“They might not want us looking for him, though,” Rika suggests.
“Well, I think we should,” Misha tells her.
I thin my eyes, liquid heat running down my arms, because now he has me afraid.
“Why are you worried?” I ask him.
“Because my grandfather is coming up on re-election, and Will is a mess.”
The weight of what he’s suggesting slowly starts to sink in. My father threatened me with it countless times, but I’ve never heard of anyone actually being sent there. He’d be in more danger there than not.
But…he’d be out of the way. He’d be unheard and unseen. No longer a liability.
“Ivar was born a year ago.” I look down at Rika as I hold Winter’s hand, realization hitting me. “He wouldn’t have abandoned me this long. Not willingly.”
She shakes her head. “They wouldn’t…”
“I really hope not,” I say. “Even if we can find it, we’ll never get in.”
Misha moves up, standing directly at Rika’s side. “Don’t you worry about it,” he tells me. “We’ll take care of it.”
What? We’ll take care of…
I grab Rika’s arm and pull her over to my side as I glare at him. “That’s right. We will.”
You little shit. You know what your parents almost married makes you and her? Absolutely nothing. No one shuts me out.
“This is family business,” he maintains.
“And I’m the oldest,” I fire back, inching forward. “Get in line.”
He may very well be her step-brother at some point, but I’m blood.
“Guys…” Rika shoots out her hands to push us both back.
“You fucked him up enough,” Misha warns, meeting me eye to eye, “and I’m not twelve anymore.”
“Yeah, I know.” I smile, giving him a pat on the cheek. He jerks away. “You grew into a pretty young thing, didn’t ya, Princess?” I flick the earring in his lip. “You wear more jewelry than a chick, but let’s get one thing clear. The only thing those pathetic tattoos serve to do is hide that baby soft skin underneath.”
He smirks. “Turning you on, am I?”
His girl snorts behind him, and I scowl.
Misha pushes forward, ignoring Rika’s protests. “You’re bad for him.”
“I didn’t let him O.D. to his death on my watch,” I growl, throwing the death of his sister in his face.
Misha shoves me in the chest, forcing me back, and the next thing I know, we’re both on the ground, scrambling to get on top of each other and punch the living daylights out of one another.
Okay, that was low. Annie was sweet and all. Honestly. But he has some nerve suggesting he’ll take care of Will better after what happened to his kid sister. What a little shit.
And to even suggest that he, Rika, and Will are “family business” that doesn’t involve me makes me want to grind my boot into his pretty, little, fucking face.
“That’s enough!” Rika yells.
I feel people around us as the girls probably scramble to pull us away from each other, but he’s had this fucking coming. Wallowing around town in his own personal black parade, all woe is me, because he has a good dad and money and a safe home life, but turning up his nose at it in his hippie search for truth.
“Stop it!”
Someone pulls at my shoulders as I almost get him under me, so I can straddle the little fucker and then maybe he can write a poem about it.
But then ice-cold water hits us both, and I gasp, pausing long enough for Rika to kick me off from him. I fall to the side, both of us breathing hard.
Shit. My hair hangs in my eyes, and I wipe the water out of my eyes.
“Misha,” she grits out, staring down at him. “We’re having a conclave in one month. You just got yourself invited.”
And she stalks off, setting the glass pitcher down on the island.
Misha sits up, flipping me the finger. “Prick.”
I push myself to my feet. “Babysoft.”
Sea is a great place to bury bodies, you know? Deep breath, asshole.
RIKA
I blow out the smoke, most of it filtering out the window. Normally, I’d go outside, but it’s still raining, and I’m too frazzled to care about one cigarette in the house.
Misha. Damon. Will.
Student. Mayor. Aunt.
Sister.
I drop my eyes, taking another drag.
Michael.
I want to do all of it. I hope I can do everything else I want to do, too.
A lump lodges in my throat at the thought of Damon’s conclave. There are things I need to say before I leave that boat, but I’m scared.
“I kind of regretted you never grew up with siblings,” my mother says, approaching my back, “and now that you have one, he’s an immediate bad influence.”
She wraps an arm around my waist and smiles at me, cocking an eyebrow at the cigarette in my hand. I laugh, grinding it out in the dish I brought over. Damon and I have stashes in several locations, but none here. I guess if Ivar spends more time here, Damon will, too. May as well arrange one more stash, then.
I look down at the old black and white photos in silver frames adorning the little table in front of me.
My great-grandfather, circa 1900, sits on a horse at the family ranch in South Africa.
I run my finger over his ten-year-old face, the black hair and eyes like coal in the photo. “Ivarsen has the hair,” I remark. “Not the eyes, though.”
Ivarsen’s eyes are blue, like his mother’s.
“No,” my mother replies. “It skips several generations. None of yours or Damon’s children will have both.”
My children. A sinking feeling aches in my stomach.
I take a breath and pull away from my mother, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
“I’ll take the baby monitor in my room,” I tell her. “I want to get up with him if he wakes.”
And I start to walk away.
“When are you going to tell him?” she calls out.
I stop. But I don’t turn around, my heart beating faster. “Tell him what?”
“That your father’s will accounted for you and any other children I’d have,” she says. “When are you going to tell Damon?”
My shoulders relax. Oh, that.
I was pretty pissed when she first told me. I didn’t trust him. I wasn’t going to allow him to run my father’s work into the ground in some temper tantrum. I needed to make sure I could trust him.
In the meantime, I set aside his half in a trust for Ivar, but…
I guess my mother’s right. He’ll make something out of it. If he wants it.
But I have a feeling he doesn’t. I’m kind of proud of him. He’s the only one out of the four who can say they’re completely self-made. Damon is doing well. I kind of envy the freedom he has. He’s creating his own legacy.
But still…he should know. I was wrong to keep it from him.
“I’ll deal with it,” I tell her and continue walking.
What’s one more order of business to add to the conclave anyway? Nine friends locked on a boat with alcohol, spear guns, and the black ocean at night? This was a fantastic idea.
One month later…
RIKA
I head down the long, dark corridor, the engines humming under my feet as I pass by the cabins on the yacht. It feels like I’m alone on board, but I know I’m not. This boat will always give me the creeps, I think.
I reach the end of the hall and pull out my AirPods, leaning my ear into the final door and listening.
But I don’t hear anything. I grip the handle and slowly twist it, cracking the door open.
A form lays in the bed, under the covers, and I slip inside, leaving the lights off as I set my phone and earbuds down.
I look over at her.
The fading light of the day seeps through the blinds, casting a striped shadow over Alex’s body, and I walk toward her and softly climb on the bed, straddling
her on my hands and knees.
I look down at her. She’s the only one who can make me smile lately. I study her face, taking in her flawless skin and long lashes. Her pert nose and rosy apple cheeks. Her calm breathing and how her eyes don’t move behind her lids. She’s so peaceful. And honestly, when she’s asleep, she looks twelve. Vulnerable. Innocent. Pure.
It’s when she opens her eyes that you see the woman.
I brush the tip of my nose against hers. She stirs, and I smile.
One of the stewards said she was the first on board today, arriving late this morning, but I hadn’t seen her. I decided to get in a workout in the gym, but I can’t wait for her to wake up anymore. I slowly lie down on her, my head resting on her chest as I tuck my arms under hers and hold her tight.
“Mmmm.” She shifts under me and yawns. “You can’t come at me with your seven-hundred-dollar perfume and expect me to keep this platonic, Rika. It’s devastating.”
I laugh. “Why are you sleeping?”
“Because some of us work nights.” She stretches her arms above us and yawns again. “And we have a long one ahead of us.”
Yes, we do. I close my eyes, her heartbeat filling my ears. I’d give anything not to have to leave this room, just stretch the minutes and make them last forever so Conclave never begins. She’s my safe space.
“Need a hug?” she asks.
But before I can answer, her arms are wrapping around me and holding me, too.
“Nervous?” she asks.
I don’t reply, though. If I don’t make a big deal out of this, I can convince myself that my nerves are just overreacting. I soak up her warmth, her body heat under her cami soothing.
She strokes my hair. “You’re too young for all this, you know?”
We all are. Yeah, I’m a twenty-two-year-old graduate student and mayor, and I’ve taken over a large portion of my inheritance, including businesses and properties, but we all have full plates. It seems the deeper we get, the more danger that arises.
Guilt nips at me. “And you’re too good for all this,” I tell her. Too good for all the tangles we bring into her life. “We love you, you know?” I still don’t meet her eyes. “You’re the breath that feeds the wolf.”
I graze my thumbs over her arms, where my hands are tucked under her shoulders, and hold onto her, because she’s the best of us. Still innocent. Still pure, no matter the ugliness that comes into her life. But no longer vulnerable. There’s not a time when she isn’t here for us, and I’m not sure if we’d be where we are without her.
I know I shouldn’t seek refuge in her as much as I do, but there’s so much going on, she seems to be the only one who realizes that I’m…
Weak.
When it comes down to it, I still feel like a kid playing at all of this.
I feel her swallow, and when she speaks, her voice is quiet. “Did I ever tell you about how I came to live at Delcour?”
No. And I hadn’t pried much into her life except to discover she was thrown out of her house when she was seventeen, and she doesn’t want to talk about her parents.
“I lived in the dorms my freshman year,” she tells me, still stroking my hair in a steady rhythm. “Living off loans, a scholarship, and a part-time job working the beer tub at a dive club in Whitehall.”
I listen. That would’ve only been months before we met, then.
“One night my roommate and I go out and party,” she continues, “have lots of drinks, and come back to the dorm really lit and horny. She calls her boyfriend at Yale on her laptop. They always video chatted on her phone, so he and I never saw each other or met. I only knew he was a genius and twenty-two, a senior.” She falls silent, and I wait. “We’re talking and joking around, both of us kind of flirting with him and making him laugh—which wasn’t easy to do, because he seemed a little sad. I can’t pinpoint what it was, but it was there.”
I remain still, waiting for her to go on.
“Anyway,” she says, “we got on the subject of whether or not it’s cheating if she sleeps with another girl. I look at him and her, and I…start unbuttoning her shirt.” She lets out a small, quiet laugh like it seems so silly now. “I don’t know when it changed from fooling around to full-on making out and undressing each other, but I looked over at his face on the computer, and his smile was gone. It was almost like he forgot how to breathe, you know? That’s how entranced he was. He barely blinked as he watched us.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “As he watched me.”
I close my eyes, listening as she caresses my scalp.
“We fucked for him on my bed, Rika,” she says.
I picture the scene she paints.
“The sex was a little boring—she was nervous and embarrassed,” she explains, “so I had to take control—but I didn’t want to stop, because I didn’t want him to stop watching me. I thought he might touch himself and jerk off or something, but he didn’t. He just watched and took everything in.”
My mind goes back, and suddenly, I’m sixteen again, standing in the catacombs. I liked to watch, too. Or listen, because Michael blindfolded me that day.
“It was so hot.” She goes back to rubbing my back, but I can tell she’s lost in the memory. “It can be so much more exciting when you can’t touch. I just wanted to never leave that night. Everything felt so fucking good.”
Her chest rises under my head as she takes a deep breath and sighs.
“But things kind of went to shit between Aurora and me after that,” she says. “She didn’t say so, but I could tell she was ashamed. And it made me ashamed, because it felt natural at the time, and she was making it dirty. Like she was bullied into it, and I was weird for liking it. And she was also suspicious, and I didn’t know why until she let it slip during an argument that he wanted to see us again. That he’d asked her if we would do it for him again.”
Despite the disdain from her friend, a flutter hits my belly for Alex. I love her, and I can understand anyone who wants more of her. It’s natural for Aurora to be jealous, but it’s natural for Alex to like being desired.
“So, in a fit, she finally agreed,” Alex tells me. “And I wanted to do it, too. I wanted more.”
There’s a pause before she continues.
“A half an hour later though, she walked out, they were broken up, and he was begging me not to stop.”
Her voice is thick with pain. Did she stop? Would I have if it were Michael? Alex and this guy aren’t together, so it either didn’t end well, or it didn’t begin at all.
“A week later,” Alex nearly whispers, “they were back together and I was the campus slut.”
I close my eyes again.
“A month later I’d lost my scholarship, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him. Aurora and I were both kicked out of the dorms because of our fighting, and my boss at the club was introducing me to the first of many of his friends who would help me pay for my new apartment.”
Jesus.
“Choices drive our lives,” she goes on. “I sometimes think about where I’d be if I never wanted him to watch me so much. If I’d never started throwing fucks around to whoever paid for it, because if I could never hear him tell me how beautiful I was again, then I might not care what I did with my body or with who.”
She tightens her arms around me.
“But then…I might never have become friends with you,” she tells me. “My path with you and the guys might never have crossed, and I wouldn’t have a family.”
Her chest shakes under me, and my lungs swell. I feel her heavy breathing, and I know she’s tearing up.
“I need Will back, Rika,” she whispers.
I lift my head, resting my chin on her chest and seeing her eyes glisten.
She purses her lips to keep her emotions in check, but eventually, she explains, “I love you and Banks and Winter and the guys, but…Will gets it.”
I stare at her, my heart breaking a little. Alex puts on a good show, but how easily it never occurred to me how much she was
missing him. All the time Damon wasn’t around, Alex was there for Will.
And we always looked at it like that, too. Alex is with Will. Alex is taking care of Will. Alex keeps Will company.
But none of that was really true. She hung onto him just as much as he hung onto her.
“He didn’t deserve you,” I tell her. “Your roommate’s boyfriend.”
She stares at me for a moment, looking a little pained, but then she lets out a sigh and forces a smile.
“Yeah, no one does,” she jokes. “Not for less than five hundred an hour anyway.”
I give her a pointed look at her sudden change in demeanor. “Alex…”
But she rolls us over and the next thing I know, her head is on my chest. “Rub my head now,” she demands.
I pause there, aggravated she’s changing the subject and putting up that façade again, but she holds me, dressed in her tank and underwear, and swings a long, naked leg over me. I let out a quiet laugh. Hiding behind playfulness. Will does that, too.
I start to rub her head, but then the cabin door opens, and we both look over, seeing Banks standing in the doorway.
She stops dead, her eyebrows nearly reaching her hairline as she catches us in our little, cuddly embrace.
Her mouth forms an O, and she starts to back out, closing the door.
“Get in here,” I call out. “We’re not doing anything.”
For crying out loud.
She stops, a half-smile curling her lips and she comes back in, closing the door behind her.
“And get that constipated look off your face,” Alex says.
Banks heads over to the bed, dressed in some workout clothes, same as me, but her hair is down. “Brat,” she spits out.
Laying at my side, she joins me in giving Alex a scalp massage, except Banks’ massage looks more like how you rub a dog’s head, curling her fingers and lightly scratching.
“Stop that,” Alex barks at her. “I hate you.”
Banks and I both start to laugh. She has like fifty-eight dogs—okay, not that many, but a lot—so petting probably comes naturally to her.
I glance at Banks. “Mads okay?”
“Yup,” she says. “At your mom’s with the nannies, and hopefully Ivarsen by now, too.”
Conclave (Devil's Night 3.5) Page 3
