A fresh start was what she needed.
But when she opened the front door, Chloe was standing there with a lopsided grin on her face. “Hey, girl!” she said, and then threw her arms around Bella’s neck in a tight hug.
Bella felt her anger being drawn away. She’d thought it was a solid thing that could be carried and wielded, like a stone, but one look at Chloe’s face and her new pink hair and she saw what a lie anger was. It faded away, no stronger than smoke.
“It’s good to see you,” Bella said, squeezing her friend tightly and dropping her bag of clothes. “What’s going on?”
“You won’t believe it,” Chloe said. “Lord Winterbutt caught Rodney stealing like so much money. All the stuff he blamed on you and Vincent and Steffie and Saundra and Aberforth—it was Rodney the whole time!” Chloe blinked. “You don’t know those last people, but just like assume they were really cool and nice and were treated unfairly by management, okay?”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“Winterborn, he’ll have to put his own pants on in the morning,” Chloe laughed.
“No, Rodney. What’s going to happen to Rodney?”
“He’s fired. Winterborn freaked out, like he does, and they got into a fight I guess. I wasn’t here. My boyfriend and I were seeing this show down in San Francisco that night. But the spirits told me all about it. Even they didn’t know he was the thief. Can you believe that? They said Rodney threw the first punch and called his Dorian-ship a bully and that Dorian shoved Rodney right through a wall. They were pretty excited, the spirits were. They haven’t seen a proper fight since the old man passed.”
“Is he hurt?” Bella’s heart ached, but she didn’t know who she was more concerned for. No, she knew. Rodney had chosen his path. She hesitated to say he got what was coming to him, because as an attorney she knew that was never the case. But Dorian—he’d be ruined. The man was nearly alone now with no one he could trust.
“The Rodster is scraped up and bruised, but okay, Agatha says. But I don’t know much more.” Chloe shrugged and twisted a hank of her pink hair in her fingers. “Anyway, yo, Agatha humbly requests your presence in the big house. She asked me to come get you. She would have herself, but there’s some big tour happening soon and she’s cleaning like she’s getting paid for it. She said you could go up to see his Highness-ness directly.”
Bella followed Chloe back to the big house. Whenever she thought of the last time she’d seen Dorian, she found her anger returned. It felt like armor around her heart. Chloe slipped in through the servant’s entrance heading off to cook whatever amazing dish she felt like making that day.
Bella didn’t follow Chloe through the servant’s entrance. She turned and walked along the front of the main house up to the expansive front steps. The dragon statue over the door glared down at her with hungry eyes. “Just try it, buster,” Bella whispered, glaring right back at him. She ascended the stairs slowly, taking her time, savoring the feel of the approach. No more servant’s entrance. She wasn’t less than Winterborn, she was better than him. He was the one who needed his own door, for shockingly handsome men with anger control issues.
The blackened doors swung open easily, noiselessly, and Bella found herself again staring at the stairs leading up to Winterborn’s office. She’d been preparing to take those steps haughtily, head held high and dramatic as hell. But when she looked, Dorian was sitting at the bottom of the steps, head in hand. He looked rough, with his hair tousled and his face unshaved.
The armor around her heart cracked, but did not break. She walked to him slowly, unsure of which Dorian she’d see in his eyes, the man or the monster. He looked up at her approach, and he was all man. His eyes swam with sadness.
“Bella,” he said, leaping to his feet. “It’s so good to see you. We have so much to get done before—”
“That’s it?” Bella snapped. The anger in her blood was a drug and it was not yet out of her system. “You call me a thief and a liar. You terrify me with your violent rages and your bloody murderous threats. And when you see that I’m innocent and unjustly accused, the best you can do is to say, get back to work?”
She wanted to breathe fire on him. She wanted to tie him up in chains and hurl him off the mountain into the sea. But mostly she wanted to kiss him, but of course that was impossible, which only made her angrier.
Dorian stiffened and stood straighter. “Of course, you are right. Please accept my apology.”
Bella stared at him, waiting for an apology.
Dorian stared at her, waiting for her to accept it.
“I haven’t heard an apology. I can’t accept it, your lordship, if it hasn’t been given,” Bella fumed.
“That was my apology,” Dorian said, a look of genuine puzzlement on his face. “What more do you want from me? Do I need to grovel? Crawl on my belly like a worm? Do I need to be lashed in the square, like father used to do?” His eyes darkened as Bella watched. It was unreal. The transformation—she could see it come over him. It wasn’t her imagination, he really was changing.
She knew she should back off, but she couldn’t. She was high on hate. “That would be a start, but still not enough to make me forgive you. Is this why your father cursed you? Because you’re so prideful that you can’t admit mistakes?”
The color was gone from Dorian’s eyes, the bright gold overwhelmed by darkness. “And yet you’re here, aren’t you? Do you still work for me? Am I your employer? Then go upstairs. You will find the doors unlocked. Go up to the next room and get to work. No more cataloging though, the time for that is through. We have a buyer for the entire estate arriving tomorrow.”
“Then what am I looking for?”
“Deeds. Money. Stocks, as before. Paper assets. But also,” he held up his right wrist, where the rusted chain was rubbing his wrist raw. “A way to unlock this.”
Bella looked at it. The chain was one piece, just link forged through link. There was no lock or opening visible. “I don’t understand. Can’t you just cut it off?”
Dorian opened his mouth to say something, and then a tremor took him, contorting him. “Just go!” he roared. “Find a solution. Find anything.”
Bella hurried up the stairs. She turned to look back and saw Dorian, again with his head in his hands, sitting on the steps.
THE ROOM she found was as dusty as the others, but the boxes were in better order and labeled in a neat woman’s handwriting. Was it one of Octavian’s wives who had sorted them? Some long gone servant? She sorted them as fast she could, looking for anything useful. But it was more of the same. Correspondences and meaningless notes, hints of scandals and violence. If there was madness in Dorian, it had been in his father as well, and his older brothers. Though theirs, by all accounts, took on a crueler, colder form.
What could possibly unlock that odd bracelet of his? Bella had no idea. It didn’t make any sense. If the bracelet was a curse, how did you unlock it? It wasn’t the kind of thing you looked up online. She’d tried and only found fairy tales, fanfic, and video game walkthroughs.
After countless boxes of documents, Bella opened a leather-bound trunk and found it full of photographs. They were old, and many had aged poorly, but some were treasures. They showed the Winterborn family at rest, at play, and at work. She lost herself flipping through them, marveling at the old fashions. The earliest photo was marked 1927 and it showed Octavian Winterborn, a tall and broad man, imposing even in a photo. He had a tidy beard and a bald head and wore a light-colored three piece suit. He looked to be in his fifties. He was standing in front of the mansion with a challenging smile on his face. At his knees were two of his sons, Alexander and Hannibal, the note on the back said.
But that was impossible. She’d seen Alexander recently—his photos were online—and he hardly looked forty. He should have been in his nineties, at least.
An itch developed behind Bella’s eyes. Her nose twitched. She had a hunch, but couldn’t articulate it. She pulled out more photos
, looking for any that had the Winterborn boys in them. And she found them, she found hundreds of meticulously dated photos showing the boys growing slowly across decades.
The first photo of Dorian was in 1970. It had his other name on it, Valdemar. He was a baby with a serious scowl on his face and one single thick lock of black hair in the middle of his forehead. But that would meant he was in his mid-forties, and Bella would have guessed he was no older than thirty.
“I expect I have some explaining to do.” Dorian said behind her and Bella leapt to her feet in alarm, tripping over the opened trunk and falling sideways into a pile of document boxes.
He was calm again and he’d combed his hair and shaved. Bella wanted to hate him, to fear him, but she couldn’t. He held out his hand and helped her to her feet.
Bella took a half step away from him. Clouds of dust shifted around her feet. “These photos.”
“Yes.”
“Your father—he doesn’t age in them. He ages a little, but not like normal people.”
“We aren’t normal people, Bella. But I think you know that already.” Dorian’s voice was low. His eyes devoured her.
“Did you mean for me to find these pictures?” Bella asked.
“No. I didn’t. I thought my father had destroyed all the photos years ago. He must have missed this box.”
Bella swallowed hard and asked the question that was on her mind. “Are you vampires?”
Dorian stared at her in surprise and then laughed explosively, sending up more plumes of dust in the musty room. “Vampires? Vampires! No, of course not. There’s no such thing as vampires. At least not anymore.”
The dust stung Bella’s eyes and clung to her skin. “Then what are you?”
“I owe you an explanation. Let’s go outside, out of this mess, and I’ll tell you what I can.” His eyes fell upon a photo that Bella had set aside. It showed Octavian and all thirteen of his sons. The oldest looked to be the same age as Octavian, while Dorian as the youngest was still in diapers. It was labeled 1971. Dorian’s eyes darkened and a hint of the madness shot through his body at the sight of the photo.
“Let me change first, please.” Bella’s clothes were caked in dust and cobwebs. She looked like she’d rolled in flour she was so dirty. Dorian nodded and she agreed to meet him in his office.
“Don’t be long,” he said. Or the monster may be here when you arrive was the unspoken part, which Bella understood all too clearly.
She went back to her room on the second floor and raided the closet for something suitable. She was tired of shoulder pads and polyester, so she picked out a knee-length sleeveless red dress and tried combing the spiderwebs out of her hair as best she could. When she met Dorian in his office, he looked dumbstruck.
Was it still him? Or had the madness arrived? His face was unreadable, almost horrified. Did she really look that bad? But then he breathed out and said, “You look simply incredible.”
Dorian took Bella’s hand and led her out of his office, all the way down to the kitchens. Dorian’s hand was strong in hers, and paler than before. He was fading away. She was losing him. She tried not to think of her mother—of holding her hand in the hospital and seeing how frail and fragile she was.
In the kitchen, Chloe was singing loudly and off-key, some song Bella didn’t recognize. Maybe it was on-key? What did she know?
“Miss Meadows,” Dorian said, but Chloe didn’t stop singing, she just nodded at them both and pointed to a basket by the door. “Miss Meadows, I was hoping to trouble you for a picnic lunch. I’d like to dine al fresco today,” Dorian said, louder.
Chloe pointed again to the basket by the door. She incorporated a wiggling dance into her song and winked at Bella theatrically.
“It’s like she doesn’t even hear me,” Dorian muttered.
Bella squeezed his hand to get his attention. They were still holding hands. Why were they still holding hands? “Dorian, she’s pointing to the picnic basket by the door. The one she already made for you.”
Dorian looked at Bella and blinked owlishly. “But that’s impossible. I hadn’t even asked her for it yet.”
Bella smiled at Chloe and dragged Dorian out of the kitchen, grabbing the basket on the way.
“But how?” he asked.
Bella ignored him. She didn’t like to think about Chloe’s gifts, about the world they implied. The idea of explaining them or defending them just made her feel exhausted. “What was your plan?” she asked. “Where did you want to eat?”
“Can you ride?” he asked.
“A bicycle?”
“A horse.”
“You have horses here?” Bella was surprised. Maybe she shouldn’t have been, but she was.
“Yes. Your father takes care of them. It’s one of his more pressing duties. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Generally he tells me nothing. Ever. At least not since my mom died, and honestly not before either.”
Dorian regarded her as if seeing her anew. “It’s so odd, the way he talks about you—it’s as if you talk all the time. He and my father used to go on these long walks on Sundays, to survey the remote edges of the property and look for signs of trouble or spots that needed extra attention. They dreamed up all sorts of uses for the property you know, but my father never got around to any of them. Your father has told me about some of the more outlandish ideas, but also he gushed about you.”
Questions leapt to mind, but Bella didn’t know which to ask first. She didn’t want to think about her father. She hadn’t forgiven him for the way he’d scolded her. “Exactly how many structures are there on this estate? My dad told me about the hunting lodge where—I mean—the place where your father had his accident. And there’s the main house, and the library. How much more is there?”
Dorian led her around the maze, across the grounds, to the garage. He squinched his eyes shut as he thought about it. “There are quite a few. There’s the stables, the boathouse, the private dock. The footman’s home. The carriage house. The dining common. The old schoolhouse. The vault. The zeppelin dock. The submarine mooring.” He counted on his fingers as he listed all of them. “And at least a dozen buildings down by where the mountain’s edge meets Bearfield. We have renters in them now.”
“A zeppelin dock?”
“I may have made a few of those up,” Dorian grinned. “Honestly, I don’t really know how many there are. The entire mountain belongs to the family and there are buildings that were constructed a hundred years ago that are now forgotten.”
“What a problem to have,” Bella quipped. “Too many houses to count.”
“Well, it’s not like I grew up here. My mother raised me on the east coast, near Boston. We only visited here on holidays and for our family Augusts.”
Dorian opened the garage doors. There was a four-wheeler inside, half-caked with mud. “If horses are out of the question, we can take this. Technically it belongs to my brother Leon, but he won’t care if we drive it down to the meadows for lunch.”
“Leon,” Bella said. “That’s Napoleon.”
“He hates that name.”
“What’s with the names? Hannibal? Xerxes? I know the rich are different, but some of these names border on child abuse.”
“Well, they’d be perfect for my family then,” Dorian said darkly. Then, shaking away the gloom, “My father named us all after conquerors. Men who straddled the world, he said. It’s what he wanted for us all. It’s why he was so upset when I changed my name.”
Dorian strapped the picnic basket to the back of the four-wheeler and then mounted it in one smooth motion. He was still wearing a suit—a handsome and slim-cut slate gray summer weight—but it didn’t matter to him. He patted the back of the vehicle and Bella clambered on behind him, slipping and thunking her head off his back in the process. He turned the key and the squat beast roared to life.
Speaking was impossible while the engine was running, so Bella contented herself with wrapping her arms around his firm waist and h
olding on tighter than was necessary. His body felt good in her hands, solid and hot, almost fevered.
They drove down the mountain road a half mile before turning down a hidden path that was little more than a space where trees didn’t grow. There was a network of old walkways and roads on Winter’s Mountain that dated back to when the Ohlone people settled there three thousand years ago. Later, an army of gardeners and craftsmen had used them to build the estate, but now they were used by no one, save the occasional bear or rabbit.
What was going on between her and Dorian? There was a thing there, she could feel it. She could see it in his eyes. But it didn’t make any sense at all. She was a curvy girl who’d set her life on fire, and he was a half-mad rich kid chained to his father’s sinking legacy. They couldn’t possibly have anything together, could they? And yet there was something in the way he looked at her that felt right. She could feel it between them like electricity. At least when he wasn’t threatening to murder her or trying to remodel the house with his fists.
No, it was impossible. He couldn’t be trusted. The sunshine Dorian—he was a man she could love. There, she said it. But it was true. He was wry. He was handsome. He had compassion and kindness in his blood. But the midnight Dorian—he was an utter bastard. Maybe she should call that side of him Valdemar out of respect and fear of old Octavian?
Dorian drove them down the mountain on narrow switchback roads peppered with gravel, through arching canopies of oak and eucalyptus, past thirteen enormous sequoias all in a line, until they ended at a rolling meadow full of flowers.
“Your father made this. It was sort of his audition. He called it the Bella Garden but I’ll admit the significance was lost on everyone at the time.”
The field faced the sea, with the mountain at its back. The ground was almost too steep to walk on, except for a cobblestone path that led to a picnic table built on a vertiginous deck. The field was so full of flowers that the ground was invisible. It was like a giant red wound in the earth, like the mountain’s heart had been exposed here, in secret. She recognized some of the flowers, but many of the blooms were unknown to her. Flowers had never really been her thing. She liked them well enough, but their names never seemed to stay with her. These flowers were different though. They seemed magical.
Chained: Reckless Desires (Dragon's Heart Book 1) Page 9
