A Harmless Little Game (Harmless #1)

by Meli Raine

  But a staff member who needed a $50 bill would sometimes let me use their phone for fifteen minutes. That’s how I saw the video. I spent every penny of my discretionary money on bribes for access to unfiltered Internet.

  And then there was the staffer who taught me about the dark net. The untracked underbelly of the shadow Internet, where nobody can see what you are doing or monitor your searches.

  “Well,” she chuckles, “this year it’s a little different, dear. Your father’s campaign won’t be anything like it was four years ago.”

  Ouch. See?

  Chapter 14

  “Right.” I don’t know what else to say. I take in a shaky breath and let out an even shakier one.

  “Has he had a meeting with you yet?” All the gushy, over-the-top love is gone. Mom is back to being a senator’s wife. Cunning, sharp, and on top of every detail in support of her powerful man.

  “Tomorrow. We’re having a breakfast meeting.”

  “I see.” Oooo, that means she’s not pleased. “I’m surprised he’s waiting that long.”

  My neck starts to tighten. A sharp pain between my eyes feels like someone’s pierced me with an ice pick. I know from stress reduction sessions with therapists that this is just a stress response. It’s a reaction. I can control this. I can’t change my mother, or take away her words, but I can change me.

  “I hope everything heals fast, Mom. When can I expect to see you? Can’t wait.”

  She sounds surprised as she says, “Tomorrow, of course. I’ll see you tomorrow. I wouldn’t miss that meeting for the world, dear.”

  Click.

  “I love you, too, Mom,” I mumble into the phone, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Someone snorts. I pivot, realizing I forgot that Connie was still in the kitchen with me.

  Uh oh.

  “That was my mother.”

  “I gathered.”

  “She’s excited I’m home.”

  “Any good mother would be.”

  Oh. This is getting interesting.

  “And she’s going to see me tomorrow morning when I meet with my dad.” Why am I babbling? Why am I telling a stranger any of this? I feel like my body has suddenly become thousands of long strands of thin ribbon, and a strong hurricane is on its way, the edges whipping through my ribbons and sending me in every direction.

  Footsteps interrupt my thoughts. Connie turns toward the sound, too. Drew walks in, showered and changed, wearing a dark suit, that maddening ear piece, and a blank look on his face that makes me want to scream.

  My whole body rushes, like a wave crashing on the shore, and I’m left with hundreds of emotions all twitching and pinging, like starfish trapped on the sand.

  “The breakfast meeting?” he asks, reaching for an apple from the bowl in the middle of the kitchen island. He takes a bite and chews, looking at me with eyes that give away no hint of emotion.

  “Does everyone know about the breakfast meeting? Is the gardener invited, too?” I snap.

  “It’s an important meeting.”

  “It’s just Daddy gearing up for another campaign. I know the drill. This is his third one. I’ve practically memorized how it goes.”

  Connie and Drew share a weird look I don’t understand.

  “This one will be different, Lindsay,” he declares. Connie chooses this moment to go out of the room, mumbling something about ordering more wine.

  “Really? Is he going to lose this time? Or you mean because he has to deal with the terrible tatters of his daughter’s slutty reputation from four years ago.”

  He nearly chokes on his bite of apple.

  Hah. Emotion. Gotcha.

  Drew recovers quickly, eyes narrowing, as he asks, “What, exactly, do you mean by that?”

  “What should I mean?” I’m not giving one inch here. I know they all know a lot that I don’t know, and they’re working very hard to hide so many details from me. Why?

  Drew moves so swiftly it’s like I lost three seconds of my life, because now his hand is on my elbow and he’s leaning so close to me I can smell his soap. It’s lime and clove, with an undertone of musk that makes me shiver.

  I inhale deeply. I let him keep his hand on my elbow.

  “I am here for you, Lindsay. I’m not just a hired gun whose company is your security detail. You really don’t understand what you’ve come home to. The truth will unfold over the next few days and weeks. I’m not the one to tell you most of those truths, but I have a feeling I’ll be the one who helps pick up the pieces from the destruction those truths will cause.”

  His voice is intense and low. He’s not angry, though. Resigned, actually. He sounds like a man who knows something bad is about to happen and has no power to stop it.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, turning to catch his eye. Our faces are inches apart. I can smell coffee and apple as he breathes. I wonder if his lips are as sweet and tasty as they used to be.

  Stop it! Stop thinking about him like that! a voice screams inside me.

  The confetti in my mind whirls up into a cyclone of pain. Panic bubbles up. He’s touching me, and I’m breathing hard, and while some of that is anxiety, way too much of it comes from need.

  “Like I said—I’m not the one to tell you the truth. That’s not my role.”

  I snort. “Yeah, I’ve noticed. You back away from doing lots of things.”

  And with that, I wrench my arm out of his grasp and storm off to the garage, where I should be able to find a driver to take me into town for my coffee date.

  Unless that’s changed, too.

  Chapter 15

  The Toast has remodeled its way into the twenty-first century. I have the driver go past it three times before he finally explains this is the only coffee shop in the seaside town where I grew up.

  “Ms. Bosworth, this is it.” My driver’s name is Silas. Silas Gentian. He’s about my age, maybe a little older, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. They’re the kind of eyes that make you do a double take, so blue they’re almost washed out. He has impossibly long eyelashes and he looks terribly stupid wearing a chauffeur’s hat.

  In a different time, I’d have found him hot and would flirt. Tease him about the hat.

  Not now. Probably not ever.

  Gone are the giant green vines from plants older than me, wrapped around wooden support beams.

  Gone are the giant, silk tie-dye banners draped all over the sunny, light-filled coffee house.

  Gone are the posters from Woodstock and The Grateful Dead and other bands from my dad’s era.

  In its place is sleek stainless steel, mosaic walls, mood lighting in lampshades made from earth tones, and coffee that’s twice as expensive.

  And, I must admit, as I take a sip of my latte—twice as good.

  Jane is late. It’s two twenty and I’m starting to get nervous, wondering if I’m being stood up. Every cell of my skin feels like it’s humming, and I’m about as self-conscious as you can be. I have a prescription bottle of tranquilizers I can take if I ever get so anxious I feel like I’ll pass out. They’re in my purse, which I clutch against my hip like it’s a life preserver.

  As I scan the coffee shop for the thousandth time, searching for Jane, I realize Silas is in a chair in the corner, sipping a coffee.

  He’s scanning the room, too.

  Chauffeur? How could I be so naive.

  He’s my security detail.

  I’m about to stand up, walk over to him, and ream him out when Jane bursts through the front door, looking frantic and disheveled. She whirls around and catches my eye, her expression morphing into a surprised joy.

  “Lindsay!” she whispers, rushing to me, grabbing me in a hug that reeks of desperate relief.

  Tears fill my eyes. Where do they come from? The bridge of my nose stings with the surprise of emotion, and our hug is genuine. My first year on the island, when I wasn’t heavily drugged, I begged to be allowed to talk to Jane. They told me it would be too traumatic for me. I was allowed
to write letters, though. Jane wrote back. The letters were always short and perfunctory. Once, a sentence was blacked out.

  See? Prison.

  Jane never wrote another letter after that one. And I understood why, after I figured out how to decipher what the staff had hidden from me.

  I have so, so many questions for Jane.

  “You look great!” she gushes, her mouth next to my ear.

  “How do you know? You can’t even see me. I don’t exist.”

  We laugh wryly and hug each other even harder. I haven’t had anyone treat me like this in four years.

  You know.

  Like a normal human being you want to spend time with.

  We pull away and I see she’s crying. She uses the pads of her fingers to wipe away the tears and preserve her make up.

  She sniffs. Jane looks a lot like a younger version of Anya, only with long, wavy, brown hair that curls at the ends, right below her waist. She has an ethereal look to her, and is willow-thin, unlike me. I’m athletic and muscular, with a short waist and long legs. We’re a study in contrasts with my blonde, straight hair and brown eyes.

  Plus, she hasn’t been penned up in a psychiatric institution for the past four years.

  Details, details...

  “Let me get a coffee and I’ll be right back!” she says, dashing off to the counter, waving her hands in front of her face to dry her tears as she orders a plain black coffee. In less than a minute, she’s back at the table with me, and she reaches for my hand, her eyes combing over my face, taking me in.

  “You look so good,” she says, her voice catching. Something about the way she’s cataloging me puts me on alert.

  “You, too. I love the way you did your eyes.” Jane uses a makeup technique like the singer Adele, to give her eyes a beautiful, bold look. She fits in perfectly here in this coffeehouse, a strange quasi-industrial throwback that looks like it fits in Seattle more than in this fake little elite town, with corrugated steel ceilings and distressed walls, stucco and concrete unpainted and slapped on seams with just enough haphazard precision to be a specific design. Long cords hang from the ceiling, large gears from factories woven in with lightbulbs.

  She laughs. “I ruined it with my crying!” Her eyebrows turn in and she stares at me. “I just can’t believe—” Quickly, like a wet dog, she shakes her head. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Say it.”

  She waves her hand. “It’s not—”

  I grab her wrist, maybe with a little too much urgency. Jane cringes and gives me a side glance that makes it clear I should let go.

  I don’t.

  “Everyone is hiding so much from me, Jane,” I say softly. My voice is controlled. “Please. Whatever you’re thinking, just be honest. That’s all I want. Honesty. Truth.” I sigh, weary to the bone.

  I let go of her hand and give her a very vulnerable look. I don’t want to be this raw, but I am. I don’t have a choice.

  We sit in stunned silence. I grab my latte and down more of it. Jane blows lightly across the top of her hot coffee and stares at a spot over my shoulder.

  Finally, she says, “When I saw your face the last time, your cheekbone was broken. Your eyeball was sunken in, and your face was swollen. I just am so happy you look like you. That they didn’t permanently scar you.”

  And then a look of horror consumes her.

  “Not... I don’t mean that you weren’t...I’m not minimizing what they—oh, hell, Lindsay, I don’t know how to even talk about what happened to you.” She squeezes my hand and gives me a look of such honesty that I feel like my heart’s being ripped out of my chest. “I’m sorry. I’m being so stupid and saying all the wrong things and—”

  I squeeze her hand back. “No! No,” I say, my voice filled with pain and appreciation. “You’re the first one who’s treated me like a human being who was hurt. Like someone who is real. Like a person.”

  I tip my head down and feel the tears gather on my lashes, pooling, then dropping, onto the sleek, steel tabletop.

  We both struggle not to cry. We both fail.

  “I’m so sorry you went through what you went through, Jane.”

  “Me?” she squeaks. “You’re the one who—”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard for you, too. Finding me. Calling the ambulance. Trying to write to me and being....well...”

  “Censored? Yelled at?”

  Our eyes meet, open and jaded.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” we say in unison.

  As we smile through tears and gather ourselves, a new kind of warmth fills my chest.

  I have a friend.

  For the first time in four years, I have a real friend.

  Chapter 16

  “Where do we start?” she asks, direct like her mother. “They can’t shut me up like they did a few years ago. We’re face to face now. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” A shadow passes across her face, like she’s rethinking her words, but it floats off.

  “I want to know everything.”

  “You’d need months, Lindsay.” A chill runs through me. I know she’s not exaggerating. The fact that she’s serious makes me realize how high the stakes are here.

  Someone really, really doesn’t want me to know some dark secrets about what happened after my attack.

  “They really never prosecuted anyone,” I say. It’s not a question. I know the answer. I have to say it, though. Say it to someone. I don’t ask it like a question, but the inquiry is still there.

  She shakes her head slowly. “No. You were taken to the hospital. They did a rape kit.” She paused, composes herself, then continues. “Once your mom and dad were called, everyone was shooed out. Me, Mandy, Jenna and Tara tried to see you.”

  “And Drew?”

  She frowns, her nose wrinkling a little. Suddenly, she looks nothing like Anya at all. “I don’t...” She shakes her head, as if trying to recall a memory. “I don’t remember him being there.”

  “Is it true that Mandy, Jenna and Tara turned against me? Said something about me to the press?”

  She pales. “You know that. Good.” She cringes. “I mean, good that I don’t have to break it to you.”

  Oh, there’s no good here. “So it’s true.”

  She mutters an expletive. “I figured someone else would have told you by now. That maybe that’s why you were in that...that place for so long.”

  “Huh?”

  We frown at each other.

  “I think we need to start at the beginning,” Jane says slowly.

  “I thought we were.”

  “Yeah,” she says, tilting her head, studying me. “So did I. But I think I need to go way back. Back to finding you.”

  My jaw clenches. “Right. Go ahead. I can handle it.”

  She blinks hard, then says, “I was at the party, but left right before the police say the attack happened. I got sick, and needed some food, so Mandy, Jenna, Tara and I all went to get tacos. We asked you if you wanted to go with us, but you were on the couch with Drew and just gave us this half-hearted wave.”

  I rack my brain to remember. “I did?” I have no recollection of that. I can close my eyes and remember everything up to a certain point.

  Then it all goes blank.

  And then I wake up on the island.

  “I’ve run through that night in my mind a thousand times, Lindsay,” she says, wrapping her palms around her cooling coffee, her eyes unfocused. She leans closer and lowers her voice. “There was no reason to worry about leaving you. It was you and Drew on the couch. Stellan—”

  I flinch. I haven’t heard his name in four years. Stellan, Blaine and John.

  There. I thought their names. Stacia would be so proud.

  Jane frowns. “Er, they were there. They’d never—I mean, no one had ever had a problem with them, and your boyfriend was graduating from West Point. Drew’s not exactly a wimp.”

  “Right,” I say
weakly.

  “I wish I could go back in time and make you come with us.”

  “Me, too. But we can’t rewrite the past.” Stacia taught me that phrase. Funny how it comes out now.

  “We went out for tacos,” Jane continues. “We were gone for a while. The place was busy. But I had left my car at the party. Mandy, Jenna and Tara dropped me off. I ran in to use the bathroom and found the place empty. I rushed to pee and get out of there. The vibe in the house creeped me out. Then I heard a weird...” Her voice chokes off. “A weird groan.”

  Someone has put an elephant on my chest.

  Her eyes narrow, questioning me. Then she asks, “You sure you can handle this?”

  I take a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Yeah.”

  Her eyebrows pitch down with skepticism, but she continues. “You were naked.” Her face flushes with embarrassment for me. “And tied up with all these brightly-colored scarves. It was disconcerting. And then I realized you weren’t wearing a red scarf. You were covered in blood.”

  She closes her eyes and looks like she’s holding her breath. She bites her lower lip. Seconds pass. When she lets it go, I see deep tooth marks.

  “And?”

  “And what I later realized was semen.”

  “Oh.” The word comes out of me like someone has blown, lightly, on a dandelion gone to seed, as if all that was needed was that one puff, enough to spread scores of seeds into the wild.

  “I screamed and rooted through my purse for my phone.” Jane puts her hand over her heart. “My mom yelled at me, later, when I told her the story. She said the scream could have brought the attackers back.” She snorts. “Like I was thinking clearly at the time?”

  I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m watching me and Jane from ten feet above us, floating on the ceiling, looking down.

  “I called 9-1-1. When emergency services asked me what the problem was, I couldn’t really say it. I just said I’d found a woman tied up and bleeding, and I thought she’d been s-s-sexually assaulted.” Jane’s hand that isn’t holding mine is now shaking. I see it tremor on the table top.