Vote Then Read: Volume II

by Lauren Blakely

  Fuck, I hadn’t meant to say that. The thought of Abigail loving someone else tore me up. It had no right, but it did.

  Selfish.

  Cruel.

  Unavoidable.

  Another round of heaving seized my gut, this one dry.

  “That was one of my favorite vases.”

  I stood up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Tansy Crowne leaned against the railing, behind her the domed ballroom ceiling and massive chandelier. If there was one good thing to come of this, it would be never seeing Tansy Crowne again.

  She arched a brow, like she’d read my thoughts.

  “You wanted me gone, I’m gone. She’s not following.”

  “You’re so sure—”

  “I fucked her sister.”

  Her brows rose, and she blinked thrice.

  I’d surprised the implacable Tansy… with a lie.

  It didn’t matter; it had still burned like the truth. Abigail had still been crushed under its weight. I still wouldn’t be able to go back to her, couldn’t save myself and say, Love me again. I’m not who you think I am. I’m not actually that guy. You were wrong.

  Truth, lie, it was still razing and blighted betrayal.

  The only difference was I might be able to sleep at night.

  Maybe.

  All Gemma and I did was kiss, and that was for show. I probably should have done more; it would’ve made the break cleaner. Would’ve made the temptation to go back to Abigail easier to avoid, but it was simply transactional between Gemma and me. Gemma needed something of mine, and I took that opportunity. In exchange, Gemma gave me her dress and lingerie. I don’t know why she needed what she took. She wasn’t going to tell me, and I didn’t have it in me to care.

  I glanced down the hallway. I didn’t know how long I had until Abigail got off the floor. I rubbed my chest, trying not to think about her on it. Below us, the party still continued on… her engagement party.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  There were two things I needed from Tansy Crowne. Abigail’s security updated, and Edward Harlington gone from her life forever. In exchange, I had to do one terrible deed. In the long run, it was nothing.

  Break up with her.

  But not just break up with her. Tansy made it pretty fucking clear Abigail couldn’t follow me, couldn’t contact me, couldn’t so much as look for me. In return, she’d break off the engagement, she’d get her guards, she’d get a life she should’ve had, the one I couldn’t give.

  The life she should’ve had.

  “Abigail was curiously absent for her engagement party and photos.” Tansy pinned me with a knowing look, and another wave of nausea hit. “It will be easy to change the story. No one will ever know there was an engagement. It was just another party.”

  It seemed like every ugly, jagged piece of this puzzle had fallen into place. But I did wonder what was in this for someone like Tansy Crowne.

  She arched an artfully plucked brow. “Something on your mind, Theo?”

  “Why?” I didn’t expect Tansy to tell me, but I had to ask.

  “You don’t belong here, Theo. You never did. Abigail’s weakness threatens all of us.”

  I don’t know why it had taken me so long to realize Tansy Crowne was the puppet master pulling and ripping apart our strings. If I’d taken one look beyond us, it would have made so much more sense.

  “It was you. You sent me away.”

  She tilted her head. “Of course.”

  That single head tilt threw me, nearly made it impossible to speak. Tansy was never trying to hide she’d done it. Abigail and I were both just too blinded by our fears.

  All these years wasted, and now too late for any more.

  “Would you ever have approved of me?” I wondered.

  “No,” she said easily.

  It didn’t matter anyway. It was over now.

  I straightened.

  “I’m sure you know if you don’t come through on your end of the deal, I’ll be watching,” I said. “I don’t have a billion dollars or endless resources, but I love her, and I have nothing to lose now.”

  Tansy watched me with a shrewd look, rubbing two fingers together absently. I decided I was done staring into the face of the devil and turned to go.

  I knew a happily ever after with Abigail wasn’t in the cards. When I took this charge, all I ever thought I could hope for was revenge. Yet hope for something more had broken through like weeds in the cement. There were moments after Tansy presented her deal when I’d thought love could overcome everything. I’d nearly caved when Abigail told me she found my mother.

  Could she see how much it meant to me? Was my anger too transparent? Did she see the hurt beneath?

  Abigail was the only one who ever cared.

  Still, at every turn, I was reminded how fucking naïve that was.

  Abigail and I were a fairy tale I was foolish to believe in. At least when I left, she would be taken care of, for real.

  30

  ABIGAIL

  It’s my birthday, I thought blandly.

  It’s been a week and I haven’t changed out of the ball gown Theo took me in. I’m sure I smelled. Mother nearly threw a fit when I appeared at my engagement party looking like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies reject.

  I don’t give a shit.

  I haven’t moved from my bed, either. No, that was a lie. Theo left his hoodie, and like a junkie addicted to the drug that’s nearly killed her twice, I put it on. To cover my ripped bodice, I said.

  Not because it smelled like him.

  Or felt like him, soft and warm.

  A week hasn’t done anything. It still feels like it’ias happening. I relived it over and over again. I couldn’t cry anymore. My tear ducts threw up their hands, out of water. I felt the moment inside me, though. Like too much alcohol or bad seafood. Felt him choose her and leave me. Felt the stupid hope I had that I could have had some kind of happily ever after, been more than Abigail Crowne, Reject Princess.

  Someday I will be special. Someday I will mean something to someone. Someday I won’t be so alone.

  I think it’s ironic the hope that was once the only thing keeping me going, was the very hope Theo Hound used to obliterate me.

  Sweet girl, I would never leave you, not willingly, not unless I had to.

  The words he’d spoken to me the day I’d dropped my walls once more for him zinged through me.

  Fucking liar.

  I wiped my eyes, wishing anger would drown out the sorrow.

  My laptop pinged, and I eyed it warily. A new email. Using it for the distraction it was, I dragged it off the floor and into my lap.

  A new message from the private investigator I’d hired, letting me know he’d found Theo’s mom’s address.

  I didn’t want this information. I didn’t fucking want it. It assaulted me. I didn’t want to know anything about Theo, let alone have this information, anchoring me to him.

  I slammed the laptop shut, breathing heavy. I focused on the sound of the waves, trying to steady my breath, when I noticed my freckle. All hope of steady breath vanished.

  That was the difference between Theo and me. He’d ripped that bracelet off me so easily, but I still have him inside me, just a few millimeters away from my bloodstream.

  I couldn’t fucking take it anymore. I jumped off my bed and got out of my stifling room.

  I hate Gemma, and the last few days I’ve been imaging various ways I can ship her to Antarctica, but she can still help me.

  I opened my door and stopped short. Four tall, menacing-looking men in black suits stood inside my suite. Just like that, four Theo shaped holes blasted into my chest.

  When I moved from my suite, they followed me like shadows. I looked over my shoulder, slightly unnerved. They were even armed. When I opened the door to my wing, a fucking alarm went off.

  I wondered what I’d done to piss off my mom so much to gather this much oversight.

  They followed me all the
way to my sister’s wing, not speaking when I entered her room without permission.

  Theo would’ve said something.

  And there was that pain.

  Gemma had a secret she thought no one knew. I pulled an orange bottle out of a Louis Vuitton clutch she kept in her closet, opening the cap and dumping the contents into my hand. Little white pills fell into my palm. Little white pills she’d stolen from Mom, pills Mom didn’t need a reason for, because she donated so much to the hospital the doctor would prescribe whatever the fuck she wanted.

  I dropped them into my mouth.

  Everyone at our old school had been on some kind of prescription, usually doing a combo of the Holy Trinity: Xanny, Addy, and Oxy. Gemma’s drug of choice was Xanax.

  It took a moment for the pills to kick in. When they did, the pain was still there, the constant ache, but it was dulled, fuzzy around the edges, not cutting into my heart so much.

  Suddenly I wasn’t dreading another forgotten birthday, but I was hungry.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten… maybe two days ago, when the mysterious food from my favorite Crowne Drive-In Diner appeared. I couldn’t imagine Mom bringing that to me, let alone going to a drive-in diner.

  When I came downstairs, there was a party.

  A fucking party. On my birthday. That was just too much. Everyone was present: my family, the Harlingtons. The only one absent was my fiancé.

  Pity.

  My eyes zeroed in on Gemma.

  Her hair glowed under the chandelier lights, her smile was radiant, and she laughed with Gray and our mom. I couldn’t take it.

  Even on my birthday it was about her.

  I wasn’t trying to be sneaky; it was just that everyone’s eyes were on Gemma all the time. Even with four certified bulwarks surrounding me, they focused on her. I grabbed a pair of scissors off a table filled with presents and approached Gemma.

  I grasped a chunk of Gemma’s hair. The hair Theo’d probably tangled. The hair that lay on the same bed—

  And cut off a chunk.

  I could almost hear the party come to a crashing halt as eyes landed on me, my sister’s hair in my hands. Her flowing rose gold hair, the hair synonymous with being a fucking Crowne, and once voted most likely to drive a boy insane in boarding school, was now dead in my fingers.

  Gemma’s hands flew to her head, feeling the empty space once filled with luscious tresses.

  Gray laughed.

  Mom looked at my ripped dress, my unwashed hair, still messy from the way Theo had tangled his hands in it, and the hoodie I wore over the bespoke dress, culminating in what I was calling broken-heart chic.

  Her eyes narrowed on me, focusing on my probably glassy eyes.

  My mom’s smile was tight when she spoke. “Abigail, are you unwell?”

  That was Crowne for Are you fucking high right now?

  Gemma had been asked that a few times too many. Gray occasionally.

  I looked at the rose gold strands glimmering between my fingers. I felt empty. This didn’t erase what happened. Theo had still chosen her over me, like everyone else.

  “What…the…fuck?” Gemma finally screamed, coming out of shock. Her hair fell from my grasp, fluttering to the floor.

  “You take everything from me,” I yelled at her. “My family, my love, my own birthday.”

  I didn’t care Mom was watching, or that I was confirming who Grandpa had accused me of being. I was Abigail, the fire starter, the worst of them all.

  All I could think about was her fucking hair in his hands.

  She never even looked at me funny, never even looked slightly guilty. I wasn’t insane enough to expect an apology, but it was like I’d imagined it all.

  So I lunged for her, my fingers tangling in her now unevenly cut hair. We were barely at each other for a few seconds before the men at my back pulled me away, and the men at her’s did the same.

  “You idiot!” Gemma’s crudely cut blonde hair was mussed. “This was for you.”

  She waved her arm around, at the smashed cake. At the champagne fountain, smashed to crystalline shards on the floor, leaking gold to the marble.

  Then I noticed more little details. A table of presents with my name on it. The dining table had a name card for me between my mother’s and Gemma’s. This was the birthday I’d always dreamed about.

  The cake was so smashed the letters now read appy irt day gai.

  “Surprise.”

  Hours and a few more pills later, I found my sister in her room.

  “Gemma,” I said.

  “If you’re here to cut off more of my hair, could you wait until the mask I’ve put on sets.” She eyed me from the oval mirror set in gold in her vanity. “I’m deep conditioning.”

  I sobbed. I fell to her floor in a heap and sobbed, sobbed, and sobbed.

  I’d meant to come up here strong, but the minute I opened her door, every goddamn thing I’d been trying to ignore flooded me, and my knees gave out.

  I don’t know how long I was on the ground, but Gemma whistled when I was done. “You’re fucked up.”

  “Why did you do it?” I lifted my head, looking up at her through bleary eyes.

  “How high are you right now?”

  A minute passed. I summoned enough energy to get to my feet. “Why did you have to sleep with him? You can have anyone you want. Why did it have to be him?”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Theo!”

  Guilt slashed her pretty face—I’ve never seen her look guilty—but all she said was, “Ew.”

  I flew at her before I realized what I was doing, my hands sliding through the creamy conditioner in her hair, pressing her into her bed. She yelled, trying to shove me off. All I saw was white hot rage.

  “Get off me.” She elbowed my stomach. “I don’t like him.”

  “That’s worse you sociopath!” I got her on her back, arm pinned behind her, using the move Theo taught me. I pressed her arm down and she yelped.

  “I had no choice!”

  I didn’t let her go, but I eased up the pressure on her arm.

  She huffed, turning her head so she could somewhat catch my eyes.

  “Do you want me to say sorry? That I felt bad? I didn’t. I didn’t think about your feelings, like you didn’t think about mine when you had Horace’s tongue in your throat and hand up your leg.”

  Shame swamped me, and I slowly got off her. She climbed up, sitting against her jewel-toned satin pillows, her long, elegant legs stretched so they nearly met me at the foot of her bed.

  “We didn’t have sex, Abigail.”

  I glared, wiping my nose. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Kind of.”

  She climbed atop her pillows at the look on my face. “Did you actually see us fucking, Abigail?”

  “I saw your dress. I saw your lingerie. I saw you kissing. I saw the photo and the marks you left on him. I saw the condom. Don’t fucking try and say that wasn’t something.”

  She paused, like she was struggling with something deep, but all she said was, “We promised not to talk about what happened, but I didn’t have sex with him.”

  He’d made a promise with her? I didn’t know my heart could break anymore, but I felt some last clinging edge chip off, crumbling to ash.

  “I don’t believe you.” Still, doubt sewed its way into my mind.

  She threw up her hands. “You got me. I’m secretly in love with Theo Hound. Tonight I’m going to confess my love for him at a Walmart or something.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It is, because it’s so ridiculous.”

  “I can’t believe you, Gemma, because what does that mean? He left. He… he fake fucked you, and he left. After obliterating me with a lie for no reason.” It didn’t make sense. Why would he lie? Why would he say he slept with her when he didn’t?

  “Sister, the day I have sex with someone like Theo Hound is the day this family is really and truly fucked.�
� Gemma stared at me with her bright blue eyes, unblinking.

  A Crowne didn’t lie… at least, a good Crowne didn’t. Gemma was a good Crowne. Not like me, who got so messed up and tangled in her lies she could barely see the sunlight beneath their wicked, curving branches.

  I fell to her bed, the truth sinking in.

  That was so much more terrible.

  She went through that night from her perspective. Theo had approached her, and she’d suggested a trade. They’d kissed, gone up to that room, where she’d changed into sweats, and then she’d given him her dress.

  “What did he give you? What could he possibly have given you?” Theo was nowhere near the street kid I’d found years ago, but Gemma was a Crowne. She had everything. If she didn’t, she’d buy it.

  What could he have traded her?

  She grew quiet, twisting her oversize sleep shirt between her fingers. The front of the white shirt read in black, blocky letters:

  NO SOCIALIZING,

  NO PANTS,

  NO SHITS GIVEN,

  GIRL’S CLUB.

  “I have a debt,” she whispered. “I’m trying to repay it. Theo had what I needed.”

  “But—”

  “That’s all I’m saying!” Gemma went to her drawer, pulling out a jar of pills and a bottle of tequila. “Pick your poison.”

  I pointed to the tequila. She raised a brow and shrugged.

  “I think I preferred it when I thought it was real,” I said. “It was cleaner. I don’t know what to do with myself now. It still feels the same. There’s still a hole inside me. I still can’t trust him. But now those feelings feel wrong.”

  It was wicked, and classic Theo. I could never be clear in the head, emotions simple and with a logical beginning, middle, and end. He had to step in the middle, throwing them to a thousand different beginnings and endings.

  I’d told him lies to protect him—at least, that was what I told myself.

  If Gemma was telling the truth… I took another long swig of tequila, relishing the burn and bite. Theo and I played our games of truth or promise, but with every truth, more lies bled, and our promises were made with fingers crossed.