by Ashley Gee
She hits each step on the way down, her body contorting in a way that no person should until she hits the hardwood floor at the bottom, her neck bent at an impossible angle. Her eyes are wide and fixed as they stare up at the ceiling, a small trail of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.
Emma’s voice is barely a whisper in the silence.
“Is she dead?”
I hide the gun before we call 911.
The police believe us when we tell them that it was an accident, that we all saw Giselle stumble and fall down the stairs.
They don’t seem to notice that Emma stays huddled in the corner while she stares at nothing at all. It’s probably easy to mistake her behavior for grief and not something else entirely. I’m going to get her bundled off to the best psychologist money can buy at the earliest opportunity, but for the moment it’s better that she doesn’t say anything at all.
Zaya surprises me with how smoothly she tells the story, crying real tears when she talks about searching for a pulse on my bitch of a former stepmother and not finding one. Lying to the cops must be something kids learn early in the Gulch.
But it doesn’t take long for the facade to break down after the police finish taking our statements and leave. I make her lay down on the couch in the living room while the paramedics zip Giselle’s body into a black bag and carry it away.
I call my father to tell him the sanitized version of what happened, but he doesn’t pick up. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing you leave in a voicemail, so I hope I get a chance to talk to him before he hears about it on the news.
Right now, I have more important people to think about.
Emma lets me shuffle her off to bed, still looking lost and shell-shocked. She hasn’t spoken a word, not even after the cops left. I’m just praying that things are different in the morning.
Zaya has fallen asleep, exhaustion and emotion robbing her of the ability to stay conscious. I stand there and watch her for a few minutes, marveling at how much younger she looks in sleep.
I still remember the day I met her, the tiny girl with wild hair and a stained dress who never seemed at all intimidated by me. I’d gotten used to other kids cozying up to me because of the Cortland name and fortune, but Zaya had never seemed to care about any of that.
She is still too light in my arms when I pick her up. The weeks I’ve spent trying to fatten her up have only gone so far to overturn a lifetime of never getting enough to eat. I carry her up to one of the guest rooms, because I don’t want to leave Emma alone inside the house.
With Giselle gone, I might not ever sleep in the pool house again.
Zaya feels too good in my arms, like it’s the place she is meant to be. But that’s only because she’s unconscious. Once she wakes up, we’ll go right back to being enemies sighting each other across a battlefield.
Maybe I can lock her in the room until I convince her that there is something real between us.
She’s alive, which means I still have a chance.
Hope threatens to crush my heart into dust as I mount the stairs one by one. The same stairs that had broken Giselle’s neck less than an hour ago. It bothers me a bit that I don’t feel much more than relief at the reminder my stepmother is gone, if just for Emma’s sake.
But the woman got what she deserved. We all do, eventually.
Zaya comes suddenly awake when I lay her down on the bed, kicking and fighting like her life depends on it. Her crazed eyes shift to my face and she immediately stills, staring up at me like I’m some demon who has materialized out of the ether to torment her.
“Vin?” On her lips, my name sounds like a wish. There is so much yearning in the sound that I can barely take it. “Please…”
I kiss her before she can say anything else, fully expecting her to shove me away. She doesn’t just kiss me back, her hands come around my neck and pull with the weight of her entire body until I’m laying over her.
“Please what? Tell me what you want.” I cup her cheeks with my palms, the warmth of her skin seeping into me. Cortland Manor has always been too cold, but now I feel heat like a furnace burns inside her body. “I would give you anything.”
“Even love?” The manic disorientation of sleep is gone from her gaze. She stares up at me like she sees right through me, like she sees everything I’ve ever tried to hide from her and the rest of the world.
Love. I’ve never used that word with anyone. Not my father, because he wouldn’t want to hear it. Not with Giselle. Maybe once with Emma when she was already asleep and wouldn’t hear it.
Love is terrifying. It makes you weak because it gives you something to lose.
“You are the air that I breathe. You always have been, even when I hated you,” I say, staring down into her eyes as I watch for any reaction to my words. “I don’t care about the money or the family legacy. I would burn this town to the ground and never look back, if it means I get to have you. I love you so much that it fucking hurts.”
“No one is suggesting arson.” Her small smile plows into me and sucks the air from my lungs. “I’ve always loved you, I think. Even when you hated me.”
“I never hated you as much as I hated myself.” My hands coast over her body, tracing the curves of her hips and over the flat plane of her stomach. “I’m so sorry for everything. I let the anger twist me up until I became a monster, but I never stopped wanting you. Loving you. I don’t care about the inheritance. The money is just another noose tied around my damn neck. We don’t need it.”
“Really?” Her disbelief is obvious. She laughs when I tickle her hard in the ribs, but doesn’t try to roll away. “You have no idea what it’s like to be poor.”
“I know what it’s like to be without you. Anything else is just details.” It isn’t a lie. Money is a tool, a means to an end. I’ve had it before, and I’ll manage to get it again. The only thing I can’t stand to lose is her.
“I’m sorry, too. For going in the water…” she trails off, voice stricken.
Zaya had tried to escape. Escape, because I drove her past the point of desperation. She hadn’t been running towards death so much as she had been running away from me.
I will never give her a reason to run again.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” I press another kiss against her full lips. It’s still hard to believe that she’s mine. I might have thought I owned her before, but I had no idea. “But if you really want to make it up to me, I have a few ideas.”
“I’m not pregnant, by the way.”
I briefly consider lying and immediately abandon the idea. “Iain told me. It’s a relief, honestly. Babies shouldn’t come into the world already burdened with their parents mistakes.”
She grips my forearms and pulls me closer, pressing her lower body against mine. Her expression is playful. “No more holes poked in condoms?”
“I’ll take you to the clinic first thing in the morning,” I promise, trying for contrite with the wide smile on my face. “In the meantime, I can think of dozens of things we can do that won’t make a baby. Care for a demonstration?”
Zaya giggles as I duck my head to press a kiss against her stomach with every intention of moving lower. Her fingers tangle in my hair, forcing my head up so I can look her in the eye.
“I love you,” she says again, and my heart sings.
“I would have chased you into the deepest ocean, Milbourne. It doesn’t matter how fast you run or how far you go, I will always follow after you.” The words are an incantation, invoking whatever dark diety might be listening. “You’re in my head and in my heart. My blood only flows for you. Forever.”
And I kiss her like I mean for this to be forever, because I do.
Epilogue
Zaya
Perfect isn’t supposed to exist in real life.
Correction, in my life.
But I don’t have any other word to describe what it’s like to be Vin Cortland’s wife.
My brother is safely away
at Blackbreak Academy, far from the criminally sophisticated friends he made in the Gulch. It will be up to him whether or not he decides to make anything of himself.
I call Grandpa every Sunday and listen to him gush about the care home as if it’s the first I’m hearing it. Apparently, there is another resident named Gladys that he has been making eyes at for the last few weeks. I hope that works out. The important thing is that someone makes sure he takes his medication every day and eats three meals, which is more than I ever managed on my own.
Everything is wrapped up tighter than a Christmas gift.
The door of our tiny apartment slams shut, which is always how Vin announces his return home.
“Kitchen,” I bellow, hoping he hears me over the blare of some pop song playing on his phone.
That man has the worst taste in music, but I manage to love him anyway.
Vin eyes me appreciatively from where I’m standing at the stove. For him, the paisley printed apron I’m wearing might as well be lingerie. Maybe it’s because he never had a real mother, but watching me pretend to be a housewife is the sexiest thing he can imagine.
“What’s for dinner?” he asks, wrapping his arms around my waist and pressing himself against my back. “Something smells delicious.”
His tone makes it clear that it isn’t only the food that he’s talking about. I try to push him away, but it’s like shoving a brick wall. “The roast is going to burn if you don’t keep your hands to yourself.”
“Let it burn,” he growls against my neck, nipping the skin hard enough to make me gasp.
“First lesson on not being rich is that you don’t let food go to waste.”
Vin licks the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Is the second lesson that you have to make your own fun? Because all the best things I can think of right now won’t cost a dime.”
Vin fits in to life in Los Angeles the same way he fits in everywhere else, like the world was designed with him in mind. He managed to get himself enrolled in classes at the last minute, probably with a sizable donation involved. Most of his coursework is at the business school, because he needs to figure out how to rebuild the Cortland fortune after it disintegrates.
I assumed the thought of being cut off financially would bother him, but he has taken it completely in stride. It doesn’t escape my notice that all it would take to right the ship would be a pregnancy, a real one this time, but he hasn’t brought it up in months, and I’m starting to think he never will.
He was true to his word about getting me on the pill, going as far as to remind me to take it every day. As if I’m the kind of girl who would forget something like that.
“I am not burning this dinner, doesn’t matter what you do. This beef cost almost twenty dollars.”
“And maybe all I want to eat is you.” He nuzzles my neck again and bites down on my earlobe, just hard enough to leave a sting that he soothes away with his tongue. “Did you take your pill today?”
He doesn’t know that I stopped taking the birth control pills months ago. Just like I didn’t know that poking holes in condoms is so easy, it makes you wonder how the things are at all effective in the first place.
There are test results in a manila envelope on the table. I just have to figure out the best way to let him know what they say.
His hands roam over my body, making it easy to forget that our dinner is sizzling on the stove in front of me. Switching the knob to low, I turn in his embrace and wrap my arms around his neck. “You have ten minutes before this burns.”
Vin smiles at me in a way that is frankly carnal. “With the way you come, I only need five.”
He carries me away as I laugh.
Vin
I’ve been spending money like there is no tomorrow, because there isn’t.
Zaya’s tuition at UCLA is paid in full for the next four years. I gave the landlord of our apartment as much money upfront as he would take. My unfettered access to the Cortland fortune is on a ticking clock, and I intend to take full advantage.
The codicil requires that she be pregnant within a year of our marriage, and we’re ticking over into month eleven. Another few weeks and the money will be out of my hands forever.
I’ve been trying really hard to decide what I think about that, but it’s been easier not to think about it at all. The money itself doesn’t mean anything, but I do sometimes wonder how I’m going to take care of her. There is a pressure to being a husband that I hadn’t anticipated.
Zaya is mine, which means all of her needs are, too.
Nothing else seems important when my head is buried between her legs and she writhes against my tongue.
If someone had asked me six months ago if I was willing to give up everything I had for Zaya Milbourne, I would have laughed in their faces.
Now, it doesn’t feel like I’m giving anything up at all.
When she has come enough times to forget that our dinner is burning on the stove, Zaya stares up at me with wet eyes.
“Are you really willing to be poor with me forever?”
“I’m willing to be pretty much anything, as long as it’s with you.”
She rolls her eyes, but I can tell my response makes her happy. “We’re still in the honeymoon phase, though. What happens in ten years when you wake up in a shitty apartment with no money in the bank and hate me for it?”
“For starters, our honeymoon period happened sometime around the 3rd grade. As far as I’m concerned, our first wedding anniversary might as well be our tenth, considering everything we’ve been through together.” My voice is stern, but I can’t stop the gentle way that I cradle her face so she can’t turn away when I glare down at her. “You don’t have to convince me that I’m giving up too much to be with you because I’ve known what you’re worth from the very beginning. I would give up billions of dollars before I let you walk away from me. Do you get that, or do I need to pound you into this mattress a few more times before it all becomes clear?”
She gasps in surprise when I push into her without a condom on, but doesn’t push me away. Instead, her legs rise to wrap around my back until I don’t have any choice but to sink into her and stay there.
The sex is unhurried even as the stench of burning meat fills the air. I don’t need her to tell me that she loves me, not when she is letting perfectly good food go to waste in favor of fucking me.
I come with a force that bends my spine, right after she does. It’s only belatedly that I realize my mistake.
“Oh shit, sorry.” I roll off of her with a groan. The pill isn’t one hundred percent, neither are condoms for that matter, but the combination seems to be enough. “You want me to run down to the drug store for a morning after pill?”
Instead of seeming upset, Zaya sits up in bed and just stares at me for a long moment. “Are you sure you’re okay without the money?”
At the moment, my only focus is her bare tits, because the sheet has fallen to bunch up around her waist. “I’m sure.”
She continues to stare at me. “If you did have your inheritance, what would you want to do with it?”
The easy answer is that I would carry her off to some place nice and keep her chained to my bed until we both died of exhaustion. But I get the feeling she wants to hear something more than that.
“I’ve always wondered what Deception would be like if someone invested in it,” I respond with a shrug, wondering why the hell she is so interested in a hypothetical. “Cortland Construction only builds in the parts of town that are nice. But the Gulch might not be so bad if someone put some money into it. The mines closed a long time ago, but there are still plenty of people willing to work. We could create jobs if we really wanted to, instead of just taking them away.”
Zaya’s eyes are shiny, but there is a soft smile on her face. Still naked, she jumps out of bed and runs for the kitchen. “I have something for you.”
Thoroughly confused, I wait until she races back in with a manila envelope in her hand. She hands it to
me with a flourish.
“What am I supposed to do with this.”
She rolls her eyes. “Maybe try opening it.”
I rip open the envelope, and several sheets of paper fall out onto my lap. The first page is clearly test results, but I can’t make heads or tails of the jumble of letters and numbers.
Then I pick up the smallest piece. The paper is thin and mostly black with a blurry shape outlined in white.
It’s a sonogram.
My mouth opens and closes again as my vision blurs.
“I went to the clinic this morning. Doctor says I’m maybe eight weeks.” Her voice is soft and her gaze never leaves my face, as if gauging my reaction. “It’s too early to tell, but I’m hoping for a girl.”
I have Zaya in my arms before I even make the conscious decision to reach for her. “Are you sure about this?”
Her smile is tremulous. “If you are.”
I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.
The money I worked so hard to keep is finally mine, just as soon as I realized that I didn’t care about having it anymore.
I whisper against her mouth. “I’ll eat burnt steak every day if it means I get to be with you. I don’t want to have it all.”
She smiles as she kisses me. “That’s exactly why you’re going to get it.”
And I do.
THE END
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