His eyes rake over me, up and down, pausing at my legs, my crotch, my chest, then my lips. “I would have pegged you as more of a gymnast. I am sure you are very, very . . . flexible.”
Holy shit. That was definitely innuendo, but it also came from some place of knowing.
Then I’m staring at his mouth, the way he’s licking his lips. The smattering of a mustache, the goatee along his chin. That very familiar chin.
And once again a memory jabs into my head in a red-hot haze.
Sex with Olivier.
A face at the window, eyes in the shadows.
The very same face I’m looking at now.
I can’t even hide the fear, and there’s no question that he can see it.
But I have to pretend. For Olivier’s sake, I have to pretend.
And then I have to get out of here.
No matter what, I have to get Pascal to believe my lie.
“A little too flexible for the likes of you,” I tell him, reaching out and patting him on the chest. “Sorry, pal, I know you get a lot of girls because of your little perfume campaign, but I’m not interested.”
It works. His mouth turns sour, into a pout. “I’m not hitting on you,” he says.
I shrug and wave my hand at him. “Whatever you say.”
Then I walk away.
I even do a little sashay, swinging my hips, like I’m proud to have just turned him down, and I can only hope it’s enough for him to buy it, enough for him to forget his objective. I hope that his injured pride and bruised ego, something he never even put on the line, is enough of a distraction that he’ll forget everything else he thinks he knows about me.
I walk inside the doors, back into the armor room, toward the stairs.
Start going up them.
And the hair on my arms starts to rise.
I glance over my shoulder to see Pascal following me, his mouth set in a grim line. He doesn’t look so easygoing anymore. The cat doesn’t like to lose the mouse.
I get to the top of the stairs and look around as subtly as I can, trying not to look like I’m searching for Olivier.
But I am.
And I spot him, standing by the doors to the music room, talking to his father and some other man I’m pretty sure is Tom Ford. I don’t know my fashion designers, but this man is as recognizable as the pope and handsome as fuck.
Even though the three of them are in conversation, there’s a small crowd around them, giving them space, but also staring at them in adoration. And why not? This is the fashion world, and these men are some of the gods. No wonder everyone is hanging on to their every word and nodding along as if they’re part of the conversation too.
I pause, watching them, hoping I’ll be passed over the same as everyone else.
And yet I feel Pascal stop right behind my shoulder.
He doesn’t say anything, but he’s there. My skin feels like I’ve gotten an electric shock that I can’t quite shake.
I should move, should go somewhere. But I feel powerless from fear. Like I’m waiting for him to do something.
And he’s waiting too. Maybe for me to do something.
Then something does happen.
Something across the room.
There’s a shout and a cry, and for a moment I think that maybe someone got a surprise or dropped something.
But when my eyes travel over, I see Ludovic clutching his chest, face red and strained as he rips off his mask. Another man is leaning over in concern, and then Ludovic’s legs are buckling and Olivier is right behind him, trying to hold him up.
Olivier starts yelling something in French, and people are taking out their phones, and, oh my God, I think his father is having a heart attack.
Another man is behind Ludovic, helping Olivier, but then he slips to the floor, unresponsive now. The crowd is gathering, and I can’t see a thing, but I hear Olivier crying out for his father.
I have to be there for him.
I run toward Olivier, glancing back once at Pascal, thinking he must be following me, going to help his uncle.
But Pascal remains behind.
Standing there, completely still.
His mouth and face are unreadable.
His eyes are dark.
All I know is that they’re following my every move.
I get to the crowd, trying to break through, to get to Olivier, but there are too many people, and they’re panicking. Blaise is in front of them, keeping everyone back, yelling in French. I wish I could understand what the hell was going on, but I know it’s not good.
Not good at all.
I can’t even breathe.
This can’t be happening. His father was doing fine earlier, at least he looked like he was.
Now Gautier is in the picture, barking at people and pointing. Seraphine comes running through the crowd, crying. It’s a mess, and I do my best to stay out of the way to let people help. Someone in the crowd seems to be a doctor and is doing CPR. It doesn’t look good; it doesn’t sound good.
Then sirens fill the air, and a fire truck shows up, followed shortly by paramedics, who take Ludovic away on a stretcher. Then the police, who order everyone to go.
I have to go too. We all do. I want to stay with Olivier, but he doesn’t even look for me. He doesn’t need to. His father is the only thing on his mind right now, and when Olivier rips off his mask and throws it to the ground, his eyes are wet and red with tears, and I know that his father is probably dead.
I break for him. I want to be there for him. I want to shoulder his grief and his burdens and be his shoulder to cry on.
But he has his sister, who is sobbing into his shoulder, beautiful even when she’s crying. And they follow the paramedics out, as do the rest of us, gathered at the front of the castle on this hot summer night, the air filled with cicadas and the sweet smells of the vineyards.
I don’t even know where to go. Everyone here seems to know each other, and they’re all staying at nearby hotels and wineries and Airbnbs. All I know is that I was supposed to stay with Olivier when all this was over, in one of the castle’s many bedrooms.
That won’t be happening.
For the first time in a while, I feel absolutely lost and unmoored, and I know that my feelings matter so little right now.
But that hurts too. Knowing they matter so little.
That I matter so little right now.
I’m alone, anonymous, a hidden girl, about to be abandoned in the countryside. I don’t know the language, and I don’t have much money to my name, and I’ve been depending on Olivier for everything so far, and I’ve only been kept in the dark.
And now his father is gone.
Now his world has completely turned over.
I have no idea where it will place me.
I sigh and try to recover some resilience. I do have my clutch purse with train tickets and a credit card, and I have my phone. I won’t bother Olivier, and for now I can at least figure something out.
I’m trying to Google what the local taxis are, since the car that took me here from the Bordeaux train station certainly won’t be arranged for me now, when I feel a presence beside me.
I glance up to see Pascal, mask off, smoking a cigarette. The fact that I’m just so brazenly staring at his face is momentarily jarring, like I’m seeing something I’m not supposed to see.
But just like he was with the mask, his expression now is unreadable.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” I say softly, trying to find the words. I might think Pascal is a total creep, but I’m not heartless. “He was . . . that was horrible.”
Pascal nods slowly, taking a deliberate drag of his cigarette. “It was.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
Pascal looks around him, the moonlight bouncing off his dark eyes. Then he shrugs. “Je ne sais pas.” He glances at me. “Where are you going?”
I can’t tell him the truth. “I was going to find a way back into town. To Bordeaux. Stay at a hotel.”
“You don’t have a ride,” he says.
I wave my phone at him. “My phone isn’t pulling up the driver I had earlier.”
He frowns. “You can have a ride with me.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Please. That’s okay.”
I’d rather walk.
He gives me a terse smile. “I meant a ride from me. I’ll call you one of my drivers. I’m staying here tonight.” He pauses. “Unless you want to stay here too? Don’t worry . . . I’m not hitting on you. You would know it if I were.”
I swear to God, sometimes he sounds so much like Olivier it’s uncanny. And yet the two of them couldn’t be further apart.
I remember his uncle, and I resist the urge to say something witty. “I would really appreciate it if you could call your driver for me.”
He nods and blows out smoke away from my face, and as he turns, he faces the lights from the castle, and I see his eyes. They aren’t dark at all, but the palest, iciest blue. He texts something on his phone and then puts it back in his pocket. “He’s just at the end of the driveway. He’ll be here in a minute. Black Mercedes.”
Then Pascal turns and slowly walks off back toward the castle, and it’s this view of his back again, the way he moves, that makes me think it really was him I saw on the street the other day.
He’d been following me.
Why?
How did he know about me or who I was?
Why is it his business who Olivier is with?
I can’t let him know that I know, but I can’t be complacent either.
“Wait,” I call out after him. “How do I know this driver isn’t going to murder me and dump my body on the side of the road somewhere?”
But the moment I say it, I realize it’s not exactly the best thing to say after we all pretty much witnessed someone dying.
He doesn’t even glance at me, just waves his hand, his cigarette making light trails. “There are a bunch of people heading to Bordeaux over there. I’m sure a few of them wouldn’t mind getting a ride with you.”
Then he walks off, back over the drawbridge and into the castle.
For the first time all evening, the air loses its heat, and the breeze turns cold.
And I realize I still have my mask on.
I take it off, glad for what little anonymity I had, and then head toward the group of bewildered and displaced guests, finding someone to come with me on the drive back to Bordeaux.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
OLIVIER
Grief.
I’m no stranger to grief.
When my mother died in the car accident, grief settled down into my life and became a constant companion. It was a friend of sorts, the type of friend you knew only meant well, even though they flattened everything around you. There was no escaping from grief; it was natural, it was something that had to be felt. My mother was a kind, wonderful, caring person, and she deserved the grief that we all felt because that’s how much her loss hurt us.
The grief never left, it just got easier to manage. My sister, my brother, my father—we all depended on each other to get through it. We were the crutches that allowed each other to keep going. Without our family, none of us could put one foot in front of the other.
But now . . . now my father is dead.
He’s gone.
It’s just me and Seraphine now, and Renaud, whom I have to call in a few hours and tell the horrible news to. It’s just us, and without our father, how can we go on? We’re his children, now orphans. We’re alone, marooned, helpless, breaking apart from the inside out.
I can’t even think. I wish I couldn’t feel, but I can, all too well.
The confusion.
The anger.
One minute my father was fine.
The next he had collapsed on the floor.
He was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital, and even now as Seraphine and I talk to the doctors, I don’t understand how any of it can be real.
A heart attack, they say.
It happens, they say.
But it doesn’t happen to someone like my father. Not in his good health and his good shape. It doesn’t happen to someone who literally just had a clean bill of health at his checkup. It doesn’t happen to us . . . it can’t happen again like this.
“It’s late,” Seraphine says in a dull voice, her hand on my shoulder. “You should go to the castle. Get some sleep.”
I stare at her red-rimmed eyes, only now realizing the depth of my exhaustion. “I’m going to Bordeaux,” I tell her. Because that’s where Sadie is. I’ve been in contact with her. I haven’t forgotten her. I need her more than ever, and she feels so weightless and translucent, like maybe she never existed, and she was just a dream, or perhaps I lost her, too, when I lost everything else.
Seraphine nods. She doesn’t ask. Perhaps she thinks I need to be alone. Perhaps she doesn’t blame me for not wanting to go back to the castle.
“Are you going to be okay?” I ask her.
She nods, but in her eyes I see it all. She’s not going to be okay, and neither am I. My father was my idol. I think he was her best friend. This loss is going to weigh on us more than either of us could have imagined.
I get to my feet, not wanting to leave her. “Come to Bordeaux with me. I’ll get you a room.”
She shakes her head, wiping away a tear that had fallen a long time ago. “No, I want to stay here.”
I look around. There’s no one else here. Gautier was here for a second when the ambulance brought our father in. Neither Pascal nor Blaise showed up. Some friends of my father did try to hang around, but they were shown the door.
It’s a cold feeling to know that we are the end of the line. That we are all that’s left on this side of the legacy.
“There’s nothing left for us here,” I tell her. “He’s gone.”
She shakes her head, and I know she’s going into shock, that she can’t quite understand what has happened, that he’s not going to get up and walk back to us.
“Are you going to have an autopsy?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “I brought it up to the doctor, but he said there’s no need. He had a heart attack.”
She gives me a sharp look. “You don’t seriously believe that.”
I sigh, running my hand down my face, wishing I could sink into the floor and never get up again. “I have to. Look, it doesn’t make sense, but I’m going to have to trust the doctors on this one. We can’t keep this going, delaying the inevitable. We need to be able to mourn him, and an autopsy is only going to delay it. Besides, what are you hoping to find?”
“I’m not hoping to find anything,” she says softly.
“Want me to call Cyril?” I ask.
She stiffens at the mention of her ex-husband. “Don’t you dare. You know he’d only pay lip service.”
I nod. Cyril was a charmer (hence, how he was able to woo someone as fiery as Seraphine), but his charm wasn’t enough when Seraphine realized he married her for her money.
“Just go to Bordeaux,” she says with a tired wave. “I’ll be fine.”
“Did you want me to call Renaud?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’ll do it. I need to talk to him.”
I’m grateful for that. I would have done it, but Renaud isn’t an emotional man. He’s closed up in many ways, and I think his sister would be better at breaking the news.
I hug Seraphine goodbye and head out to my driver, who has been waiting for me all night.
The drive to Bordeaux feels long in the dark, such a contrast to the bright lights of the hospital. My driver doesn’t talk except to offer a few words of condolence, leaving me alone in my thoughts. But the longer I’m in the car, the more I feel anonymous and removed. Like whatever happened at the ball, at the hospital, it happened to someone else.
I should revel in the numbness. I should wrap it around me like a shroud and put another mask on, one that says that the show must go on. But I don’t want to. It f
eels like an affront to my father.
I keep seeing the image of him in my head as he fell to the floor, and I make myself drown in it because I don’t want to forget, I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen.
There was such horror in his eyes. He stared right at me as he clutched his chest. Afraid and in disbelief and in pain, and yet there was something else. Something I can’t quite describe, perhaps because it’s something you only feel when you’re about to die. But whatever it is, it will haunt me. It’s like he felt betrayed, and I guess he was, by his own body.
By the time the car pulls up to the hotel across from the opera house in Bordeaux, I feel like I’m on autopilot, reliving his death again and again.
I make my mind switch to Sadie.
Sadie, who I left at the ball because I could only think of my father at the time.
Sadie, who is independent and intrepid enough to find her way here.
Sadie, who I told to check in, and I would come find her.
My phone died on the ride over, so I go to the front desk for the extra key and make my way to the room. The grandest rooms weren’t available on such short notice, but it doesn’t matter. No one is trying to impress anyone anymore.
I knock on the door, and when I don’t hear an answer, I swipe my key and step inside, the door closing behind me. For some reason I fear the worst, as if death has come for her, too, but then I see her lying on the bed in her white dress, her eyes slowly opening as she takes me in.
“Olivier?” she whispers as she pushes herself up on her elbows.
Her hair is falling across her face, and in her dress she looks like an angel.
I thought I could make it across the room, but I can’t.
The sight of her brings me to my knees.
It makes all the loss and grief swell up like a balloon before it bursts, and then it’s pulling me down, and I’m drowning.
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