Angry God by L.J. Shen

Vaughn left my side sometime after I fell asleep, exhausted by absorbing what had happened to him without falling apart. The place where he’d kissed my forehead was still warm, the only souvenir of the last time we’d spend together.

I didn’t bother leaving my bed the following morning. I felt like crying for eternity, curled inside myself, my body rocking back and forth as the sobs rattled through me. Turned out that Vaughn looming over me and threatening my life wasn’t half as devastating as hearing what had made him want to kill me—and the rest of the world—in the first place.

I allowed myself the better half of the day to fall apart privately, letting out all the emotions I couldn’t show him. Then I stood, picked myself up, and finished my statue.

What I did next would shock everyone.

Including myself.

Instead of going back to my room the following morning, I headed straight to Edgar. I was running out of time to do everything I wanted to do to take care of Lenora before shit hit the fan. Confiding in her had felt eerily similar to handing her my balls in a nice, cellophane-wrapped package, but strangely necessary.

All that we were would die right along with Harry Fairhurst tomorrow, and Hunter and Knight were due to land at Heathrow later tonight.

I barged into Edgar’s office without knocking, ignoring the fact that Arabella was sitting in front of his desk. They were engrossed in deep conversation, hunched forward and exchanging hushed words over raised tones. Planting my hands on my hips, I jerked my head to the door.

“Outta here,” I barked. Didn’t take a nuclear scientist to know who I was talking to.

Arabella twisted her head to look at me, wiping her cheek—from tears or cum, anyone’s guess would be as good as mine.

“You’re not the boss of m—”

“Ass. Outta. That. Chair.” Each word was pronounced with dripping mockery. “Before I drag you by the hair, and believe me, Arabella, I won’t even think twice before tearing those expensive extensions—and your real hair—from that empty skull of yours.”

That was a lie, but a believable one nonetheless. She turned her face to Edgar, expecting him to fight her war, but he was too stunned to react, his eyes on me. Reluctantly, she stood, her chair scraping back, and walked slowly out the door. She stopped when her shoulder brushed my arm.

“I know something fucked you up, Vaughn. Everyone knows that. And you’re not the only person who’s bad for a reason. I’m not the devil,” she whispered.

“No, you’re not,” I rasped under my breath. “The devil’s smart and calculating. You’re neither.” I slammed the door in her face.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I scowled at Edgar the minute we were alone, leaning forward and bracing my hands on either side of his desk.

It was covered with bullshit—sketches, documents, coins, a picture of Lenora, Poppy, and their mother smiling back at him. Fake fucker hadn’t checked on his daughter in weeks.

“I beg your pardon?” He sat back, blinking. “Who do you think you’re talking to, Mr. Spencer? I strongly advise you check yourself before you’re checked out of this institute. I am not impressed with either your manners or your profess—”

I cut him off. “Fuck my professionalism. You’re fucking your daughter’s enemy.” I wiped his desk clean of everything there in one, harsh movement, just barely holding back from smashing the entire thing in his face.

He pulled back and coughed, seeming surprised by my outburst.

“Your teenage daughter’s enemy,” I added. “So don’t lecture me about manners. Len is not even talking to you, and instead of making things right with her, you go around spending time with that bitch? What is wrong with you?” I straightened up, pulling at my hair with both hands as I paced across the room.

He stood, his voice booming so loud it rattled the glass windows. “What are you on about, you silly boy?”

I whirled to face him. “Don’t play dumb. Arabella told both me and your daughter that you guys are having an affair. How long has this been going on? Since you were in Todos Santos? Was she even legal when you first had a taste?”

“I…I…wait.”He frowned. “Lenny thinks that’s what I’m doing when I’m meeting with Arabella?” It was his turn to run a hand through his mass of gray curls. “She thinks I’m having sex with her?”

By the way he said the word sex, I gathered that he viewed the concept as about as appealing as I did. In other words, he’d rather be chopped up and thrown into the ocean than tap Arabella’s ass.

Then what was he doing with her alone all the time? She wasn’t my first choice for intellectual conversation.

“Are you saying you’re not?”

“No!” He slapped the desk, roaring.

“Enlighten me, then. What possesses you to spend more time with Arabella than you do with both your daughters combined?”

“I cocked up!” Edgar pushed his desk away completely, causing it to skid over the floor until it almost hit me. He shook with what looked like years of built-up rage. “I cocked everything up in Todos Santos, but not the way you think. I didn’t have an affair with Arabella. I had an affair with her mother, Georgia—the first woman I’ve been with since Lenny’s mother died. I got carried away, not thinking. Not thinking she was married, that she had kids, that I was destroying another family while trying to keep mine together. Arabella caught us in the act one day and told her father. This spun the next year in my life out of control. Apparently, Georgia had been battling an addiction to painkillers and alcohol, and I was one of her continuous bad decisions. She cried rape to save her relationship. And I got thrown into a behind-the-scenes legal battle with Arabella and her father, who wanted to avenge Georgia’s indiscretions. He whisked Georgia off on a so-called vacation, but really, it was a lengthy trip to rehab, while Arabella stayed in California with her sister. That’s when her mother admitted she had an affair with me and wanted a divorce. When her husband threatened to drag her through a nasty process and waved the pre-nup in her face, she tried to cut her wrists, unsuccessfully. Arabella and her sister were crushed, and guilt consumed me, so I found myself helping the family through this period. When I learned Arabella had found a way to get here, I knew she was after revenge. That’s why I’ve been distant with Lenny. The less I drag her into this, the less chance Arabella has to get to her. She’s been making every day a living hell. I think she has this idea that if she ruins my life, she’ll feel better about the fact that I ruined hers.”

“Is that what’s happening right now?”

“Yes. She barges into my office and room unannounced, throwing accusations in my face. She’s walked in on two dates I’ve had since coming here. Shattered two of my sculptures. Then there’s what she did to Lenny and Poppy, of course. I knew that. I knew. That’s why I kept my distance from them. I told myself it would all be over in a few short months, and things would go back to normal.”

“Bullshit. Lenny and I both heard you in your room,” I challenged. “You told her to get off of you. You had sex.”

“She was trying to seduce me!” he shouted. “She gets into fits where she tries to have sex with me, but I always push her off. I’ve called her father a few times. Her sister, too. They said I deserve it for what I did to their family. She’s a martyr, dragging me through every single sin I supposedly committed.”

“Why are you allowing her to spend so much time with you, then?” He didn’t seem the type to bone a teenager, but I was still skeptical.

He swallowed hard. “More time with her means less time for her to target Lenny. Children shouldn’t suffer for their parents’ misdeeds. I’m humoring Arabella’s destructive side until her time here is up. But I am not touching her, and I am horrified that my daughter would think that. Does she not know me at all?”

“Have you taken the time to get to know her recently?” I retorted.

His head hung low, like a half-mast flag.

“Has she shared this with Poppy?” He sighed.

I shook my head. Len hadn’t gathered the strength to upset her older sister. When you care about someone—and at this point there was no point denying I cared for Lenora—you really don’t want to be the bearer of shitty news to them.

“Thank God.”

“Don’t thank God, thank your daughter. You have to make amends with her.” I pointed a warning finger at him from across the room.

“I don’t know, Vaughn. Parenting is bloody hard, okay?”

He wiped sweat from his brow, dragging his massive back against the wall and squatting down. I did the same, crouching across from him, on the other side of the room.

“The truth is, kids don’t come with a manual. I’m not always sure when she’s acting up because she needs to, because it’s normal, and when it’s serious. Lenora has always been so inherently good. Both my daughters are, really. But Lenny has loads of common sense and a spine for miles. I’d never been particularly worried about her. I thought I was merely allowing her a rebellious period, thinking she was mad about the internship again.”

The internship. I almost winced. That one was all on me.

“You need to talk to her today. Set the record straight. Tell her exactly what’s up.”

He nodded.

“As for the internship…” I continued, the words leaving my mouth of their own accord. “The plan has changed. I need your help with something.”

Edgar frowned. “You’re still going to show the sculpture, right?”

Of course. Edgar loved Len so much. That’s what she didn’t know. She thought him giving me the internship was him disregarding her. She didn’t know he’d made the greatest sacrifice for her. It was me who’d deceived them. At first, anyway.

I’d told Edgar I would make his daughter fall in love with me and get her out of her emotional funk. That I would court her, love her, cherish her, and be a friend to her. He, in return, sold her dreams to buy her happiness. With me.

We’d both lied to get what we wanted, and it had blown up in our faces in a spectacular fashion.

“I’m not showing the statue.” I flicked my Zippo, letting the flame lick up and pressing it to the tip of my tongue, fully aware he was going to put me on fucking blast. The secret to extinguishing fire with your tongue is a lot of saliva. And very little fucking common sense. “But we are going to show them something, all right.”

My meeting with Edgar somehow bled into late afternoon. I gave him careful instructions on how to handle everything with Len. It felt like placing your toddler in the irresponsible hands of an untrained monkey, but I knew I had to get the hell out of there, and fast, after I executed my plan.

When I finally returned to my room, all I wanted was to kick my boots off, close my eyes, and pretend tonight was going to be just another night of me sneaking into Good Girl’s room.

But of course it wasn’t.

As it also happened, I had a surprise waiting for me in my bedroom, which had nothing to do with my two asshole friends.

“Evening, son.” My father turned around in the recliner by the window, his movements smooth and nonchalant. There was an unlit cigar tucked between his teeth, and a glass of something strong in his hand.

“What are you doing here?” I felt my jaw ticking with irritation.

Talk about shitty timing. The last thing I needed was another distraction. With my luck, my mother was here, too, along with the entire goddamn family.

“Sit your ass down.” He jerked his chin toward my unmade bed.

“Or?” I draped a muscular arm against the wall, challenging.

“That’s an easy one,” he sneered. “Or I will stand up and make you very goddamn uncomfortable by hugging your ass. Because that’s what you need right now, isn’t it, Vaughn?” He slanted his head sideways. “A hug?”

I sat down, resting one boot over his recliner in my small room. I’d been hugged by my dad more than a fucking tree in Woodstock, but there was something about his expression that threw me off. He knew something.

“Here. Sitting down. I’ll ask again—what are you doing here?”

“You’ve been ignoring my calls.”

“I spoke to Mom every day. You never took the phone. Gotta hand it to you. You know how to master the hard-to-get act.”

That was the strangest thing about the entire Dad ordeal, but also precisely what made me not answer his calls. He was on to something, and whatever it was, he didn’t want Mom to hear it.

Dad sat back, but he didn’t look smug. A pang of worry pinched my chest. He had the constant air of someone who’d just fucked your wife, emptied your safe, and taken a shit in your bed. Now he looked surprisingly somber. Somber meant trouble.

“We had to talk privately,” he said.

“Clearly.” I scanned his face, looking for clues.

“I figured it all out, son. I’m sorry. I’m so. Fucking. Sorry.” His voice broke midway, and he turned his face away, his jaw clenching like mine did. His throat bobbed.

No.

No.

I dropped my head into my hands, elbows on my knees, and shook it.

“Troy Brennan?” I asked. It had to be that fixer he’d hooked me up with. How the fuck else did he figure that out?

“No. I made a promise and kept it.”

“Jaime, then?” I snorted in false amusement. He must’ve told Dad I was in some kind of trouble. I didn’t even have it in me to be mad at him. It was the logical thing to do. Still, shitty as hell. He’d signed a contract.

“No,” Dad said, standing up and taking the necessary half-step toward me.

I didn’t want any of what he was about to offer—not the pity, the pain, the shame, the feeling that accompanied those things. Still, he sat next to me on the bed.

“I think Jaime was planning on telling me after the fact. But one night I got into my bedroom and your mom had fallen asleep with the lights on, an art magazine half-open under her arm. I tucked her in and was about to turn off the light when I picked the magazine up and saw an item about how all of Harry Fairhurst’s paintings had been bought by a mysterious collector. I wondered why we hadn’t been approached about the paintings in our house—everyone else had been, after all—but the answer was simple. You had access to our house, and to the paintings in it. I threw the magazine away so she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t do the math herself. I racked my brain trying to figure out why you’d want to own all this motherfucker’s paintings. Better yet, how you could afford them. So I checked your trust fund, and sure enough, it was empty.”

I swallowed wordlessly. I’d been sloppy in that regard. All I could see was the end goal, and that had backfired in my face.

Dad put his hand on my back, both of us hunched over, seated on my bed. My face was still buried in my hands. I felt like a stupid kid, and hated every minute of it.

“What could drive a man to buy an entire, eight-figure collection of paintings he’s not even fond of?” My father’s voice drifted in the air like smoke, lethal and suffocating. “There was only one answer: vengeance.”

I stood up and walked to the window, refusing to face him.

He knew.

Lenora knew.

My secret was no longer mine. It had broken free. Run loose. I had no control over it. It was probably pounding through the alleyways of every ear in my inner circle.

“You want him forgotten,” Dad said gently behind me.

I appreciated that he didn’t say outright the things Harry had done to me. It made the situation a little less unbearable, somehow. I sniffed, ignoring the statement.

I wanted to forget Harry Fairhurst had ever existed, yes, but I knew I couldn’t. So I’d settled for erasing him from the memory of the rest of the world.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

But not if all your paintings are torn, burned, and floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Then you’re just another mortal.

Dad stood up and came toward me. He planted his hands on my shoulders from behind. I dropped my head to my chest. He hadn’t ridden my ass like I thought he would for ghosting him for eternity.

…or spending a sickening amount of money on art I had burned.

“Let me do it,” he whispered.

“Huh?” I spun, my eyebrows diving down.

“I know what you’re about to do, and I’m asking you to let me do it. Not for you, for me. When we talked about your problem before, I told you I wouldn’t pry, but if I found out who was involved, I’d deal with them myself. And you agreed. We shook on it. There’s a lot on the line for you, son. Let me shoulder your burden. Let it be on my conscience, not yours. After all, I was the one who fucked up. I was the one who let it happen. I was the one who didn’t figure it out in that Parisian gallery, the idiot who sent you to Carlisle Prep when you were a young boy. My fuck-up. My mistake. My payback.”

I appreciated how, even now, he did not bunch Mom into the colossal fuck-up that was Harry Fairhurst. He took full responsibility as the head of the family. Some people thought flowers and hearts were romantic. Me, I thought being a badass who took the fall for his entire family and shouldered all their sins was far better. Not that it was really my parents’ fault. They’d prodded, asked, begged, and questioned. They’d provided me with a magnificent childhood, and not just materialistically.

“Thank you,” I said curtly. “But no.”

“You don’t know what killing a person does to your soul.”

“And you do?”

He squeezed my shoulder again, refraining from answering me. Interesting.

“You have a girlfriend.” Dad changed the subject. “Isn’t she his niece? That would complicate things.”

“We’re not staying together.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. That would be beyond awkward, now that she knew my plans for her uncle.

I’d given her all my secrets.

I’d trusted her then, and I trusted her now.

She’d never opened her mouth. And, as it turned out, she hadn’t even known what she saw back then. When I told her about Harry’s abuse, she’d confessed to me that what she saw in that room was completely different.

“I didn’t see Harry’s head underneath you. I just thought it was a girl. I didn’t know anything about oral sex. I thought you were young, and angry, and doing things you shouldn’t be doing and going to regret. I felt sorry for you. At thirteen, you shouldn’t need sex and booze and blow jobs to feel. At thirteen, you’re learning the hang of feelings. It’s life on training wheels, you know?”

I didn’t know. Harry never gave me the chance to know what it felt like to feel.

“Besides…” I moved around Dad, changing the subject. “…how do you know about her?”

“Knight sent a family newsletter,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Fucker,” I mouthed.

“Watch your mouth.”

“I was making a general statement. What do you think he does with Luna? Play poker?” I flung myself over the bed, staring at the ceiling. I felt like a real teenager for the first time in forever. My dad was on my case, offering to get me out of the shit I’d gotten myself into. I had girl trouble. I made sex jokes on my best friend’s account.

Dad stood in the middle of the room, looking a little lost all of a sudden—for the first time ever, actually.

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Vaughn. You don’t have to lose her. You don’t have to lose anything.”

“It’s a done deal, Dad. Drop it.”

“Son…”

I turned to look at him. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Mom. It would break her.”

He held my gaze, nodding gravely. He got it. He got why I needed to do it myself.

“I won’t,” he said. “I didn’t when I saw the article. This stays between you and me. What happened doesn’t define you, you hear me? Once upon a time, I held on to a dark secret, too.” He leaned down, brushing my ink black hair from my forehead and frowning. A mirror image of father and son, with nearly three decades between them.

“How did it end?” I blinked.

He kissed my forehead like I was a toddler, smiling.

“I killed it.”