The Kiss Plot by Nicole French
Three
Brandon was all of sixteen when he started at MIT. It was a long story, the way the foster care system had taken him from a terrible upbringing in South Boston to the home of an MIT professor and his wife. But the basics were that the man turned out to be a whiz with numbers, graduating from the MIT economics department at nineteen before becoming a lawyer. Brandon was basically a cat with nine lives—currently, he was futzing around with electronics and being a doting father and husband.
“I think you need to start from the beginning,” I said. “When did you meet my ‘father’”—I literally could not say the word without wanting to vomit—“and what the hell happened?”
“And,” Skylar put in, in a voice that was eerily quiet, “why did you call him ‘Titan’ at the wedding?”
If I had my guess, Brandon was going to catch hell later for not telling her this stuff before now.
Easy there, pumpkin. He’s just trying to help.
I mentally batted away the voice of the man who had actually raised me. I didn’t need to add more emotionally confusing fuel to this fire.
Brandon sighed and tugged at his hair harder, looking as if he would like to jump right out the window. “I studied econ at MIT, but I was also taking classes with the electrical engineering department, where Ray, then my foster father, worked. And I was good at it.”
I nodded. This wasn’t a surprise. Since leaving finance, Brandon had gone back to his engineering roots and spent most of his time making shit with a bunch of wires in his lab. That was the extent of my knowledge.
“Some of my work got people’s attention. I was even on a couple of patents.”
“At sixteen?” I asked, disbelieving.
Brandon nodded sheepishly. “Well, Ray was the principal author. But yeah, I got a bit of a reputation. Then, right after graduation, this asshole in a Harvard jacket gives me an address and tells me if I want my future made for me, I need to show up at this yacht.” Brandon wrinkled his long nose distastefully. “I was nineteen, almost twenty. Unemployed because I was so young, dying to get out of Ray and Susan’s house, but not wanting to go back to Dorchester either.” Brandon shrugged, the movement monumental with his big shoulders. “So I went, thinking I was going to get some weird job offer. But instead, I was tapped.”
“Tapped?” I repeated. It sounded like a game of duck, duck, goose, not a procedure for entering some weird society.
“It’s a euphemism,” Brandon replied dryly. “For ‘kidnap you, make you sick as a dog on the open fuckin’ ocean, and threaten to throw you to the sharks unless you tell them every secret you have.’ John Carson wasn’t on the boat when I arrived. Instead I met three younger members of some weird fuckin’ society who addressed each other like Greek and Roman gods or demigods. One was named Mercury, another was Achilles, but I don’t remember the other one’s name. They were all dressed in shirts and ties and looked very, very rich—which I was very much not back then, you know. Me at nineteen meant ripped jeans and a Sox hat.”
“Just at nineteen?” Skylar scoffed with a pointed look at the Red Sox shirt her husband was currently wearing.
“So, what?” I asked, now totally absorbed by the story. “They just took you out to the ocean to invite you to their clubhouse?”
“In a way,” Brandon said. “After three days of interrogating me they finally gave me a bit to eat and let me sleep.”
“What did Ray and Susan say when you just disappeared for three days?” Skylar interrupted, looking genuinely horrified.
Again, Brandon shrugged. “I wasn’t the best-behaved adolescent, Red. It wouldn’t have been the first time I took off.”
Skylar shook her head, looking very much like she wanted to give Brandon a piece of her mind on Ray and Susan’s behalf.
“The funny thing is, it wasn’t as scary as they wanted it to be,” Brandon continued. “I knew tougher hoods in Dorchester. I told them whatever they wanted to know, gave them a few punches to the gut when they tried to get rough, and waited the rest out. On the third day, they brought me back. They said I’d passed the first test, and then they gave me a slip of paper with another address. Princeton, where I could meet the Titan, they said.”
Brandon went, more out of curiosity than anything else. But again, he was kidnapped for the rest of the weekend to a house on the Jersey shore, interrogated again by another set of Brooks Brothers-wearing goons before being released with yet another invite.
“It continued like that for weeks,” he said. “Secret meeting after secret meeting. Always with the promise of meeting Titan, but he never showed.”
“Why in the hell did you keep going?” Skylar demanded. “Did you like being kidnapped?”
Brandon reached out for his wife’s hand. “Hey. They didn’t keep me, Red. Baby, I’m right here. And…I don’t know. Didn’t you ever want to fit in so badly, you’d do almost anything for it?”
I shrank. Yeah, I knew the feeling. I was pretty sure everyone in this room knew the feeling of not fitting in.
Skylar softened. “So what happened next?”
“Well, finally I did say fuck it. I had better things to do than serve myself on a platter for a bunch of entitled pricks to sucker punch. I figured by that point I was being initiated into something, but I didn’t give a shit what it was. Two months later, I arrived at the Ritz ready to tell them all to fuck off. And that’s where I found John Carson.”
Carson, waiting for him in the penthouse, full of effusive praise and charm while he invited Brandon to sit down for an actual lunch.
“He liked the fact that I’d stayed discreet and never gone to the police,” Brandon said. “And he liked a lot of other things about me. He said I had been chosen for my potential. Usually Janus was filled with inherited positions kept in the family.” Like the de Vrieses, I thought. “But there was always one spot open for new blood each year. Someone with extraordinary promise. A true prodigy about to shine.
“Or,” Brandon added, “be manipulated. But I didn’t say that. I just picked at a cheese plate while he explained to me that I’d been chosen to be part of a very rich and secret society. They were ‘kingmakers,’ he said. Sometimes even actual kings. As a society, they protected the interests of the rich and powerful, so being a part of them assured I would become rich and powerful too. That I could rewrite the rules of the world I lived in. That I would never ever have to answer to anyone but myself.”
The room was still—Skylar and I sat forward, elbows balanced on our knees.
“Then what?” Skylar asked.
Brandon sat back. “Then he had a couple of porters bring in the nicest fuckin’ meal I ever saw, opened the door to a bedroom where three naked girls were waiting for me to join them, and left me a number on the table. He said to call within twelve hours if I accepted the offer. If I didn’t, the number wouldn’t work anymore. I’d be expected to forget any of this had ever happened. And if I ever spoke to anyone about any of it, I could also expect to suffer the consequences.”
“So…did you…what did you do?”
I looked at Skylar, who was obviously trying not to fixate on the fact that her husband may have had a very wild evening at some point with three strange women.
“Well, think about it, Red,” Brandon said gently to her. “Here’s me, barely grown. I’d been living with Ray and Susan for seven years. Still had a knack for trouble. But more than anything else on the fuckin’ planet, I just wanted to make some money. Because to me, after growing up the way I did, money meant freedom. It meant respect. Then John Carson invites me, a shit kid from Dorchester, to be in the most powerful association on the planet? Someone was finally offering me a key to the kingdom, you know?”
I brushed my thumb over the coin in my palm, toying with the hard edge. “But you didn’t join?”
“I did not.” Brandon bent over his knees, folding and refolding his hands like he was getting ready for a fight of his own. When he looked up, his blue eyes shone like the edge of a knife reflecting the sky. “Are you religious, Jane?”
I shook my head. “My mother went to church, but no, can’t say I am now.”
“I was raised Catholic,” Brandon said. “And my mother—when she was actually sober—used to say you could see the Devil in people’s eyes. I don’t believe in any of that, but I swear to God, when I met John Carson for the first time, I thought the Devil himself was looking at me.”
I swallowed, and my throat felt thick. It wasn’t exactly easy being told that the person responsible for half your DNA might be, oh, Satan. Talk about an awkward introduction.
“Janus isn’t a special society, Jane. It’s just a gang, pure and simple, dressed up in tails and gold. I had already escaped that kind of life once. I wasn’t about to jump into another version. No matter how good the prime rib.”
For the first time since he’d started talking, Skylar actually looked at her husband with something like pride. Like she couldn’t stop herself, she jumped up from her spot next to me and launched herself at him. Brandon, surprised, immediately pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around his wife’s slight body while he stroked her hair.
My heart squeezed just looking at them. Not even two weeks ago, I had someone who looked at me the way Brandon was looking at Skylar. Maybe even more so. For a moment, I was taken back to the ocean, when Eric finally said those words I hadn’t even known I’d wanted to hear.
* * *
“I’m done respecting your fucking boundaries when it comes to this. You want to walk away from me after tonight, Jane, fine. I won’t come after you. But I’m not letting you go without telling you in no uncertain terms that I’m in love with you. I’m crazy about you. I knew the second you walked in that fucking bar, all the way back when we were practically just kids, that you were the only one for me.”
I shook my head. “N-no. It’s not true.”
“It is true. You stunned me then. You stun me now. You’ll stun me every day for the rest of my life, because it’s not what’s on the outside that does it, Jane. It’s what’s in here. You’re not just my pretty girl. You’re the most beautiful fucking person I know, inside and out. And I love you.”
My mouth dropped. I hadn’t dared hope for those words for years, and now here he was, saying them out loud. And I couldn’t believe it. “No, you c-can’t.”
Eric’s face was fire. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
And then he kissed me again. Despite the cold water washing over us both, the kiss burned, through the waves, through my clothes, down to my toes that were starting to numb, to my fingers that began to wrinkle. It was a kiss that seared straight to my soul, branding me the way that only Eric de Vries could ever do.
* * *
My finger drifted listlesslyover my lips. So much for that. Now I was snooping through his apartment, looking for evidence of his secrets. Trying desperately to figure out who this stranger was I had married. Or hadn’t.
That wasn’t love. I didn’t know what it was, but love? No way.
A sudden ray of sunlight shot through the buildings on Hanover Street and caught on my ring, making the black diamond gleam on my finger. Suddenly, I felt ashamed for being her at all. If things were over between me and Eric—which I very much suspected they were—the only thing left to do was to go back to New York, pay my respects to his grandmother, and then move on with my life. Brandon was able to walk away from a man who offered everything in the world he’d ever wanted. If John Carson—whoever he was—was as bad as Brandon said, I needed to walk away too. And that meant from Eric as well.
I opened my mouth to say so, but before I could, the handle on the front door turned. And Eric walked in.
