Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 47
Dimitri lies backin his hospital bed, one arm behind his head, and smiles dopily behind a swollen eye. “Orbital fracture,” he tells me as if it’s some prize he won. His father pats him on the shoulder twice.
“Glad you’re OK,” Pietro says gruffly.
“I’m going to find a vending machine,” I say, and squeeze my mom’s hand briefly before I leave the room, shutting the door behind me.
There are cops in the hallway, wandering up and down, leaning on the white walls. I hear the chatter of their radios and a couple of them give me a friendly nod as I walk past.
I’m still wearing lounge clothes: leggings with a grass stain on the ass, sore feet inside flat shoes, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer t-shirt, and Gunnar’s sweatshirt. It’s a wonder people aren’t giving me weirder looks. But then, it is a hospital after midnight. I bet there are much weirder things to see here than me.
Ransom’s room isn’t hard to find. At least, not when I lie and tell them I’m his sister. The nurse even lifts a worried eyebrow. As I follow her, I wonder if it was because she feels bad for me, or because she feels she came perilously close to turning down a request from a Rayne. Is this how life is for Gunnar every day?
I crack the door and knock while I open it the rest of the way. Ransom looks a hell of a lot worse off than Dimitri. Gunnar sits on a chair beside him, clenching and unclenching his dominant fist — which is cracked and raw — and staring down at his little brother. His expression is distant, unreadable.
“Hey,” I breathe, and he turns to me. I let the door shut behind me, and Gunnar turns back to his brother. “I got caught up in Dimitri’s room,” I explain, crossing the room. “How is he?”
Ransom looks so sweet, young, innocent in his sleep. He’s hooked up to an IV drip, head turned to one side. He is pale, as usual, but his normally blood-red lips are faded and dry. I cover my mouth with one hand, and reach down to touch Gunnar’s shoulder with the other.
A part of me, the part that struggles to reconcile the Gunnar I know and the one who has hated me since I returned, expects him to snap, pull away from my hand, tell me to leave. But he reaches up, slowly, and intertwines my fingers with his.
“He’s doing OK,” he mumbles. “But Dad is going crazy.” His voice is hoarse.
“How long did Dutch have you?” I ask. He reaches up to rub the back of his neck with his free hand.
“Not a long time,” he says. There’s some element of something to his voice now. Guilt? I think back to what Preston had said. The lawyers. The smugness.
“You’re off scot-free, huh?” I ask, trying to keep the mood between us a little lighter. I might not know what I think yet about the future of our friendship, or whatever thing this is becoming, but I’m not ready for him to be the one to push me away. Not until the stress of this event has faded and I get to make my own decision.
“Not quite, but … well, yeah. Sort of,” he says softly. He’s still looking down at Ransom, but not at his face. His eyes seem to be fixed on the pale grey clip on his brother’s finger, dutifully reading his pulse. “I’m sorry.” He glances over his shoulder at that. Not quite at me, but in my direction.
“For what, exactly, this time?”
That makes him exhale. “Today I’m sorry for what you just saw. Out there.” He swallows. “In me.” I shrug, but he doesn’t see it. “Are we cool?”
I hesitate to answer. While I was worried that he was ready to leave, he might have been worrying about the same thing. I lower myself into his lap, snaking my arm around his shoulders, and rest my head in the curve of his neck. His soapy scent is so calming, familiar, but there’s something else there too. Some acrid trace of adrenaline, and the staleness of police stations, hospitals. When I kiss his jaw, he enfolds me in his arms and buries his face in my hair.
“We’re not cool,” I say, quietly, stroking his cheek with my thumb. “But that’s not why.” There’s a long silence, and I feel tension gather in his muscles, and then fade away. I feel him nod against my hair.
The door flies open, hitting the wall, and as Preston Rayne strides in, appraising the room with his chin up high, I bounce off of his son’s lap and step away from him. He is completely unaffected by the sight, which is fairly unsurprising, but I still feel my cheeks burn.
I never felt weird about hugging him before.
“This has been a shitshow,” Preston says, belying the pleasant expression on his face. He turns to check nobody has followed him into the room, and then levels his gaze on his only conscious son. “Do you understand what I’ve had to deal with tonight? I’m not getting any sleep tonight. Tomorrow, today, is going to be like pulling teeth. I have meetings, I have …” He pauses, shaking his head. “There need to be consequences for this.”
“I understand.” Gunnar’s voice is robotic.
“You don’t understand. Because you just turned eighteen, you little jackass. You don’t understand what I have to do. What I’ve always had to do to keep this family where we are.” It’s like this is the first time he’s realizing I’m in the room too. “Andrea,” he says warmly. “Glad to see you again.” I try not to give him a look of confusion. He’s almost ping-ponging between roles right now. The stern father, the shamed patriarch, the charming elite.
“I think the least that can happen is you can say goodbye to your birthday party tonight,” Preston says.
Gunnar’s Halloween birthday parties are legendary. I had been moping about missing out on this year’s.
He lifts his head at that. Even if he is feeling contrite, Gunnar doesn’t really like having things taken away from him. “I can’t cancel,” he says. He leans back, considers it, and then his entire demeanor shifts before us. “Dad, everybody in school is counting on it. What have you told me about letting people down? About social contracts? Honoring commitments?” He looks his father straight in the eye, and then the corner of his mouth lifts.
Preston holds his son’s gaze, and then laughs. “You’re a little asshole.” His phone starts to buzz, and he looks down at the screen. “Fine. But this isn’t over. We’re talking about this more.” He jabs the phone in Gunnar’s direction, and I can see pride on his face. I almost can’t believe it, but I can. Of course I can. He is his father’s son.
“Wow,” I say dryly when he leaves the room. “You almost had to face an actual consequence.” I turn and stare at Gunnar, whose face has become placid, deadpan again. “Are you OK?”
“I’ll live,” he says, turning back to Ransom.
With a sigh, I turn to leave the room. I don’t really know what I’m doing here. It was nice to see the kid, hear that he’s OK, but I’m getting pretty tired of the Raynes. He doesn’t turn around, but he must hear my shoes on the tile because he says, “Don’t go yet.”
“Do you want some water? I just need to stretch my legs.” The room feels small, and the moment I intruded on feels intimate. He doesn’t answer, but he turns around to look at me. Then he nods, wordlessly releasing me.
* * *
“Exactly,”Preston is saying to a couple of his lawyers at the end of the hallway. I sigh. This was the nearest water cooler I remember seeing, and it’s right beyond where they’re standing. “It will send a message.”
“I think it’s the right call,” a lawyer says. “Otherwise the Russian is going to work up the whole town. I can sense it. Everyone will talk about how the Raynes never face consequences.”
Wow. It’s like they read my mind.
“It could devastate,” the other lawyer agrees. “Socially.”
The horror. I roll my eyes, stopping in my tracks and waiting for one of them to spot me and move so I don’t have to push past them. But none of them are even acting like they can see me.
“So we’re agreed?” Preston asks them. “Ransom needs to learn.”
“Wait, what?” I say out loud. This gets their attention, of course, and all three suited men turn to blink down at me. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s none of your business,” a lawyer says, far more rudely than he needs to.
“Put it in motion,” Preston says, dismissing them with a handwave. Then he turns to me, still blocking my path. “Andrea,” he says.
“What are you going to do to Ransom?” I ask, though every second I stand here speaking to him feels like a worse and worse idea. “Everybody saw it was Gunnar who beat—”
“I’m not doing anything to Ransom,” Preston interrupts, though his tone is surprisingly gentle. He sighs. “Andrea, do you know anything about what he was doing there? In Westerley?” The way he says the name, like he can taste it, makes it perfectly clear how he feels about the poorer end of the county.
“He was drinking, sure,” I say, lowering my voice so only he can hear and looking around, “but if you can name anyone his age who isn’t underage drinking in this town—”
“I know about the drinking. I know about the drugs. You think I don’t have a sense of smell? You think my housekeepers don’t find … paraphernalia? I can forgive that, to an extent, as long as he isn’t embarrassing himself — but dealing?”
I open and close my mouth. I’d been about to say something about whether Ransom was embarrassing himself, or his family name, then I’d thought the better of it. But then his final word struck me. “He’s what?”
Preston rubs his face, suddenly looking tired. Human. Like a father. “Your stepbrother,” he says carefully, “has given evidence. They were going to parties and dealing drugs to Westerley trash. Your family is trying to ruin mine. They won’t get away with it.” He gives me a small smile. A sad smile. “That’s just the truth, Andrea. I still think fondly of you.”
I blink a couple of times. That’s a lot of information. Ransom Rayne, someone I really care about … he’s been going to the other side of the tracks and dealing drugs? Does Gunnar know? Something tells me he doesn’t, or things would have gotten bad much sooner. If Ransom has been dealing, is it because he’s truly scared he doesn’t have any money for college?
“When he has fully recovered, he will be tried. He and Dimitri both. One as an adult, one as a minor. It’s the only way we can get past this without any further smearing of our name.” He says it so casually.
“But Gunnar gets away with beating at least two teenage boys into a hospital bed?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“That’s not something we need to be discussing,” Preston says low. “I know this sounds unfair, but it’s—”
“You could make this go away too,” I say, this time interrupting him. His eyebrows raise as I speak, working myself up. “Not that I condone that, and all, but we both know you could. A little money and Pietro would fold. I heard what your lawyer said. Both your sons getting away with shit is social suicide. The rumor mill in this town wouldn’t let that stand. So you had to send one of them away, and you chose Ransom.” His lips have parted slightly in shock. Neither of us expected that I would ever come this perilously close to telling him off. “Did you even hesitate? When you had to choose?” My voice threatens to waver, anger sending tears to the corners of my eyes, but I battle it. And, for now, I win.
“Andrea,” he says, his voice still low, but all pretense of fondness has fallen away. The only thing left in the single word is a warning. “Listen to me carefully: You do not get to speak to me like that. You are still a child, and I am still the adult. My decisions are final, and they are mine alone.” He straightens himself up. No longer a wounded father, he is every inch the pinnacle of the Torrent Bay elite, with the hostile smirk to prove it. “And just because my oldest seems to have become charmed by you ever since he realized you were female,” he adds, gesturing to my chest with alarmingly casual crudity, “does not mean you have the right to question my choices. It also doesn’t mean you have anything of value to offer him in the long run. And he will remember that. Trust me; I know.” He leans in. “Because he’s me.”
A dark glint passes behind his eyes and I find myself taking a step back. He straightens his lapel and gives me a friendly nod. “Give my best to your mother,” he says, as if none of that just happened, and he didn’t just see her. Then he turns on his expensive shoe and disappears around the corner and out of sight.