Liars and Liaisons by Sav R. Miller
30
I knowI should tell him about his brother.
Really, I should tell him about mine too. See if he bolts the way Nate did when he found out I share half a gene pool with Dr. Kal Anderson.
Something tells me Grayson might not mind. In fact, it’s entirely possible he already knows since he looked into me before bringing me to Duris in the first place. Maybe I could kill two birds with one stone if I tell him about Kal, who would come out in a heartbeat and fix everything if I asked.
Even if he acted like he didn’t want to help me anymore when I left Aplana. I don’t deserve it, after the way I’ve treated him for the last decade, but I know he’d do whatever it takes to make me safe anyway.
And even though I don’t want to think of my father in a good light at the moment, I can’t help wondering if forgiveness is something I got from him. My whole life, it was my mother who preached kindness and anti-violence, but maybe love was a paternal inheritance.
After all, it’s so much easier to grant mercy when you’ve needed it many times yourself.
“I’m tired of cleaning up after these freaking parties,” Micah mutters, tossing a dozen red Solo cups into a black trash bag. The foyer is littered in them and reeks of stale booze while streamers and various items of clothing are strewn about, making the rustic mansion look more like a frat house in a bad ’90s comedy movie.
“It’s your job,” Willow says, snorting.
“Because Grayson is a crazy person who thinks I need to be watched after what happened to Sydney,” she grumbles, scrunching her face up as she plucks a used condom from the bottom step. “Ew. Okay, I’m officially done. We need hazmat suits for this shit.”
I hold up my yellow gardening gloves. “Should’ve taken these when I offered.”
She sticks her tongue out at me, then bends over, whipping her white-blonde hair into a ponytail. “This wouldn’t be a problem if you kept him in bed more often.”
My eyebrows knit together, and Willow lets out a cackle. “I don’t know what that has to do with this.”
“Oh, please. The estate reeks of dirty, depraved, naked shenanigans. Ghosts aren’t the only things we’ve been hearing echo off the walls the last week and a half.”
Warmth floods my face, and I glance at Willow. “You haven’t.”
She cringes, her dark eyes crinkling. My head drops, and I groan, the sound traveling up to the ceiling and pressing on the windowpanes.
Micah shrugs. “It was inevitable. Anyone could tell he’s been obsessed with you since he brought you home. If anything, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
“Well, it’s just sex,” I say, even as my heart rattles my rib cage.
“That’s what they always say,” Willow points out, a slender finger crooking in my direction. “Don’t think we don’t see the way you look at him too.”
I ignore her comment, continuing along the windowsill and picking up discarded napkins and cigarette butts.
Micah sighs, glancing around at the messy area. “I’m enforcing an official time-out. Let’s go to the lake.”
Neither of them seems to notice my hesitation as they scramble to their feet and head for the front door. It feels wrong to leave the house like this, especially now that I’ve fucked Grayson and he finally paid me the hundred grand I’d asked for. If I neglect my maid duties, that means I’ve basically just been paid to sleep with him.
The front door opens and swings shut as the girls run out, and I stare at the remnants of a party I still wasn’t invited to.
I search deep within my chest, trying to find that familiar tug of humanity that would normally keep me from being okay with this situation. But it isn’t there, and the harder I search, the more I wonder if it was ever really there in the first place or if the need to earn everything I’ve ever gotten is simply another symptom of growing up with a father who shucked everything away any chance he had.
Shrugging to myself, I shake off my gloves and let them fall to the floor. Willow and Micah are already halfway to the lake when I reach the door, and I slip out quickly, before I can change my mind.
For once, I don’t notice the shadows lurking in every corner of the estate. I don’t notice the curtains when they shift, almost proving that there is someone inside, watching every move I make. Biding their time before striking.
Later, while we all sit with our legs in the lake, sipping from a single mason jar full of some raspberry margarita that Micah whipped up in the staff wing last night, I remember what she said earlier.
“Who’s Sydney?”
They exchange an uneasy glance, and Micah leans back on her palms, tipping her face toward the sunshine.
“Depends on who you ask,” she says finally, eyes closed as the sun’s rays beam down, highlighting a few of the freckles on her cheeks. “Grayson thought she was a prodigy, but most people saw a girl who had nothing, growing up, and assumed she wanted whatever they had.”
“She was talented,” Willow interjects, her dark eyes swinging to mine. “Had a voice like a songbird and played the flute like it’d been made for her.”
Micah sighs. “You’re only saying that because you were in love with her.” She turns her head in my direction. “Willow falls so fast for any girl with a pretty pop-star voice.”
“Sue me.” Willow rolls up her jeans more, dipping her calves into the murky water. “I discovered I was a lesbian when all the teen shows were making their stars recording artists. It was a fundamental time for me.”
Waving her off, Micah pulls her feet up and shifts her knees beneath her chin. “Anyway, since she was my sister, I just thought she was all right.”
I grin, then remember Nate’s threat and everything before it. “What happened to her?”
“Same thing that happens to all dreamers.” Micah shrugs, reaching for a blade of grass. “She died.”
It’s really the obvious answer. Nobody talks about her, except in vague, nonspecific terms. Still, hearing Micah say it so nonchalantly feels like being drenched in a bucket of cold water. Then again, I suppose everyone grieves and heals differently.
I guess it’s just surprising that Micah, of all people, seems to have healed so callously.
She gets to her feet, and for a second, I think she’s going to leave Willow and me at the lakeside. But after she dusts her hands off on her legs, bare in her denim cutoffs, she holds out a hand for me.
“Come on,” she prompts, giving a small smile. “I’ll show you her room.”
* * *
The southern wingof the house is off-limits to me. Even though I’ve been fucking Grayson every night and morning, his strict rules about where I’m permitted access on the property haven’t changed—with the exception of the sunflower garden.
I think we obliterated any lingering fears he’d had about entering that field.
Micah has a key though. I’m not sure it’s one Grayson sanctioned since it’s a little skeleton key she digs from her front shorts pocket, but I don’t question it either way. I’m too curious to think better of this.
With one hand, she pushes the heavy wooden door open. Like the rest of the estate, the ceiling is tall, and the halls are lit by dim lights that barely provide enough visibility to step forward. The main difference is all the mirrors—the rest of the mansion, nearly every room, is outfitted with at least one wall of floor-to-ceiling windows.
The southern wing’s hall is lined with mirrors. They stretch from the baseboards to the crown molding, not an inch of paint or plaster in sight.
That eerie, prickly sensation I’ve had since my arrival wraps its spindly fingers around my throat. Micah steps into the hall easily, like she’s done it a million times. I hesitate at the threshold, uncertainty blanketing me like a thin film of sweat.
I don’t think we should be here. A presence looms in the dark shadows, something otherworldly and phantasmic. When I tell Micah as much, she just laughs. The sound echoes off the reflective glass, and I swear the lights flicker.
“Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” she whisper-shouts, stopping at the last of three doors on the right. “I come in here all the time. It’s fine.”
Arms tucked tight against my sides, I follow her into the half-dark. She pushes the smaller white door open, and slides her hand against the wall until she finds a switch, illuminating the room.
There’s a bed against the far wall with sheer green curtains draped over the frame, tied with silk ribbons at each of the four iron posts. Calendars and award certificates hang above a large white dresser, and a brown suede recliner is in the corner. On the floor beneath lies a shaggy rug, and between the two massive windows across the room is a glass door, leading to a side section of the estate’s property.
Several mugs sit on a kitty-cornered nightstand next to the bed, and there are various instruments lying around, as if abandoned mid-use—a flute, a violin, a small keyboard with missing keys. Clothes are strewn about, piled on the floor and laid out on the footboard of the bed, and the trash in one corner overflows with crumpled papers and candy wrappers.
Across from the bed, a little black wood-burning fireplace sits, untouched. A wisp of something catches my eye, like smoke diffusing from the last of the burned embers, but when I take a second look, I no longer see anything.
I frown, taking it all in as Micah walks to the dresser, picking up a diamond-studded picture frame. She shoves it my way, and I take it, studying the two girls in the photo. One is clearly a younger Micah, evidenced by the big, goofy grin on her youthful face. The other is taller, thinner, but has the same white-blonde hair and wide blue eyes.
Even the shapes of their noses are the same—buttoned at the bottom with a tiny bump in the bridge.
“Your sister lived here?”
Micah nods. “For a little while. When she entered her mentorship with Grayson, I think she stayed here because of his super-strict schedule. It was only a couple of weeks, but… no one’s been in to clean the room out since.”
She hands me another picture, this one snatched from the dresser’s attached vanity mirror. This one is of the same blonde woman, though her arm is wrapped around a stone-faced Grayson. They stand on a red carpet—her in a backless black gown and him in an expensive fitted suit.
A cramp forms in my stomach at their closeness. He doesn’t touch her, but the way she tilts her head in his direction makes me see a little green.
Jealous of a dead girl, Violet?I can almost hear Cora judging me, but the knowledge of it being a ludicrous notion doesn’t make it less prominent in my chest.
“She was a voice major, but she really wanted to play in NEAA’s student orchestra. Our parents encouraged her to go for singing and songwriting, but her passion was playing. Grayson was the conductor when she entered the annual competition held for composition majors, and she just… blew him away, I guess, with her performance.” Micah gazes down at the photograph. “They normally wouldn’t let a non-comp student enter, but she’d forged a couple of things, and the rest is history.”
I swallow, and she hands me another picture. Grayson’s off to the side while Nate stands with his arms around Sydney, now wearing a short baby-blue dress and grinning up at my ex-boyfriend. She holds a flute in one hand and a glass trophy in the other.
A part of me feels a little concerned with the fact that Nate’s there, clinging to her with a drunken smile plastered on his face. But my focus slides to the man off-center, watching the pair with a look that promises nothing good.
It’s half-admiration, which I suspect he reserved for her, and half-vengeance. Even before she died, Grayson was intent on destroying his family. Long before he met me and made me a part of his plan.
I can’t help wondering what sort of hold this woman had over him and Nate to ruin a family so thoroughly with her absence.
Jealousy percolates in my stomach, a low simmer I try to ignore.
I hand the photos back, and Micah slides them back into the mirror’s frame. She pauses, staring at them silently.
“She was all I had,” she says softly. Tears well up in those beautiful blue eyes, and she sniffles. “When she came here to work, my parents were against it. They didn’t trust the James family and didn’t want her to squander everything she’d worked for by associating with them. But she didn’t listen. That was her thing—no matter what, Sydney Scott did whatever she wanted. And that mentorship meant the world to her.”
My eyes find the photos again. I study the soft lines of Sydney’s face, the carefree spirit she emanated. “What happened to her?”
I half-expect the same answer as before. A simple, “She died,” because I don’t really deserve more than that.
Instead, Micah wipes her nose on the back of her wrist and shrugs. “Grayson’s family got to her. And like most who exist wholly in this dark, terrible reality, they destroyed her.”
