Liars and Liaisons by Sav R. Miller
31
I’m waitingfor Violet in her bathtub when she finally deigns to come looking for me.
Irritation heats my bones, or maybe that’s the scalding water I’m soaking in. I can’t quite tell where my anger stops and starts at the moment.
When she waltzes in, she doesn’t even notice me at first. She immediately walks to the bed, fishing her phone from the pocket of her baggy, ripped jeans, and dials a number.
“Dad,” she says after a moment, and I almost roll my eyes at the excitement in her tone. How terribly forgiving she is, if she’s willing to speak to that man still.
My eyes remain on her though, unmoving. Because I want her forgiveness for myself.
More than anything else even if I am irate with her at the moment.
He must say something on the other line because she falls silent. Her head tilts as she listens intently, and then she turns, craning her neck to take in the length of her bed.
The entire mattress is covered in decapitated sunflowers. One thousand six hundred eighty of them, to be precise—for each hour I’ve spent trying unsuccessfully to rid my thoughts of her existence. They’re piled a foot high and spill over onto the floor on the other side of the bed—a symbolic sea of the sort of suffering I’m willing to endure just to see a smile light her face.
My fingers are still split open and scabbed over, aching from snipping each flower from its stalk. Took me the better part of the last three days, and even with that amount, more than half the field outside remains.
She stares at the bed, then tentatively reaches out and pinches a yellow petal between two fingers. Then, and only then, does that sweet, spellbinding smile stretch out, igniting a fire inside me that I’ve only ever felt when playing piano.
Clearing her throat, she seems to shake herself out of the trance, speaking into her cell again. “No, I sent you the check a few days ago… well, I hope you got it because it was a lot of freaking money.”
A pause. My chest tightens with the realization that she’s still sending him everything I pay her.
“Yeah, sure. I know. I wasn’t trying to—” She cuts off, running a hand down the side of her face. “Hey, can I ask you something? It’s about Kal. I was thinking of maybe reaching out…”
Her sentence trails off, no ending in sight. Defeat slumps in her shoulders, and she nods to herself, to the wall, to whatever cruel god watches as parents disappoint their children and does nothing to stop it.
“Well, he has money. Connections we don’t. I just think maybe he could help.” Her black brows form a V-shape. “Okay. You’re right. I should just leave him alone.”
My grip on the tub tightens as her voice cracks.
“Yeah, I’ll talk to you soon. Tell Mom I love her and will call tonight.”
Hanging up, she tosses the phone backward; it lands on the chaise, then slides onto the floor. Dragging her fingers through her hair, she dislodges the two matching braids hanging over her shoulders, shakes the raven strands free, and falls face-first onto the bed with a distraught groan.
The sunflowers fall off the mattress, raining down and covering the floor. For some reason, almost seventeen hundred of them didn’t seem like such a big number until she’s practically buried among them.
“Want me to kill him?”
She shrieks, sitting up immediately and whipping her head in my direction. Those beautiful doe eyes find me instantly, stoking the fire in my belly with their electric charge. A single look from this woman threatens total incineration.
“Do I want you to kill my father?” she quips, recovering quickly. “No, actually, I don’t think I do. That would be a crime.”
I lean my head back against the lip of the tub and close my eyes. I know the suggestion of my indifference will make her angry, and I want her to match me. “Just ’cause it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Are you really justifying murder right now?”
“I’m justifying justice.”
“Oh, right, sorry. I didn’t get far enough in college to take that ethics course.”
Peeling one eyelid back, I cock a brow at her. “And why didn’t you finish?”
“Because—” Her mouth falls shut, and she glares at me. “Because my father transferred his debt to my name and I could no longer receive financial aid. And since my family was already dirt fucking poor, we couldn’t pay for the program out of pocket. So, I left college and then left town and have spent the last six years avoiding permanency because of what he’s done.”
She lets her head fall to the bed before pushing up with her elbows into a sitting position. “Do you know what happens if I fail to make a payment? If the checks to my father can’t be endorsed or if they get lost in the mail? He dies. My mother, my brothers, maybe even me—we’re all as good as dead. So, no, Grayson, I don’t need you to kill him. He’s doing a bang-up fucking job on his own.”
I don’t reply because it sort of seems like she’s spiraling, and I know that feeling all too well. Anything I say might just make things worse.
I want her angry, not teetering on the edge of reality.
She slips from the bed and comes into the bathroom, holding a single sunflower in one hand. Stopping a foot away from the bath, she plucks a single petal. It falls, swishing back and forth until it comes to rest on the floor.
“This doesn’t earn you my forgiveness,” she says.
“But you love them?”
“They’re my favorite. But still.”
Nodding, I lift one shoulder. “Fair. Though I think it’s now you who should be seeking mine, Little Echo.”
Her gaze lifts, boring into mine with the heat of a thousand burning suns. For a second, I don’t think she’ll say anything else. Maybe drop the flower and leave, beckoning me to chase.
Then, she curls her hand into a fist. Crumpling the flower. “Did you love her?”
My other eye opens now too. “What?”
“Sydney. Micah’s sister. Your former student and apparently an all-around well-liked person. Did you love her?”
I could strangle Micah. If she were in the room, I might actually do it. Obviously, I got a notification on my phone when the door to the estate’s southern wing was opened, as if I wouldn’t have that portion outfitted with motion detectors and alarms.
Nate and my father never got to collect Sydney’s awards or any of her other belongings. They only wanted them so they could feel better about leading her to her death from all the parties and sinister attention. So, I’d blocked off that wing the second the police called to let me know they’d found her body in the river and that circumstantial evidence found at the scene—empty bottles of alcohol, a baggie of coke—was causing them to rule out foul play.
Since she’d been staying at the estate under my guidance, she was my responsibility.
An accident, they called it. As if every one of us in the James family wasn’t directly responsible. Other than Micah, she didn’t have any family they could contact to refute the claims, so our involvement was ignored.
They’d taken her from me. Led her to the life of debauchery known by New York and LA’s elite. Drugs, sin, the promise of luxury that a simple composition mentorship wouldn’t give her.
But I’d practically tossed her on their doorstep. Taken a bright, idealistic, talented girl and led her to the slaughter myself.
It’s only fitting that her ghost haunts these halls. That’s why I keep the southern wing untouched; I want her to have something to come back to when she isn’t tormenting me.
Now, it’s been tainted by their presence. She might not come back at all.
“I told you the southern wing was off-limits.”
She doesn’t ask how I know she went. She’s smarter than that. “You didn’t answer the question.”
“Your question doesn’t negate the fact that you broke my trust.”
“You drugged me the night we met and let me go around thinking I’d betrayed my ex by sleeping with you. Don’t lecture me about trust.”
“And have I not given you every piece of me in the time since?” I seethe, my patience with her, with the world, running very thin. Like a rubber band that’s been stretched far too much and is on the verge of snapping. “Have I not bared my soul to you, time and time again, only for you to crush it continuously? What have you given me? What have you done to earn my trust?”
Her lashes brush the tops of her cheeks in a slow, disbelieving blink. Emotion pulses clumsily in her irises, but she glances away, and then it’s gone. “You keep her room as a shrine. She must have been very special to you.”
I don’t say anything at all for several moments, focusing on the erratic rhythm of my heart. Whether its chaos is caused by my rage or her, I can’t exactly tell at first.
When the silence becomes unbearable, I bite. Unable to stomach the devastation in her pretty features.
Unable to stomach any discomfort at all where this vixen is concerned.
“What does it matter if she was, hmm? Does that bother you?” I cock my head, watching her face pinken. “Are you jealous, Violet?”
“No.”
Chuckling, I lean my weight into my palms and push myself up. Water runs off my body in delicate streams, soaking the floor as I haul my legs out. I take the sunflower from her, clutching it tight in my palm, and cup her cheek with my other hand.
“How easily you overlook what was my shrine to you,” I say in a quiet voice, my body electrified by her very presence. All the anger within is pacified just by her proximity, and I realize she could do absolutely anything she wanted to me and I wouldn’t be able to hold it against her for very long.
“Sydney was my student,” I tell her, forcing her to meet my gaze. My fingers slide beneath her jaw, tangling in the hair at the back of her neck. “She was someone I saw a lot of myself in—driven, talented, more than a little lost. I took her under my wing with the intent of giving her the guidance I’d never received. She was a flower who bloomed in my program, and I wanted nothing more than to watch her thrive.”
Violet’s breathing becomes uneven when I lean down, brushing my lips over hers.
“Nothing was ever going on between us, nor would it have. My relationship with her was strictly professional, though I cannot say the same for others in my family.”
I tuck the sunflower stem behind her ear, reveling in the juxtaposition of two ostensibly beautiful things.
One forged by the earth, destined to chase the sunlight forever.
The other the sun itself. Warm, bright, and the center of my fucking universe.
“I have a brother in Aplana Island,” she says, her voice almost too soft to hear. “He’s… well, my dad had an affair before I was born, and it resulted in him. My dad rejected him though, and so when he approached me when I was older, I thought I was supposed to do the same. Even though it went against all the kindness and compassion my mom had drilled into me, growing up. I thought I was being a good daughter by staying loyal to them and keeping him out, but lately, I’ve just felt like an asshole.”
Tears spill down her face, and I swipe one away with a thumb.
“And then I found out these rumors about him, and they were so… gruesome. I felt justified in my decision to shut him out. Even though he’d never done anything to me and he was just trying to get to know me. I wasn’t interested.” A pause, and a shaky inhale as she blinks her tears away. “A part of me was scared too. I didn’t want to know how deep our genetics went. If… if the things people say he’s capable of are things that lurk in me too.”
“You’d be surprised what people are capable of doing when left with no other choice.”
“Yeah,” she whispers, and I hate how broken it sounds. “That goes for your brother too.”
I release her and pull away, my hands falling to my sides. The sunflower falls to the floor, forgotten. “What are you talking about?”
She crosses her arms, shrugging. “I liked him because it was easy. Because I didn’t really have much and he made me feel good with all his compliments and gifts. He was nice.”
My jaw clenches, so hard that I feel the bite ricochet up my skull. “Yes, I know how nice he pretended to be to you. Is that what you were thinking of when he assaulted you? That he was being nice?” Pushing past her, I head for the bedroom, grabbing my black boxer briefs off the floor and stepping into them. I reach for my shirt next, a deep green button-down, and yank it on over my shoulders, glaring at the fucking mess of sunflowers littering the room.
Stupid of me to think they’d matter.
It’s idiotic really of me to even be upset. If nothing else, she’s made it fairly clear whose bed she’d rather be in, who she’s pledged her allegiance to, and yet I’m throwing a goddamn tantrum like a prepubescent child. All because I want to kill my brother.
Not for what he did to Sydney, dragging her into this world and leaving her to die in it. Not even for the obvious threats he’s made against my career, my finances, my life.
I want to slit his throat for touching someone who doesn’t belong to him. Even when she technically did. I want him hung by his toes to drain the blood from his body, just for the simple fact that she ever gave him a single compliment, kiss, or smile.
Jesus. Maybe the mountain air is poisoning me.
Violet follows me out of the bathroom, halting my hands as they close my shirt. She takes over, doing up each button with nimble fingers I had in my mouth and hair just this morning. Fingers that ripped the mask off my face when she was ready to come so she’d be able to see my reactions to her pleasure.
And I realize it isn’t the mountain that’s the problem. I’m not going mad because of altitude sickness, but of my complete and utter addiction to this woman.
“You were right,” she says, leaving the first two buttons undone and smoothing her hands over the collar. Her touch sends ripples of wicked desire along my neck, raising the hairs there. “I don’t want nice. Not when it’s just a mask worn to hide their true intentions.”
I smirk, feeling somewhat placated. My arms slide around her waist, tugging her close as my cock stirs to life. “Ah, but you love masks.”
Her eyes twinkle. “I love yours.”
