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“He’s definitely the lucky one,” Zach says, casting me a look. “None of us believed there was a woman in the world capable of conquering him.”
“We can’t all be lucky enough to fall in love at twelve years old,” I retort.
Zach shrugs and quotes, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
“Perhaps it does,” Willow says, resting her hand against my chest. “Luca’s heart is just a little different from everyone else’s. It’s a little broken, a little rusty. But that’s what makes him sospecial.”
And she smiles up at me with perfectly fake adoration, and the self-satisfied curl of her smirk makes me want to slap the smile off her face with my cock. I tighten my arm around her, digging my fingers into her hip bone through her dress.
“Well, let’s not keep Zachary and Theodora all night,darling. We don’t want to bore them to death.”
“Oh, I am so very far from being bored,” Zachary says, and his smile is genuine now. I can tell from the warmth in his brown eyes and the joy radiating from every one of his elegant features that he is thoroughly enjoying Willow’s little performance. “I look forward to meeting you again, Willow.”
“Let’s do dinner sometime.” Willow simpers as I pull her away. And then, calling over her shoulder, “Good luck with your new book, Theodora! I’d love a signed copy!”
I didn’t even know Theodora had written a book.
41
Photogenic Dick
Ignoring everyone else, Ihalf-drag Willow away from the busy hall and past a cordon into a secluded corridor leading to the conservatory. The corridor is dark and cold, the walls covered with tapestries. I pin Willow to one of those by her arms.
“You like making a spectacle of yourself?”
“Isn’t that why you brought me here on your arm?” she asks. “To be a spectacle?”
“I didn’t bring you here so you could leverage your mother’s suicide for clout with my friends.”
She doesn’t so much as flinch at my words.
“It’s none of your business how I leverage my mother’s suicide,” she says, and a weird shiver runs through me. She smirks. “Whenyourmum kills herself, you can leverage that however you like.”
I let her go and step away with a laugh of pure incredulity.
“You’re broken, Lynch, so broken I can’t even make out the parts of you that might ever have formed a real person.”
Instead of putting distance between us, she follows me, stepping right into me. Her face is a ghostly love heart in the faint viridescence of the fire exit sign above us.
“It’s not my fault, Luca.” Her voice is a soft, warbling thing, like a sung note on the verge of breaking. “I can’t help it that I had a bad childhood.”
There’s a tightness in my chest, an uncomfortable pain like the hole in my heart has suddenly reappeared, like it’s gaping open to suck up the warble of Willow’s voice, to absorb it into the tight, red chambers of the atria and ventricles. I’m struck by a wave of that strange mélange of emotions, abject disgust mixed with a desire like an all-consuming greed.
I have the powerful urge to both hold Willow close and to throw her far away from me, to keep her locked against my chest and to send her toppling from the height of a deadly cliff, both at once.
“Why did your mother kill herself?”
The question rises to my mouth, slipping right past my self-control.
Why should I not ask, after all? Why should I not know? Why should Willow keep the secret of her tragedy to herself?
“Probably for the same reason everyone kills themselves. Because they don’t want to live anymore.”
Willow’s voice is thoughtful. The ghostly glow of her face is unearthly, as though I’m communicating with some otherworldly being and not a lying grifter from the pits of London’s roughest borough.
“You don’t know why she killed herself?”
She lets out a tiny puff of air, half-sigh, half-laugh. “It’s not like I couldask, is it?”
