With his characteristic candor, he gets right to the point. “I’ve got you on speaker, Mister Grayson. The NYPD is on my other phone, so, if you hear noise, that’s what it is. If you turn on the news, you’re going to see a mob outside your building in New York,” he says brusquely. “They’ve got some signs, and they’re chanting some hateful business. Seems a few troublemakers got together and rallied the troops on social media. Police are out there already, but there’s been some trouble. Wanted you to hear it from me instead of TikTok.”
“What kind of trouble?” you ask warily. Unconsciously, you reach for the stem of your wine glass, as if one sip would be enough to fortify you.
“A few broken windows,” Cal reports. “One or two tried to get the front door open. They were quickly identified and arrested, thankfully. Most of them are just yelling and being a nuisance, but, considering that rocks got thrown, I wanted to loop you in.”
“How many?”
“Rocks?”
“People.”
“Um. They haven’t stopped showing up. Maybe a hundred?”
“Jesusfuck,” you mutter. You think of the fact that all your front doors—each one on every house—are fortified with steel bolts like a bank vault. They look pretty, sure, but they all sport bulletproof glass and armored construction that prevents against disasters both natural and manmade. Like angry mobs trying to attack yourhome. Nausea, sudden and intense, makes the wine roil in your otherwise-empty stomach.
“What do you need me to do?” you ask. It comes out quieter than you intended. Almost a whisper. You have cleared your throat to ask again when Cal is distracted by something on his end of the phone.
“No, thank you,” he says. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Cal?” you call out, feeling sick and helpless.
“Right here, Mister Grayson,” he says, returning to your call. “The boys in blue wanted to know whether we wanted the whole crowd trespassed off the property.”
“Of course we do!” you exclaim. “Why did you tell them no?”
“The sidewalk is, technically, public property,” Cal explains laconically. “The sergeant there is not against forcing the matter, but I think that’s taking a bad situation and making it worse. According to Zane, who’s our boots on the ground up North, there’s a few reporters around making noises about what kind of pop star calls the cops on their fans.”
“Fans?” Totally of its own volition, the hand not engaged with your cell phone spasms. The wine glass topples on the floor, splashing blood-red across your new duvet cover and your lap. The book flies off the bed and, as luck would have it, lands right in the liquid. “Fuck, fuck,fuck!”
“Sir?” To his credit, Cal sounds only mildly concerned.
You can’t tell whether you just exploded on the wine stains or the angry horde outside your home, so you don’t bother to clarify the matter for Cal. “Fans don’t show up on your doorstep with pitchforks and torches,” you mutter between gritted teeth. “Those are myenemies, Cal. Am I not allowed to defend myself from people who want to hurt me?”
There’s a moment of silence on the other end. “To be fair, sir, you aren’t even on that end of the country. They weren’t getting to you.”
“But I could have been!” you say. Loudly. “I was just talking to Maeve about going to see my ther… agent in the city. My talent agent, I mean. Christ, Cal! What would have happened if they figured out that I was down in Miami? Would they be sending their friends to come take me out down here?”
The sound of Cal clearing his throat isn’t as subtle as it would be from someone else. He’s a big guy. It’s more of a leonine rumble.“Personally, sir, I’d like to see them all rounded up and charged. Legally, we don’t have a leg to stand on. The idiots who came at the door are catching charges for disorderly, trespassing, and harassment. The police collected social media footage, and soon we’ll have the rock-throwers. They’ll get them some disorderly, harassment, and property damage. Anyone that climbed on the stoop, we can get for loitering. If you want to escalate it to stalking, I can’t stop you. But we’re trying to triage the situation, Mister Grayson, not stoke the fire. These people are mad. You leave them alone, they’ll yell for a while and go home. You start making martyrs of them, and it’s going to be bad attention for you. More bad attention.”
The fact that your head of security—your lead bodyguard—is trying to tactfully stop the cold body of your reputation from bleeding to death is not lost on you. Suddenly, the spinny feeling in the room crashes out.
“Hold on, Cal,” you choke.
You don’t make it to the en suite bathroom. Your stomach empties itself painfully in the corner of the room, wine-tinged vomit adding to the mess on the floor. From the other side of the king-sized bed, Apollo stares at you in doggie concern. When the smell hits you, you almost retch again. Instead, you reel like a drunkard back to the bed, hoping that Cal didn’t catch the monstrous sounds you just made.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“Not really, Cal.” With your bare arm, you wipe your sloppy mouth. Your tongue is fuzzy and tastes like sick, and your head is suddenly pounding.
“Do you need me to call Juarez?” Cal asks, referring to your on-duty security, who is always nearby. It must be Juarez’s night on call.
“No, thank you.”
“Do you want me to come down there?” Cal asks. “I’m over in Coral Gables, but I can be there in half…”
“I’m fine,” you say, more forcefully than you should be capable of, given the situation.
Kai.Kai should be your next phone call. Kai is not far away. He’s going to raise hell when he hears about the situation in New York, which you won’t be able to keep from him. Not like the situation with No Kid Hungry, which you elected not to share unless he reads about it and brings it up. But Kai has practice first thing in the morning and goes to bed early. Kai doesn’t deserve his half-crocked, hot-mess boyfriend blowing up his phone at 10 PM on a work night.
