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I'd go looking for a job tomorrow so I could be free of Spencer, no matter what happened. I could handle a second job if that was all I could get. Tips were good so I hoped I could afford to find a house to share or a bed-sitting room somewhere in Cambridge if Spencer followed through with his threat. I'd hate to leave Kirkland House because it was a plum placement. I would hate to lose my place there.
But the most important thing was that I had a tuition scholarship which paid for my classes and books. I'd have to scramble to find a place to live if Spencer did cut me off. Once I was twenty-one, the trust fund would be under my control, and I couldn’t wait for that. I'd be completely free of Spencer at that point.
I could ask for more shifts at the restaurant, but I could never get enough shifts to afford room and board or rent and expenses.
I fell asleep to that calculus—hoping I could afford to move out if Spencer followed through on his threat.
The next day, I woke up sore from the night before. It was a pleasant soreness, at least to me, because it meant I was no longer a virgin. I had a bath and then went to my classes, almost forgetting about Spencer and his economic tyranny. But it was brought back to me all too soon, when Spencer showed up at my dormitory after classes, while I was sitting at my desk reading over the next day's material.
The knock at the door interrupted my focus on an astronomy text calculating the distance to the moon. I went to the door and opened it, and Spencer barged inside, wearing his business suit, his briefcase in hand.
"What are you doing?" I said, angry that h
e felt that he could just come over without calling first.
"I'm here to save you from yourself," he said and stood by my desk.
"What do you mean?"
"I want to show you something," he said and reached into his massive briefcase. "Maybe it will help you see the light about your boyfriend."
"He's not my boyfriend," I said, angry that Spencer was back.
"Look at this," he said and handed me a file. "Read it over. Maybe this will convince you he's a thug, and no good for you if you want to ever make anything of yourself."
I took the file and opened it, thumbing through a dozen sheets of paper and photographs. Some of the names had been blacked out, but there was enough there that I could get the gist.
It was a police report about an assault that happened over a year earlier. The man in the very graphic photographs had been beaten almost to death, his leg broken, his arm broken, and his face beaten so badly, his eyes were swollen shut.
There were two mug shots included in the file.
One of Sean.
One of Hunter.
I covered my mouth and read the police report with horror. The man's wife reported that her husband owed Donald Saint money and that his nephews Sean and Hunter Saint had come to collect and had beaten him almost to death when he had no money.
"I can't believe it," I said and shook my head, my stomach feeling sick at what I saw in the photos.
"Believe it. I want you to promise you'll never see that boy again. He may seem all nice to you, but he's a thug underneath the pretty boy façade."
"I can't believe he actually beat someone up. He hates that side of his family."
"Apparently not enough to stay clean," Spencer said. "Blood is thicker than water, Celia. It's time for you to grow up and realize that. All that fighting he did as a kid made him and his brothers perfect for the protection racket that his uncle and father are involved in. If you want to be a prosecutor some day, you have to stay away from people like Hunter."
I shook my head, feeling a bit dizzy that Hunter had been involved in this kind of thing. He seemed so dead set against anything to do with his uncle.
"Stay away from him. Don't even talk to him again. If you agree, I'll keep funding you here at Kirkland House. I promised to fund you until you're twenty-one and I mean it. When you get control over your trust fund, you can do anything you want. I want you to get into Harvard Law. I'll even up your allowance so you can stop working. You have to be at least Magna Cum Laude to get into Harvard Law with any certainty, so I don’t want you to focus on anything else—not work, not boys."
"I'm nineteen, Spencer," I said, frowning. "They're not boys. They're men."
"In age, yes, but not in terms of maturity. I don't want you to throw away your life over some jerk-off."
"Hunter is hardly a jerk-off and you know it. He's got an MBA. He's going to boot camp to become a Marine."
"His father is part of the Romanov syndicate, laundering money for them. His uncle runs a protection racket. Hunter can't escape his genes or his family."
"He's not involved," I said, angrily. "Why can't you understand that Hunter's leaving Boston to get away from his family's bad influence?"
