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“Traditional virgin offering in the Cult of Artemis.”
“Was it?” Lia asked.
He nodded. “Girls were supposed to apologize to Artemis when they lost their virginities. Artemis has always been such a cockblock.”
“I should have listened to her,” she said.
“What happened with you and David?”
Lia took a long shuddering breath. “I left my room the next night, around midnight. I was going to his bedroom. I wanted to be with him again. If anybody caught me, I was just going to say I wanted a midnight snack. I thought I’d find David in his room, but he wasn’t there. I heard his voice outside the house. And Mum’s and Daddy’s. They were on the patio by the rose garden, talking. I went through the music room. All the lights were off in there and the door was cracked open. If the lights are off in the music room, you can’t see into it from the garden. They didn’t see me, but I saw them. And I heard them.”
August stroked her wrist now, the beating veins, and she tingled everywhere he touched her. Was this a side effect of drinking from the Rose Kylix? If so, she was already regretting selling him that bloody cup.
“I don’t know what held me back,” Lia said. “Why I didn’t just walk out and say hello... Something about the way they were laughing made me nervous. So I hid at the door and spied on them.”
She could still hear their laughs ringing in her ears.
Her mother’s laugh, like she’d just been pinched in a tender spot.
Her father’s laugh, like he’d won a hand of poker and was raking in the chips.
David’s laugh, like he’d gotten away with murder.
“Mum was wearing this red-and-black dressing gown Daddy had got her for Christmas. She looked beautiful, as always. Daddy was there, too, sitting in a chair, Mum on his lap. David walked over to her with a rose he’d cut from the garden and presented it to Mum like a knight to his lady. And Mum took it from him and said thank you. And then David leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. A deep kiss. And Daddy said...”
Something twisted in Lia’s side, a pain like a rose thorn lodged between her ribs and into a lung.
“Daddy said, ‘Behave, boy. You had more than enough of her already tonight.’”
“God, Lia...” August breathed. He sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach. She knew how he felt. Lia dug her fingers into the smooth leather of the armchair. The pain in her side was growing sharper, like she’d had to sprint for her life and had a vicious stitch. She couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t take a full breath, couldn’t move.
“I already knew Mum and Daddy played around with other people—when I was old enough, they’d warned me in case I heard the gossip. I didn’t like it, but it’s their marriage, not mine. If they wanted to have threesomes or foursomes or tensomes, that was between them and whoever. But...ah, this was about me. It was...um...” She took a quick pained breath. “I thought I was going to die, August. I really thought I might die.”
“Lia, Lia...” August said, kissing the back of her hand.
Two hot tears rolled down her cheeks.
Discovering David—who she would have gone off with to Gretna Green if he’d so much as crooked his littlest finger at her—had slept with her own mother the night after she’d given him her virginity had fundamentally altered Lia down to the very marrow of her bones. She had liked people before, trusted them, thought the world was a playground and she had no job other than to swing on the swings and slide down the slides, eat biscuits, pet puppies, drink tea—that was her life until then. But it turned out the playground was built over toxic waste, and seeing that kiss had sliced her open so that the poison in the soil seeped into her bloodstream.
Lia didn’t trust men anymore. Her father alone was the exception to the rule, but even with him, as much as she loved and adored him... She never let her girlfriends alone with him. Not because she thought he’d flirt with them, but because...what if he did, though? She’d been accidentally betrayed by one parent. She didn’t think her heart could take it if it happened again.
“What did you do?” August asked. His voice was soft, cautious.
“Ran back to my room and threw up a couple times. Not the best way to handle it. I should have burst out and yelled, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ But I couldn’t do it. I was a coward.” Lia felt a fist in her throat. She didn’t bother to try swallowing it away. It wasn’t going anywhere.
“No, not a coward. Not you.”
“I was, though,” she said. “I couldn’t face him. I slipped a note under his door that said if he didn’t leave and cut off contact with my parents forever, I would tell them about us. Mum and Daddy know literally everyone who matters in the art world. They own all or part of at least twenty galleries in London, Glasgow, Dublin, New York and Los Angeles. They could have blackballed him if they’d wanted. Daddy’s got friends in the Home Office. He could have had David’s visa revoked. He could have ruined David’s life, easily. It was a real threat.”
“Did he leave like you told him to?”
“That day,” Lia said, “my parents had taken my brothers to London for a football match or something. David came to my suite and pounded on my bedroom door, screaming at me to face him.”
“And you couldn’t?” August asked.
She slowly shook her head. “Picture me. Seventeen years old, curled up on the floor, wrapped tight as a ball, crying. I was terrified he was going to break the door down and kill me.”
“Kill you?”
