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“I was just—”
The dam had broken, and I felt a sudden rush of power as I realized Nicolai no longer held power over me. He’d cut me loose, and God help me and what would come of it, but I no longer needed his permission for anything.
“You were just what?” I demanded. “Just trying to remind me that I’d been worthy of your love and affection once? That every time we fought, and you reminded me that with a single word I’d be out on the streets, you were right?” Oh, the feeling of letting go wasaddicting. It was a rush which would inevitably have me breaking down in the air and vomiting into the tiny airplane toilet from the adrenaline crash, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. “You don’t get to act like you’re doing me a kindness right now, Nicholas. Not after everything.”
He slow-blinked again. I never called him that. “Jules…you’re being unreasonable.”
“No,” I snapped. “I’m not. You stole half my life. You went after me when I was a teenager—achild—”
“Lower your voice,” he hissed, but I was so far beyond that now.
“You took all my money, you made sure everything was in your name, and when my dick got too old for you, you threw me into the streets. There is no high road for you, Nicholas. If you even have a moral ground, it’s made out of a goddamn bog.”
“You should go.” There was a coldness in his voice that probably should have terrified me to my core. A sound that promised revenge instead of goodbye if I didn’t walk away now.
And as tempting as it was to push him further, I didn’t. It wasn’t worth it. I was putting an ocean between us, and he’d already torched every single one of my professional opportunities simply by drawing a line in the sand and standing on the opposite side.
While it felt like I had nothing left to lose, I wasn’t ready to take the chance. I wasn’t giving up on who I was, on the person I had worked so hard to become. The calluses on my fingers from my cello strings would not be for nothing. He may have taken my pride and every opportunity here, but I wasn’t going to shatter the way he wanted me to.
Turning on my heel, I grabbed my case and started toward the security checkpoint when I heard his voice call out one more time, “Ju-ju-bee, wait!”
I paused but only long enough to shoot him a vee over my shoulder, two fingers by my left ear. Someone behind me laughed—a high cackling sound—and it made me smile. If I looked back, I knew I’d see him gently humiliated and bright pink in his pale cheeks. It would look beautiful on him because, tragically, he was beautiful, pushing fifty with the face of a cherub—soft dark curls from his Italian mother and bright blue eyes from his Russian father.
But the humiliation wouldn’t go more than skin-deep on him because I was convinced he couldn’t actually feel anything. A true and proper sociopath with the capacity to pretend he had emotions. His love, tenderness, joy, compassion—they only lasted as long as the person was valuable or interesting.
The moment that stopped, so did he.
But I’d seen him torch the lives of others for less, so I wasn’t exactly comforted as I made my way through the queue. But I decided that although I would be heading off into the unknown without any real hope and no marketable skills, whatever he wanted to throw at me couldn’t be any worse than what he’d already done.
* * *
My sister’ssober expression greeted me at the passenger pickup at JFK. I hadn’t seen Joy for years, but she looked the exact same as when I’d left her—tall, curls as wild as mine, the same eyes with dark circles that existed no matter how much sleep we got. Neither of us smiled readily, and it was almost a comfort that she didn’t get emotional when I approached, my sweaty hand around my suitcase handle.
She still carried the old betrayal in her eyes that had settled there when I’d told her I was moving in with Nicolai after graduation instead of coming home. I wondered if we’d ever outgrow her resentment, but I wasn’t sure that would ever matter. At nineteen, her lack of trust in me cut deeper than anything ever had up to that moment, and moving in with Nicolai had become an act of rebellion for me. I hadn’t understood why she was so angry with him when he’d done nothing but be kind and give me opportunities I would have never gotten without him.
Now I wasn’t sure how to tell her she’d been right all along without reopening those old wounds. She might forgive me for being young and naïve, but it was hard to tell. We didn’t love easily, and that included each other.
Life had never been kind to either of us.
Our parents died thanks to a drunk driver when I was eleven and she was sixteen. Our only surviving relative was our mom’s brother, Raymond—child-free to such extremes that he’d broken up with girlfriends for even looking at babies for too long. There was never any love or comfort when we moved in. There was food in the fridge and clothes when we outgrew the ones we had. He didn’t stand in my way when I applied for the conservatory scholarship, and he drove me to the airport when I was accepted.
When Joy or I would cry, missing our parents so much that it felt like a physical pain, he’d just leave the room until we were done. It was a crash course in self-soothing, and I wondered if he was angry about having to take us in for the rest of his life. Hell, I wondered why he’d bothered at all.
At first, I assumed it was because of the meager life insurance payout, but that had gone to Joy to divide between the two of us. Raymond had money and property, so there was no benefit to him. Maybe, in the end, it was because he loved us as family in his own twisted way.
It was the only thing that made sense even now, considering I had zero of my inheritance left, nowhere to live, and I wasn’t about to impose my mess on Joy, her husband, and their children. The one comfort I even had getting on the plane here was knowing that Uncle Raymond had, once again, offered to help in his strange, detached way.
Pulling my peacoat tighter around my body, I tightened my fingers on my cello case and ignored the fact my palms were damp. There was nothing like shame to induce sweating in the middle of a New York November.
The wind whipped around us in the taxi line, and Joy eventually took pity on me, grabbing my rolling case and leading the way. I hadn’t been gone that long, but my formative years were spent across an entire ocean, and I’d forgotten what it meant to be a little brother to her.
Family existed as more of an abstract concept and the occasional weekend or birthday phone call. They were names on a calendar—a niece and a nephew I’d ask a salesperson to help me shop for because I didn’t know them. She never came to see me, and every time I brought up visiting, Nicolai guilted me to the point that even leaving the house felt like a betrayal.
God, he’d ruined so much of my life in such a short time.
The guilt immediately ate at me as I slid my cello next to my suitcase in the trunk, then sat down on the well-worn seat that smelled like a thousand different colognes. Joy was staring at me, but I didn’t look back as the driver peeled away from the curb and headed toward my new reality.
“So,” Joy said, about ten minutes into the trip in stop-and-go traffic, “Georgie dropped off a bunch of furniture for you yesterday, and I left some of Mom’s old linens on the kitchen counter.”
