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“Oh, and maybe if her husband hadn’t been glaring at me all night as if he was getting ready to exsanguinate me, I could have been my usual sociable self.”
“Indigo, stop,” I growl, the image of my father’s lewd glower causing my hands to ball into fists.
I know full well the salacious thoughts passing through my father’s twisted mind, for I have the same impulses when I take in the disobedience painted across her breathtaking face.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to bring that up. It’s just…” She takes a step towards me, taunting the merciless beast inside me with her body. “For a parent to make their kid feel that way, it’s… abusive.” Tears teeter on her waterline. “And I’m not apologizing for being a decent person who doesn’t treat people like garbage or bow down to men as if they’re inherently more valuable than me because of their genitals.”
I try to smile at the defiant way that she says it, but I can’t as my mind prowls back to talk of her family. The mother. The stepfather whose name she refuses to ever bear.
“Was it true?” I ask. “About your parents? Their wealth.”
“Your father was such an asshole to look into me like that.”
“I know, Indie. But I can’t unhear what he said.”
“It’stheirwealth,” I reply. “Not mine. It might become mine if I were willing to engage with their toxic shit… which I’m not. No amount of money is worth it.”
“And your… stepfather?”
She peers down before finding my eyes again. “He’s not a nice man. And… I don’t want to talk about him tonight. It’s already been… a lot.”
I bow my head, the civility masking the rage and shame I feel as I prepare to answer a question I know she will already have in her head.
“Indigo, I need to tell you about… the woman who turned up at the end.”
“Your sister?”
“No, the other—”
“Gabriella?”
“Yes.”
She frowns, no doubt sensing the dread dripping from my tone. I don’t even know how to explain the insanity of my link to her, something that no one from a sane background could ever comprehend.
“What about her?” she asks, her voice a frail breeze.
“I've known her since I was a child. Her father is friends with my father. Close friends. As well as being a client of his.”
“A PR client?”
“Yes. Crisis management, in particular. Which is something people need when they are prone to…misdeeds.”
Or crimes of the worst kind, more like—another reason why my father keeps Vitaly as one of their VIP clients, ones I don’t have access to, for he knows full well there are some crimes I refuse to help clients cover up.
“Her family is very powerful. And many years ago, when I was still a child, my father and hers, they… made… some kind of pact… and… when I was seventeen, I was informed that I’d…” I shift my weight as her earnest eyes peer into me, making me feel as if blood is draining from my body. “I would be marrying her. She’s the woman you’ve heard about. The woman you asked me about on the island.”
She takes a step back, her face as pale as winter frost.
“It was something they concocted to make both families more powerful, more protected, and to reaffirm their control, their role as heads of the family.”
“Control?They’re arranging their kids’ marriage… Do these people know what century we’re living in?!”
“They don’t care about social norms, Indigo. Or at least, not behind closed doors.”
“And do you want to? Marry her?”
I feel my expression coarsening into stone. “Of course not. I feelnothingfor her. Nothing but vague feelings of revulsion.”
