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“He touches one hair on your head, and you call me. I don’t care what the contract says. I’ll fly to New York and carve his heart out,” Nico says vehemently.
Rising onto my tippy toes, I peck my brother lightly on the cheek. “You’re my favorite person in the whole world. You know that?”
Nico gives me a crooked grin. “Here, I’ll carry that down the stairs,” he offers, slipping the handle of my suitcase from my hand.
“Thanks.”
I follow him as he hefts the considerable weight with relative ease and descends into the foyer. Lucca and Cassion wait for me there, identical looks of thunderous discontent on their faces.
“Want me to stow away?” Cassio offers when I stop before them. “I’ve done it before. I can do it again.”
I giggle, grateful for his cheeky humor. It feels good to laugh after all my stress lately. And yet, a tug of melancholy kills the laughter in my throat. After what happened with Pyotr in the paint supply closet, everything feels different.Ifeel different, like I’m losing the last brushstrokes of innocence childish as the painting of my life grows darker, more ghastly.
“You laugh now, but I’m serious. I’ll be your silent shadow. Just say the word. I’ll kill anyone who so much as looks at you wrong.”
“Thanks, Cass, but I think I better do this one on my own.”
I hug him around the middle, and Lucca sandwiches me in, smooshing me between them.
“You guys didn’t have to come home just to see me off,” I say when they finally release me.
None of them live at the family manor anymore, so they each went out of their way to say goodbye to me.
“And miss the opportunity to tease you? Never.” Lucca chucks me under the chin affectionately.
“Is Father coming?” I ask, glancing toward the hallway and his office.
Nico’s lips press into a thin line, telling me all I need to know. He must have “pressing business” and doesn’t have time to say goodbye. Not that he’s ever been one for fatherly affection.
A knock sounds at the front door, and my heart leaps into my throat. I turn toward the noise as Alfie strides into the foyer to answer it.
“I could just kill him now and save you the roundtrip flight,” Nico suggests, sounding far too hopeful.
“You know I’m not going to say yes,” I chide, hugging him.
He plants a kiss on the top of my head. “Love you, Scout,” he murmurs.
It brings tears to my eyes. Words like that don’t get thrown around easily in my family, and it means a lot to me to hear them. At the same time, it gives me a strange sense of foreboding. Like this might be the last time I see Nico. I shove the feeling into a dark corner of my mind.
“I love you too,” I breathe, giving him an extra-tight squeeze before releasing him.
Pyotr stands waiting on the front porch as I roll my suitcase to the door. Alfie scoops up my luggage without hesitation and takes it to the car waiting in the driveway. Applying his gentlemanly facade, my betrothed offers me his arm, and I take it.
Over the last week and a half, since he demanded a blowjob in place of an apology, Pyotr and I have found an uneasy truce. He hasn’t forced himself upon me in any way again. He hasn’t bullied me. Instead, he’s maintained a distant, unemotional formality.
Going through the motions of a polite human being, he’s walked me to several classes, offered to carry my school bag, and even sat beside me in Art Appreciation. But his gestures are almost robotic, executed with precision and not an ounce of genuine emotion.
Meanwhile, I’ve maintained a polite silence, answering him when he asks me questions and thanking him when he does something nice. And I wonder if this polite disconnection might not be what our lives together will be like.Can I live like that?
An electric attraction crackles over my skin on the rare occasion when he momentarily invades my personal space. But whether he experiences it or not, I have no clue, so I can’t even say if we might physically be able to find common ground. It’s agonizingly isolating.
But as I take his arm now, I feel it in the tips of my fingers, a tingling anticipation that I forcefully push aside, focusing my thoughts on the weekend ahead. He drives me in his sexy white Corvette, and I admire the red-and-black dual tones of the car’s interior and the soft leather of the seat. Then the view as we head out of the denser city.
The car ride is silent all the way until we pull into the private airfield, and he parks the car next to a small plane in a hangar that just fits the beautiful bird. A man dressed in a sharp black suit steps out of the plane as we climb from the car.
Pyotr gestures for me to lead the way as the man collects my bags from the trunk without a word. Like a well-oiled machine, nothing needs to be communicated. I take the stairs carefully and stop short as I see the plush interior of the private jet.
Decorated in fine white leather and cherry wood, the seats are closer to cushioned armchairs than they are plane seats. A wet bar fills one corner near the cockpit. A luggage closet sits toward the back, along with what looks like the door to a single bedroom.
