“What do you care?” I ask, leaning back in my seat. “You’re miserable here. If Daniel has less control, then things could ease up on all of us. Especially you. He needs to understand that he doesn’t have us under his thumb. We’re not just pawns in his game. We’re players in our own.”
“You think you have all this figured out, don’t you?” she sneers, snatching up a towel. “Boys playing at being men. There’s going to be hell to pay for what these two did last night. And there’s going to be even more for what you did.” She jabs her finger at me. “Trouble in South Side wasn’t the only thing on my scanner. The police are looking for a suspect in an assault at the hotel your little jack-off awards ceremony was hosting last night.” She pulls in a breath, nostrils flared. “Now, I’m all for courting trouble, especially when it comes to fuck-stains like your daddy, but the three of you are doing more than courting trouble. You’re fucking it raw and bloody.”
“You’ve had enough time on your back. You should be used to it,” Tristian mutters.
There’s a beat of silence, and even knowing Ms. Crane and her temper, I don’t think any of us expect what comes next.
She hauls her hand back and brings it cracking against his face.
The sound of the slap is loud and jarring, but even Tristian is too stunned to do more than gape at her wordlessly.
“What the hell is going on?” Story says, walking into the room. She’s wearing my shirt from last night, a dark smear of blood dried around the buttons, and her phone is clutched in her hand.
Tristian rubs his jaw. “It’s nothing. I had it coming. I was being a—”
Rath springs from his chair, asking, “What’s wrong?” because he catches it a second before Tristian and I do.
She’s deathly pale, her eyes wide and full of a panic that has me rising out of my chair, too. “My mom just called me,” is her reply. But even though her lips part, breaths jerking from her mouth, nothing else emerges.
“Story?” I ask her, seeing the tremble in her hand. “What’s going on?”
“It’s your dad.” She lifts the phone, staring at it like it’s an unfamiliar object. Her eyes rise to mine, but not before her chest hitches with a sharp, panicked breath. “Daniel’s dead.”
26
Story
The air is thick, and it’s not just tension and my mother’s grief. It’s a numbness that I can’t penetrate. A panic I can’t sweat out. A dread I can’t shove down.
Did we just kill someone?
Again?
My mom still hasn’t taken the tissue I’m holding out to her, but it takes me too long to drop it, opting to rub at her back instead. We’re sitting on her sleek, designer couch. Her shoulders hitch with strained breaths beneath my palm, and even though her eyes are downcast, I can tell they’re empty.
“The remains were found among the debris early this morning,” the detective is saying. He has bright, shrewd eyes and a hard mouth bearing very few laugh lines.
“Oh, my god,” she gasps, covering her face. “This can’t be happening.”
But it is. Last night, a fire broke out in South Side, burning a building to the ground. Within the debris, the remains of a man were discovered. In Daniel’s office. He was wearing a ring—with a skull.
“The fire investigators say the building was old and filled with the kind of material that burns quickly.” The man frowns, his bushy eyebrows looking like two aging caterpillars. He’s sitting on the armchair across from my mother. For the last ten minutes, his focus has vacillated between the notepad in his hand and my mother’s cleavage. “Someone in a neighboring building called it in around eleven. The fire trucks were there in five minutes, but old buildings like this, ma’am…” He gives her a pitying look. “It went up like kindling. Took less than an hour for it to burn to the ground.”
My mom pulls her hands from her misty eyes, head shaking. “I thought he was just working late. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Staying at the office. He was so upset when Vivienne was killed. He just couldn’t sleep.”
My mother weeps next to me, soft cries that don’t quite smear her makeup, because even now—maybe even especially now—presentation matters to her. I suppose I understand. I hold her hand as we sit on this couch—this fucking ridiculous, expensive, sterile couch—in her formal living room. Daniel’s living room? No. Not anymore. He’s dead.