Chapter 17 #2
I arrived at his place at seven thirty, and I hoped that I was early enough that it would catch him off guard and annoy him somehow.
Instead, I pulled onto his street, and the garage was already up and waiting for me to pull in under his carriage house.
For some reason, today, it sort of ground my gears that he always seemed to be ahead of me. The police presence looming in my office earlier scared me more than a little.
I walked across his courtyard, my heels clacking smartly over the bricks, and caught sight of him in the kitchen through the French doors.
He had his sleeves rolled back over his forearms, and his collar was open at the throat.
What’s more, he had on an apron and was running a knife through some herbs on a cutting board. I froze, taking it in.
He looked up at me and stuck his thumb in his mouth, and I swallowed hard. He sucked something off it and jerked his head to indicate I should let myself in. I entered the kitchen and closed the door behind me.
“How did what go?” I demanded, and I wanted him to be crystal clear that he meant the cops being in my office.
“With the detectives,” he said, not even bothering to deny it.
“Are you stalking me now?” I demanded, crossing my arms over my stomach. He gave me a lopsided and almost sinister grin.
“I’m keeping tabs,” he answered.
I rolled my eyes and threw up my hands.
“Honestly, I have no idea if they believed a word that came out of my mouth or not. You probably know how these things go.”
He chuckled, tossed the herbs into whatever he was sautéing, and gave the contents of the pan a flip or two to mix things up. The room was fragrant with white wine and a familiar, if not readily identifiable, smell.
“Sit,” he ordered, gesturing to the little table at the end of his kitchen, which was set for two.
“What if I can’t stay?” I asked. I knew I was being petulant, but this was really rubbing me the wrong way for some reason.
“It wasn’t a request, Savannah. Sit.”
I huffed a sigh at his incorrigibility and went and sat. He came over and poured a glass of white.
“It’s a good vintage,” he promised. “Try to relax a little. Catch me up. What did they ask?”
I wrinkled my nose, took a sip, and gave him the rundown, just as though I was ticking off problems an inspector had found making his rounds on a property.
Every once in a while, as he moved about the kitchen, he would ask me, “And your answer?” I would tell him, apprehensive, and blessedly, all he would do was nod and say nothing, but I kind of got the gist that no news was better than bad news.
I mean, he wasn’t ripping my head off for any of my answers, and they were pretty much verbatim what he had told me to tell them if they had come knocking.
He set a plate of linguini and clams in front of me, and said, “You did good.”
I rolled my eyes and said, “Well, thank you for that! Whatever would I do without your brilliant insight?”
He snorted and said, “You’re a salty little thing today. You need to learn to relax.”
My shoulders sagged in utter frustration, and I said, “Killing people may just be another Tuesday for you, but it most certainly isn’t for me. Honestly, I’m scared to death.”
“Don’t be,” he said starkly, and pinned me with his gaze.
He brought over his own plate and set it down before pulling off his apron and hanging it on the back of his chair.
“Eat,” he ordered gently.
“I’m not used to this,” I said quietly, staring down at the food, which looked and smelled lovely, but lord, my stomach was in knots. How could he possibly expect me to eat at a time like this?
His hand covered mine, where it rested listlessly on the table, and I jolted, meeting his inscrutable gaze with mine.
“I know it’s a lot. I know it’s overwhelming. It does get easier with time, and the best thing you can do for yourself right now is to eat, try to relax, and get a good night’s sleep. Just keep doing what you’re doing with your daily routine.”
“I understand, but I don’t know how. How do you do it?” I asked mollified.
“Just keep calm and carry on,” he said as though it was as simple as that… and I thought about it. Maybe it was? Maybe it was literally just as simple as that. I mean, wasn’t that what I’d been doing essentially this whole time since first coming to Savannah?
“Take a deep breath,” he ordered, and I did, mimicking him as he pantomimed doing likewise in a slightly exaggerated fashion.
“Good, good…” he murmured. “Now eat your dinner.”
I speared some of the Caesar salad on a smaller plate at the top of my place setting with the salad fork that’d been set out.
“Mm!” I perked up a little in surprise.
“Yeah, that’s not a salad kit.” He smiled a little, and it was almost… bashful?
“No?” I asked. “You made this yourself?”
“I mean, it’s probably not as good as Torment makes it, but it is his recipe… so…”
“I don’t think I’ve met him,” I said, and he shook his head.
“You haven’t, yet.”
“Were the three at…?” I faltered, letting the question hang between us.
“They were, and you’ll meet them eventually,” he said. “Just play it cool, like you haven’t before, unless they broach the subject. Understand?”
“Yes, but who were they?” I pressed.
“Does it matter?” he asked, and it was with an earnest stare.
“I mean, I guess, not really…” I mumbled, speared some more salad on my fork, and he sighed.
“Your curiosity is rather insatiable, you know that?” he asked, but it wasn’t rude. “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said gently, and I cocked my head.
“I thought that just the other day,” I said. “Truly… but you know the next line?” He shook his head.
“I didn’t know there was a next line.”
“There is,” I said. “’Satisfaction brought it back.’”
He chuckled and nodded. “Touché.”
“So…” I smiled a little wryly, and he shook his head.
“Relentless.”
“I mean, if I’m the cat, I have nine lives, so ‘you only live once’ is out the window.”
He laughed then, and I couldn’t help but smile. His laugh was rich and robust, and I liked it when it was genuine.
“Fair, Kitten. Fair. But you don’t want to use them up too quickly, so best let this one lie for now. You’ll meet them sooner or later.”
“How many are there?” I asked. “Or is that off-limits too?”
He said, “Thirteen. If you count the prospect, fourteen, but he’s not exactly one of us, per se. Not yet anyway.”
“How does that work?” I asked.
“So full of questions,” he admonished, but it was jovially. He looked me over and said, “This is something I can answer and should – so here goes.”
He took a deep breath before launching into it.
“Once upon a time, the core of us all went to the same boarding school. We were a bunch of dumbass rich kids displaced or pretty much disowned from our families and stuck somewhere off to the sidelines to grow out of being inconveniences to the family lines. At least, that’s what it felt like anyway.
Synister was sort of our de facto leader when it came to school. We all just sort of fell in under him.”
He paused, letting memories wash over him, and I could tell by how the muscle in his jaw ticked that they weren’t particularly fond ones.
I didn’t think that had much to do with Synister or his classmates, but rather his family, which the Prescotts were old money here in Savannah.
Like clear lineage dating all the way back to the Oglethorpe days.
Fresh off the boat and ready to colonize the Americas from England.
“Syn and I became fast friends, and the rest just sort of found themselves in our gravitational pull. You know how it is.” He shrugged, and I simply pursed my lips and nodded, continuing to eat and listen because…
no. I absolutely didn’t know how it was.
I mean, I had a bit of an inkling, I guess.
My family was firmly middle class, which made my brother and me pretty much the upper echelon in our respective schools, but we didn’t let the fact that our family owned the farm where most of the other kids’ parents worked go to our heads.
Our parents raised us humble and, lord, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Nana or Pop-Pop.
The type of dynamic Corbett spoke of was…
I mean, I could feel the Cruel Intentions kind of vibe from it, but I didn’t think that was necessarily real.
That was just a movie… but I guess in some places and on some tiers above even my family’s, it was as real as it got.
I mean, I knew that coming here and working my ass off and faking it until I made it had risks, but…
this? All of this? Being complicit in a murder and watching how casually these men covered it up and just went back to business as usual was intense, and beyond anything I thought it could be.
It was definitely too late to tell the truth of my origins now, though. I was afraid that if I did, well, it might just be the thing to make me disappear too, which I did not want to do.
“Before we knew it, we grew to become enough in numbers that we formed the Iron Wraiths. At first, it was a sort of rich-kids’ school secret society sort of thing.
But as we got older and ended up in the same shop class, we all fell in love with motorcycles at the same time, and things sort of just naturally evolved from there.
“It became a rite of passage when we each hit eighteen to get our first bikes, go for our motorcycle endorsements, and thus be grandfathered into the club.
“Certainly not how most motorcycle clubs formed, but we were like, ‘fuck it,’ it was our club, we could form and do things how we wanted.
“Some of us went to college, some of us went to war, some of us got into family businesses, or got the startup money from family to go do our own thing. Some of us were successful, some of us weren’t, and some of us got caught up in drugs or what have you and struggled along the way.
But you know what none of us ever did?” he asked.
I shook my head silently because I couldn’t fathom.
“We never gave up on each other.”