Chapter Sixteen
LUCIANA RARELY DRANK MORE THAN the occasional glass of champagne. After telling Caelen about the abortive meeting on the Bridge, though, and watching the girl’s hopes fade and despair set in, Luciana printed out a bottle of port.
She listened to Caelen sob on the couch, and try to muffle the sound, and Luciana would top up the glass again.
Through the window, she watched the sunlights start to fade toward night. It was late summer, and late in the day.
She didn’t care.
Caelen was breathing softly on the couch. She had fallen asleep.
Luciana looked out the window once more. It was fully dark now, and she could see no details beyond the window. Only her reflection in it. A tired, middle-aged woman looked back. In the reflection, her hair looked white, not blonde.
Not that she had any choice at all, according to Brice, but maybe losing the stalls could somehow be a good thing? The question whispered through her sodden mind.
It was swiftly followed by near-panic. What would she do without the business?
The way he’d put his head back against the wall that afternoon came zinging back into her mind. The column of his neck, the warm skin there….
“Shut up,” she muttered to herself and drank more port.
When the quiet knock on the front door sounded, Luciana presumed it was her imagination. She was reaching for someone, anyone, to come and tell her how to fix everything that had gone wrong. How to save her son.
That wasn’t going to happen, though. Not even Brice could change anything.
If he was trying to change anything. She still didn’t believe him.
Not at all. Not just because he had signed the charge sheet, but also because if Brice Falcon said he was working to change things, then he would have changed things.
He would have fixed them already. He was Brice Falcon, after all.
Yet no miracles had happened. Ergo, he had been lying.
“See?” Luciana muttered to the glass. “I wash…was right.”
The quiet knock came again. A tiny bit louder this time.
“Shumone at the door,” Luciana said. She got to her feet and moved over to the door, only weaving once. She opened the door and staggered back, shocked. “Rayen!”
Rayen Todd gave Luciana a taut smile. “I didn’t want to wake whoever is sleeping on the couch.” Her voice was low. “I need to talk.”
Luciana wiped at her eyes. “Caelen. On the couch.”
“Devar’s love?” Rayen murmured. She was a tall, dark silhouette in the night. “He was going to bring her to dinner, to introduce her to Barny and me.” Her voice dropped. “Then all this started.”
Luciana stepped back. “In. Come.”
Rayen stepped in, took the door out of Luciana’s hand and shut it softly. “Upstairs,” she murmured. “We can talk there. Go on. I’m right behind you.”
Luciana drew herself upright. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not, idiot. You want to wake Caelen?”
Luciana sighed. “I’m not sober.”
“I couldn’t tell.” Rayen’s tone was dry. “Do you want to stand here and talk, or talk upstairs?”
She was asking, at least.
Luciana turned and made her way to the stairs, then slowly took a step at a time, up to the second floor. She moved into the bedroom and lowered herself carefully to the bed. Except the bed was unexpectedly lower than she thought, and she sprawled.
She sat up again, and felt the room tilt.
This was not a good state to be in, to deal with Rayen.
Rayen walked in, carrying a mug that steamed. “Here, drink. It’s coffee.”
Luciana wanted to protest that Rayen was once again telling her what to do.
Only, with the room shifting around in her vision, she recognized that she wasn’t capable of deciding what to do herself.
So she took the cup and sipped. It was, of course, the way she preferred her coffee. Rayen hadn’t forgotten.
Rayen didn’t sit on the bed beside her. Instead, she pulled over the low stool and settled on it. She wrapped the hem of her dress around her ankles, held them, and put her chin on her knees.
“Your hair is gray,” Luciana observed. She thought it was remarkable that she had noticed.
Rayen touched it. “It happens.”
“You should color it.”
“No, thank you.”
“You used to rage about people who didn’t take you seriously as a woman and a professional,” Luciana pointed out. “How much more seriously do you think they’ll take you as a gray-haired woman? People don’t see older people.”
“They’ve seen you lately, though, haven’t they?” Rayen’s voice was back to dry again. “Brice Falcon, Luciana?”
Luciana straightened her back. It kept slouching into a curve. “It was a thing. It’s over now,” she said.
“Is it?”
“Yes,” Luciana said firmly. She drank more of the coffee, after blowing on it. She was dripping it all over her trousers. She didn’t care.
“So why did he send me a message and suggest I come and see you?”
Luciana held still, as her heart thudded. “He did not,” she said as clearly as she could.
“Why would I make that up?” Rayen asked. “In this, I’m as neutral as anyone can be and still care what happens to Devar.”
“People do not hate him,” Luciana muttered.
“You and I both know that people resent him. They resent his brilliance.” Rayen said it gently. “So do they want to see him taken down? Yes. Only I think…” She hesitated. “Have you read the Forum lately, Luci?”
“Luciana.”
“Luciana,” Rayen corrected herself.
“This morning. Read it.”
“I mean this afternoon. Tonight.”
Luciana pressed her lips together. “Too busy drinking a whole bottle of port.”
“Port?” Rayen smiled. “You never take shortcuts, do you? You are going to regret this deeply tomorrow. Do you want a sober dose? It couldn’t possibly be worse than the hangover you’ll go through. …Port!”
“I like port.”
“You like champagne. Although all the sugar in that wouldn’t have done you any favors, either.”
“No sober shot,” Luciana said. “I just want to forget. Just for a bit.”
“Except I’m here and I’m not letting you forget. I think Falcon knew what you would do. I think that’s why he sent me the message.” Rayen rested her hand on Luciana’s knee. “You’ve had a hard time of it lately.”
“You haven’t?” Luciana asked, her voice rising.
“I’ve watched in horror,” Rayen said. “You’re the one in the middle and being pulled apart, though. Falcon on one hand, Devar on the other.”
“And my business in the other corner,” Luciana muttered. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Rayen.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Rayen said patiently.
“I don’t think you should do anything. Not for the next day or so.
It’s a blood bath on the Forum, Luci. There is a building wave of outrage over the idea of execution.
People don’t like it. And more and more of them are saying so… and signing their name to it.”
“Luciana,” she muttered.
“Luciana,” Rayen repeated. “I’m sorry, it’s an old habit. You know that.”
“You always did belittle me, in whatever way you could.”
Rayen’s eyes widened. She sat up, taking her chin off her knees. “I did not.”
“You did. You might not have meant to, but you did. You gave Devar your last name, instead of combining our names, like everyone else does. You insisted I stay at home with him, while you got the career.”
“I already had the career,” Rayen said gently.
“And you always made the big decisions about Devar. Schooling, courses, what institute he should aim for.”
“If you think that I had any influence over Devar’s choice of career, you don’t know Devar as well as I thought you did,” Rayen said. She sounded amused. “You really are sozzled, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Luciana admitted. “Or I couldn’t say all this. I resented you, Rayen.”
“I know.”
Luciana sat up. “You do?”
Rayen nodded. “You resented a lot of people. Right up until you started your own business. Then the big ol’ chip on your shoulder melted away. I watched you use it, to drive yourself. And look at what it achieved for you.”
“They’re going to take it away from me,” Luciana said.
“No! Who? How?”
Luciana explained about the meeting she had rushed to attend on the Bridge, and the outcome.
“Brice said the Bridge can just take it all. Pay me whatever they want. Or nothing at all, I suppose. Especially now I’ve spat in their faces.”
Rayen put her chin back on her knees. “I wish I had been there to see that,” she murmured. “Now his message makes a bit more sense.”
“I’m afraid, Rayen.”
Rayen met her gaze. “So am I.”
Rayen had always been the sensible parent. The sober and decisive one. And now she was admitting she was as lost as Luciana. And, oddly, it was comforting.
Luciana drank her coffee.
Rayen looked over Luciana’s shoulder. Her mouth formed into a small smile, and Luciana knew she was looking at the image Luciana had framed and put on the counter.
“We raised a great son.” Rayen’s smile widened.
“Even if he does piss off people who can’t keep up with his mind.
” She leaned forward. “Sometimes I wish I had his strength and self-respect and could say what I think to a few of the people at the medical institute. Doctors think they’re geniuses, yet some of them are astonishingly stupid. ”
Luciana giggled. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “That feels wrong.”
“Beating your chest and rending your garments the way you are right now might feel like the sane choice, but trust me, it isn’t,” Rayen said.
“What else am I supposed to do?” Luciana asked, genuinely curious.
“We, Luciana. What do we do?”
Luciana rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “I can’t just wait the way you think I should.”
“Do you have an alternative course of action?”
“I…” She thought about all the calls and messages she had made, trying to find a way to speak to the captain, to ask for true justice. “No, I don’t,” she admitted. “I’ve been running on instinct for weeks. Since they arrested Devar.”
Rayen nodded. “Time to use strategy, Luciana.”
“What strategy?”
“That’s why I’m here. We need to figure that out.”
Strategy. “I use strategy all the time, managing the stalls.”
Rayen nodded. “You know more about the psychology of selling that any two people I know.”
“I just never thought about using that for…for something so personal.”
“Buying is personal, for the person doing the buying,” Rayen said.
“That’s something I said,” Luciana said. “You remember that?”
“Yep. I’ve used it, too. For business and for personal stuff. Seeing it from the other person’s perspective, figuring out what they want…it works, Luciana.” She leaned forward. “So what does everyone around Devar want? Why are they doing what they’re doing? And what can we do about it?”
Luciana sipped the coffee. She was starting to think more freely now.
What did everyone want? Politics was just buying and selling with a different name. Brice had said that.
She dismissed the reminder, and concentrated instead on thinking about the people who seemed to have a stake in what happened to Devar.
Then she sat up. “I think…I have an idea.”
Rayen smiled and got to her feet. “I’ll get more coffee.”
“And a sober shot,” Luciana called after her. “I’ve got work to do.”