Chapter Two
Caius
I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off.
I’m in my house, at my desk, and staring at my laptop screen. There’s work to do. I know this. Yet I can’t focus on any of it.
What’s wrong with me?
That’s the question I keep asking myself over and over again. There’s something beyond reach that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s there, but it isn’t. It exists, but it doesn’t.
This feeling is maddening.
It’s not like I woke up like this either.
I’ve been drifting for months and months, doing my best to contribute to the workload of CUP, but I’m unable to settle on a feeling of normalcy.
Everything feels wrong.
Like that Disney movie I watched once with… I frown because I can’t remember. It was a movie about a girl named Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole. Her world was turned upside down. Everything was inside out.
Who did I watch it with?
My sister?
I’ll ask her. Anything to get out of this office. It makes me feel like a failure.
As I walk past my bookshelf, a book catches my eye. Something about it niggles at my memory, but I can’t seem to place the importance of it.
Calista.
A flash of my sister’s name shaded on a paper. Me tossing a note into the fire.
Bizarre.
Giving my head a small shake, I exit my office to seek her out. She’s a quiet girl and spends most of her time drawing on her iPad. The kid’s got talent. Her art is impressive and well beyond her years. Perhaps she’ll attend a prestigious university to further her art skills or maybe she’ll go right into having her own illustration business. The options are plentiful.
I stride down the hallway to her room at the end. The door is ajar, which means I’m welcome to enter. Like always, I knock anyway, respecting her space.
“Hey, sis,” I say when she calls out for me to enter. “What are you up to today?”
She eyes me warily and chews on her bottom lip. I’m just glad she’s looking at me again. Something happened to her—something she refuses to speak about—and it makes it difficult for her to raise her eyes from the floor. It’s only been the past few weeks that she’s been meeting my gaze.
I approach where she sits in an armchair by the big window in her room. Now that it’s summer, the trees are a hundred varying shades of green. Her iPad is nestled in her lap and she sips from a small teacup.
“Drawing.”
Her answers are always clipped and soft. I try to remember when we were younger. Was she this way back then too, or did it all stem from the mysterious incident?
If only I could remember.
“Let’s see.” I take a seat in the armchair next to hers and reach over the small table. “I bet it’s awesome.”
She purses her lips like she doesn’t want to share but then hands it over. Her black eyebrows pinch together, clearly worried about what I’ll think.
The image is strange. Abstract. There’s a woven, gray pattern—maybe a rug—with dark red dots that lead to a large red circle. A giant G is in the center.
I don’t pretend to know what the hell this means.
“Interesting,” I mutter, quickly looking away from the unsettling image. “What does it mean?”
Her dark eyes bore into mine, searching my gaze for something. I’m welcome to her finding out the hidden parts of me because I sure the hell can’t seem to do it. After a beat, she relaxes and shrugs.
“Nothing. Just doodling.”
I arch an eyebrow at her. “Right. What else you got?”
She makes to pull the device from my grip, but I’m already swiping to one of her other canvases on her drawing app. The picture I find first shocks me silent.
It’s a picture of a terrified woman peering down at the floor or a table. The perspective is from the table looking up. Her blond hair hangs around her face in sweaty tangles and her blue eyes are wide with horror. Dark circles ring the woman’s bloodshot eyes and her lips are parted. A single tear streaks down her pink cheek.
It’s hauntingly beautiful.
“What’s this one mean?” I rasp out, unable to tear my gaze from the woman in the artwork.
“You don’t know?”
“Should I?”
She shrugs. “I thought maybe you would.”
“Is she a celebrity?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have any more of her?”
She shakes her head. “No. Are you mad?”
A fierce need to protect her chases away all confusion and uncertainty. “Hell no. I could never be made at you, Calista. You’re my baby sister.”
Her nostrils flare and she looks away. I sense I’ve said the wrong thing, but I don’t know how to fix it.
“I miss Mom and Dad,” she whispers. “I wish I could take it all back. I was a horrible teenager. They hate me.”
Hated.
It should be past tense.
They’re dead now.
“They never hated you,” I assure her, though I don’t exactly remember if that’s true or not. “If you want, we can fly out to Oklahoma to visit their graves. Orion won’t care.”
Several months ago, when I called Orion “our dad,” she burst into tears. Even though he’s our adoptive father, she still clings to calling him by his name, not Dad. I try to do the same when it’s just the two of us.
“They were right,” Calista says in a soft voice. “They knew I’d get mixed up in the wrong crowd, get taken advantage of, and ruin my life. If only they knew how terribly I destroyed it.”
The teacup in her small hand trembles. I want to take her hand in mine to offer some comfort, but she doesn’t like to be touched. It hurts, but I respect her feelings.
“I bet if they knew what a great artist you are, they’d be thrilled. Mom was always so good at her crafts. Remember when she painted birds on the bathroom wall?”
Calista gives me a blank look. “No.”
Frustration claws at me, but I don’t let it show. I’m guessing this is just some teenage angst she’s going through. Or hormones. I’d turned red as fuck when she told me we were out of tampons and asked if I could order more.
I glance back down at the blond-haired woman on the iPad. There’s something familiar about her. Maybe she’s a celebrity. I’ll have to run the artwork through one of my AI programs to see if there are any celeb lookalikes to investigate further. Otherwise, it’s going to drive me insane wondering who the hell she is.
“Can I email this to myself?” I ask, eyebrows lifted in question.
My sister thinks it over for a second and then nods. “Will you tell me who she is if you find out?”
I smirk at her. “I’ll do one better and ask her out if she’s single.”
A rare, small smile is reflected back at me. My chest thumps with pride. She’s a serious, withdrawn young woman and it kills me that she seems to be processing grief or something worse all alone.
All I want to do is help her and make her happy.
“Would Orion hurt me if I ran away?”
Her words are a blow to my skull. I nearly drop the iPad to scowl at her. “What the fuck, Calista? I’ll hurt you if you run away.”
Not really, but I’d be pissed as hell if she did that.
She narrows her eyes, studying me as though she doesn’t believe me that I’d hurt her. I’m glad she knows I’m not some fucking animal.
“Why would you leave me, anyway?” I grumble. “You’re my sister and we need each other.”
We both grow quiet as she ponders my words. Then she whispers so quietly, I barely hear her.
“Caius, I’m scared. I don’t like it here. Orion and Theo…” She shudders. “Please, can you take me away from here?”
The pain and terror in her voice gut me. “We can take a vacation. If you don’t want to go to Oklahoma, we can go someplace else.”
She nods emphatically. “Yes. I’ll go anywhere. I just need to get out of here. Can we go now?”
I almost agree that we can, also eager to get out of this constricting house, but if we leave in a rush, it’ll be suspicious.
“Soon,” I assure her with a smile. “That’ll give you time to order some new clothes or a swimsuit or whatever it is girls like to buy before a family vacation.”
The iPad times out and the screen goes black. When I tap it, the screensaver pops up. It’s clearly more of Calista’s artwork. There’s a girl with her arms crossed over her chest, small but fierce, wearing the same black, blunt-cut, chin-length bob with bangs standing on a giant graffiti wall. There’s lots to look at on the wall, but the words that stand out the most in red send a chill down my spine.
I AM LULU
She snatches the iPad out of my grip and hugs it to her chest. Defiance shines in her dark eyes as if she wants me to fight her for it. Fortunately, I know how and when to choose my battles. Her art is important to her, and clearly, private.
But what does it mean?
I want to ask her but bite my tongue.
Is it some alter ego? A tough, brave version of herself?
How can she be so afraid in one moment but seem so fierce in the next?
“I’ll keep you posted,” I say as I stand. “Want to play a game of dominoes later?”
She relaxes and nods. “I’ll beat you again.”
“You can try.”
With those words, I leave my little sister to her art. It’s apparently therapeutic for her. I bypass my office, which I hate these days, and head for my room to get out of these stuffy dress clothes. When I enter my closet, I get a faint whiff of perfume.
Red dress.
Sex against a sleek luxury car.
Fingers in my hair and heels digging into my ass.
I can’t remember the last woman I slept with. I’m not exactly the kind of man who likes to date. It’s complicated and time-consuming. But clearly, I dated someone and it’s still something I think about.
If she meant anything to you, though, you’d remember.
I like the idea of the pretty blonde with the sad eyes from the iPad being that woman. It makes me wonder if I could make her smile. If I could kiss her in all the right places to make her moan.
Who are you, love?
What is your name?
My phone buzzes with an incoming message. The screensaver on my phone is a picture of me and Calista sitting in the game room playing our dominoes game. I remember Theo took the picture, catching us off guard. We’d turned to look at the camera wearing the same dumfounded expression.
But that’s where the similarities end.
Both our parents had dark brown hair and tanned complexions. I have Dad’s same strong nose and Mom’s lips.
Calista with her black hair and nearly black eyes looks like…well, no one I know. Certainly not like me.
Whenever I ponder shit like this, I unravel. I feel fucking insane. There’s no one I can talk about it with either. Dad would probably put me through the CUP program if he thought I was defective. I imagine Theo would go straight to Dad with my secrets. And I’m too busy trying to protect Calista to confide my crazy in her.
Pushing away those stressful thoughts, I pop open my phone to look at the message she sent me. The picture of the woman, through a teenage artist’s rendition, is striking.
There’s something about the mysterious blonde.
I need to know who she is.
I will find out who she is.
She’s a real person. That much I feel in my bones.
Don’t worry, love, I’ll find you.
I always find what I’m looking for.