Enigma

Chapter 29 Salem

CHAPTER 29

SALEM

It was midnight by the time everyone wrapped up their statements and dispersed. The police told them that Lara wouldn’t be found until the tides receded in the morning,

and possibly carried somewhere farther along the beach, if she was found at all.

Salem sat in a booth at the bar. It was still open and buzzing with activity, the kitchen open in the back to serve the hungry customers who had been outside for hours. Nothing like death to get everyone talking, including her. Caz sat on one side, Melissa on the other, joined by Aditi opposite them with Baron next to her. They had just ordered food, and though it seemed insensitive to eat after what they had witnessed, the fact was they were starving. Salem hadn’t eaten anything since a quick lunch, and given the exertion her body and mind were already feeling, she needed the nourishment or she’d pass out. And she didn’t want to. She needed to tell Caz about the mark and ask him more questions. They needed to talk.

Baron was evidently on the same wavelength because he took a sip of his water, not drinking since he was driving. Caz too, since he was driving as well. He had a car, a sleek black one that he’d slammed the brakes on earlier and left on the street and had later had to park properly. She had no idea how he had it or where he had kept it hidden, his secrets intriguing her more and more.

“So,” Baron began. “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.” He turned to her. “You saw Lara this morning in Dr. Bayne’s office, giving someone a blowjob? And then she just up and runs off into the sea?”

Salem nodded. “Dr. Bayne is my advisor. He was helping me apply for the awards.”

She noticed the look Baron and Caz exchanged, and made a mental note to ask Caz about it later.

Aditi fidgeted, as if she was uncomfortable. Salem raised her eyebrows at her and she mouthed “later.” Salem nodded.

Their food came and they all dug in, Salem taking a huge, completely unladylike bite of her chicken and mashed potatoes. Caz took a massive bite of his grilled cheese sandwich, inhaling half of it in one go. She could now see why he’d ordered four of them.

Baron leaned forward, cutting into his grilled fish. He placed a piece on Aditi’s plate and ate the rest. Aditi tried the fish, wrinkled her nose at him, and turned to her pasta. “It feels weird eating like this after what happened.”

Melissa spoke from the side, chewing her pasta delicately. “That’s the fucked-up thing about it. I can’t stop thinking how she was looking at us. It was eerie.”

Aditi nodded. “What do you think, Salem? Your expert opinion?”

Salem forced herself to swallow the food, the taste completely bland on her tongue, the lump tight in her throat. Her insides were jittery. Lara’s face morphed into Olivia’s face, her lack of expression becoming her sister’s, and Salem bit the inside of her cheeks to stay in the present.

“It’s difficult to say without examining anything,” she informed them, trying to switch into the analytical part of her brain, trying to remove her emotional response from the situation as hard as it seemed. “If her body is found and an autopsy is done, the report could shed light on it, rule out any narcotics or medication or allergic reactions, though I highly doubt it was that. She was calm. Her pulse was completely normal.”

Caz chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, his tattooed throat moving with the motion. “Maybe she had a psychotic breakdown,” he suggested. “If what you saw this morning was nonconsensual, it’s possible her mind simply couldn’t take it and dissociated from the trauma. It happens more often than we know.”

Baron hummed. “Possible.”

Salem shook her head. “I thought of that too but it doesn’t make sense. It felt… specific. I can’t explain it, not without evidence. Why this place? Why like this? There are so many more ways to go, much less public and much less painful, if that was what she wanted to do.”

“Maybe she wanted to make sure everyone saw,” Melissa mused.

The table went silent, thinking on her words. Salem was thinking too. She knew it wasn’t just a suicide, it couldn’t have been. Salem might not have liked Lara but she had known the girl long enough to know how she viewed it. Lara had been at both her sister’s and her father’s funerals, and though she hadn’t been unkind then, her views on suicide had been apparent. It was irresponsible to leave the family behind like that, and she wouldn’t have done that. Add to it the odd symbol behind the ear and the “bird” she said in a moment of lucidity, and Salem was convinced there was more to it and she could feel she was getting closer to finding answers. She could feel it.

They finished eating in relative silence, an odd group of people. They paid for the meal and left. The girls hugged her in the parking lot again before Aditi and Baron went off to his car and Melissa went back inside the bar to find someone because she didn’t feel like being alone that night.

Salem could relate.

She looked at Caz from the passenger side seat of his very nice car, and felt her hand go to his hair, brushing the longish strands away from his face as she leaned back against the window.

“How did you get the car?” she asked.

He slid her a look before returning his focus to the road. “One of my paintings sold last year.”

Salem felt her eyebrow go up. “So, the rumors are true?”

“Which ones?” he asked in a wry tone.

“You sold paintings for millions?” she fired at him.

“One painting. Five million,” he fired back.

Damn. That was a sweet deal.

“Then why stay in the creepy temple thing in the woods?” she asked, wondering why he didn’t stay in a house or the residential building if he had the money to.

He stayed silent for a long minute. “I was looking for my muse.”

Salem blinked at the unexpected answer. “By sleeping in a bag in the woods?”

He shrugged. “Woods. My studio in the library. Just those two.”

She had yet to see his studio in the library. Though she remembered how she had followed him there once, a lifetime ago, she had never gone down. “It feels so long ago,” she said out loud.

He knew what she meant. Of course he did. “It does.”

Salem brought the conversation back on track. “So, did you find your muse?”

“I did,” he confirmed, taking a right turn to the university parking building close to the main gates. The building came into view, and they entered, going down to an empty spot.

He did the hand thing she had seen women rave about online but never understood the fascination with. But watching him as he put one hand behind her headrest and spun the wheel with the other, his tattoos magnified somehow as he reversed into the spot with precision, Salem got it. It was hot.

Once done, he cut the ignition and turned to her, snaking a hand into her hair.

“I found my muse on a beach on a dark night,” he told her, holding the back of her head, his eyes blazing. “And she was the most stunning creature I had ever seen, with living snakes in her hair and fire in her eyes, yet made of ice.”

Salem breathed deeply, remembering the night vividly, the night he had been drawing while she stood over a dead body. He had thought her stunning, the sincerity in his voice convincing her he was speaking his truth. And it had touched her, that he viewed her so beautifully.

“Okay,” she whispered, her throat tight.

A side of his lips twitched. “Let’s go.”

He leaned in and nuzzled the side of her neck before getting out of the car. She got out, not waiting for him to come around and open her door, and joined him at the gate, tucking her hand in his warm, calloused one, as they walked back to the resident buildings. The castle and campus were all empty this late, the wind chillier than it had been the night that she’d been naked in the clearing.

They reached her building in companionable silence, and then walked to her room.

She opened the door and was surprised to see how much fuller the space felt with his things—a suitcase next to the closet, his laptop and accessories on the desk next to hers. But not all of his things. He couldn’t be living that sparsely.

“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” she asked him, walking to the closet, to see his clothing occupy the space she’d emptied for him in the morning. Dark shirts and t-shirts, dark pants and jeans, dark jackets and coat.

“This is it.” He toed his boots off next to the shoe stand at the entrance. “I moved most of my painting stuff down to the studio. Don’t need much personal stuff.”

Salem studied him. Why was he living so frugally when he had the money? Something wasn’t adding up.

She sat down on the bed and extended her hand out to him, much like he’d extended his to her last night, and he took it, just like she had. She pulled him onto the bed beside her, making him sit next to her. “Pact of trust, remember.”

He let out a breath, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and hung his head for a moment. “I just…”

Salem instinctively began to rub his back slowly.

“I was in prison for a year.”

Salem’s hand froze, completely thrown by his words. “What?”

He sighed. “Remember my brother, the one who took your father’s deal and came here to protect your sister?”

Salem nodded, still frozen, waiting for an explanation.

“When I was younger, I had anger issues,” he told her honestly. “Laz always knew how to get me to calm down, but with him gone and me in school, living with a temporary guardian he was paying, well, I spiraled.”

Salem’s fingers flexed over his back. “What happened?”

He stood up suddenly, like his body was too wired to be still, and headed to his bag, the one he kept with him at all times. Salem stood as well, not understanding what was happening. Was he leaving?

She let out the breath she’d been holding when she saw him rummage inside it, until he was clutching something small in his large hand. His back expanded on a loud inhale, and he turned to her, walking right into her personal space and taking hold of her hand.

Salem looked down at the object in her hand, confused, until she recognized the cracked screen.

Her phone.

Her old phone that she’d broken on the ground.

Her broken phone that she’d given to a stranger boy one night eight years ago.

Her lost phone that had never been returned again.

Salem stared at it, holding the weight in her hand, her heart in her throat as she processed the information coming at her at lightning speed.

“I don’t understand…” Her voice trailed off.

He pressed his forehead to hers, much like the time they had been standing on the street. “You wore a necklace that night.” His face moved, his nose finding the side of her neck, the spot he loved. “It was one of those fancy snake necklaces, that wrapped around your beautiful neck.”

Salem was breathless, both with the realization that he had been the boy she had met—the rough boy full of rage and irritation—and with the fact that he remembered her mother’s choker that she had made her wear.

“Little asp,” he murmured against her neck, and she felt her knees go to jelly, as another realization hit her—he called her that because of that night, and not because of her hair. She had been little and she had been wearing an asp.

The layers underneath what she had once thought a simple nickname shook her. To not only meet but to be remembered and recognized years apart caused such a heady, hazy rush, going straight to her heart.

And then she remembered. She pulled back a bit and he straightened.

“You called me that on the beach the first night,” she accused him, no venom but calling him out for everything he had been hiding, was still hiding from her.

He nodded. “I knew you were coming to Mortimer this year.”

She gripped his arms, beseeching him to tell her everything. “How?”

He let out a breath, flexing the vein on the side of his neck that was popped under the tattoos. “I found it really odd, back then, that a young girl was texting a guy who wasn’t her boyfriend but the messages weren’t ones she’d want anyone she knew to see,” he recalled, blowing her mind again with the fact that it was him, the tall lanky rough-around-the-edges boy. “I was crashing the party that night with a friend and he got caught trying to steal something, so he dipped and I was running out the other side when—”

“—when we bumped,” she completed.

He pushed a curl away from her face, his eyes blazing on her. “I recognized your eyes. They’re very distinctive to the Salazars, and I’d seen your father around my brother a few times. I immediately knew you were related to him.”

Her fingers on his arms went down to his waist, holding him as he continued playing with her strands, lost in thought.

“I felt protective over you, since my brother had made a deal to protect your sister. So, I took your phone and called my brother, telling him everything.”

His brother had known about it?

Caz continued. “Laz told me to find out what was in it, if it was something that you needed protection from. So I did.”

Salem’s breath caught, her eyes breaking away from him and looking at his chest, something hot like shame filling her. He knew how desperate she had been for a friend, how low she had stooped just to find the semblance of something remotely similar to it.

His fingers came to her jaw, gripping it, turning her face up so she faced him. She couldn’t. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see whatever she would see in his eyes.

“Look at me,” he instructed her, and just like every time before, her body complied. She opened her eyes and he was looking at her, not the way she’d thought he would, but fiercely, just like he always did, like she was the singular focus of all his attention.

“You did nothing wrong,” he told her, his words carrying the same ferocity.

Salem swallowed. “I was stupid.”

“You were a child,” he corrected her. “A lonely child. And he was a predator, not a fifteen-year-old boy like he’d told you.”

That just made it worse, to have confirmed what she’d suspected all along.

She didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she changed the subject. “What happened then?”

He stayed silent for a few beats, his face telling her he knew exactly what she was doing, but then thankfully went with it. “I told my brother. About the group here and about what I’d found.”

Salem nodded for him to continue.

“He contacted your father.” Caz went back to her hair. “The group had been posing as a student group to get students from the university to meet them. Your father was furious when he found out. Had my brother do the groundwork for evidence, and the group dissolved.”

Salem had never heard of that, even in rumors. “But no one heard of it, how?”

He tensed. “Because there’s another group, a more powerful one, and your father was a member of it. So was mine. They buried it.”

Salem opened her mouth to ask about it, her heart beginning to beat faster as the rumors she’d heard on campus about secret societies were confirmed. But before she could ask, he surged ahead, clearly wanting to move on from the topic.

“The guy you’d talked to escaped when they went for him, and he got back to the city. My brother asked me to keep an eye on him from afar and report back.”

He took a breath and stepped back, leaving her suddenly floundering as she watched him walk to the window, looking out at the dark sea.

“I had been following him for a few days, reporting back to my brother so he could report to your father, when I saw him do… something.” His grip tightened on the ledge, his tattoos flexing like a live thing. “My anger issues were on a short leash, and I snapped. Sent him to the morgue. But I was young, so instead of prison, they sent me to juvie.”

Salem sat back on the bed again, her legs feeling weak. “When did you get out?”

“Two years after,” he told her. “When I turned legal. My brother had… made some connections in his time here, and they helped him.”

Salem stared at the young man before her, unable to believe how much of a life he had lived, how much turmoil and turbulence he had seen. The strength in him was astounding, making her feel smaller, her life looking like a walk in the park compared to his.

“What happened then?” Her voice sounded hoarse.

He leaned against the wall, still looking out. “Your father had grown really fond of my brother over the years. He had asked him to consider being with Olivia in a more permanent capacity.”

“As security?”

He gave her a look. “As a life partner.”

Her jaw dropped. She tried to remember back to the time, a few years ago, when she’d been selectively mute and not speaking to anyone, going through her final years of high school and dreading everything. She tried to remember her father ever talking about a match for Olivia, her sister ever talking about it. It was a blank.

“He never said anything,” she told him, unsure of what to believe.

He shrugged. “Laz and Olivia had been together for a while. I think your father knew, but because he liked Laz, and because we came from a legacy family as well, even though we were piss poor at the time, he didn’t mind. Maybe he would have told you all later.”

“Maybe,” Salem mused, unsure. She felt like she hadn’t known anyone, feeling like even more of a stranger to her father, who had been not aloof but certainly distant from her.

Something occurred to her then. “Did you know my sister?”

If he had, it changed something. If he’d known the perfection that her sister had been, Salem would never compare. She gripped the blankets under her, her heart pounding as she stared at his back, willing him to give an answer so she could ease the knot in her stomach.

He shook his head, and a breath rushed out of her, relief filling her veins. She knew it was stupid and selfish, but she wanted one person in her life to know her first, see her first, want her first.

“I knew of her,” he said. “Whatever Laz told me. He really cared for her, but his focus had been lifting us out of poverty and making enough money for us to never want for anything ever again.”

“And my father offered him that?”

He nodded. “I’m not sure if Laz was considering it, not until your father offered to have my record buried, and Caz Vanguard buried. He offered a new identity for me, one that would be untraceable, and gave us the choice for me to take back the Vanguard name in the future if we wanted.”

She could see her father doing that. The Salazars were a powerful family line, made even more powerful by her shrewd father. She could see him offering to give a young boy a fresh future and bury his past, not out of the goodness of his heart, but to secure the boy’s older brother as an alliance for his older daughter. While Caz believed her father had grown fond of his brother, and maybe he had, she knew that the fact that the Vanguards were a legacy family almost as old as theirs had to be a factor in it. Laz Vanguard had been the heir to the Vanguard empire, robbed of it cruelly, but with the potential to take it all back with the help of her father and his alliance.

In fact, she wouldn’t have been surprised at all if her father had orchestrated his meeting with the boy, seeing an opportunity and taking it, but going at it in a roundabout way so it seemed more organic and less calculating.

It was falling into place.

“So, you became Caz van der Waal,” she deduced, nodding to herself as it began to make sense. “Where were you before Mortimer? You got out of juvie, and then what?”

“I had already become van der Waal and my brother was still Vanguard, and still at Mortimer since your sister was too,” he explained. “He didn’t want us to be here at the same time and tip anyone off to our connection. That would ruin the ruse.”

She nodded, even though his back was to her and he couldn’t see it.

“So, he sent me overseas to a private college specializing in the arts,” he told her. “I was there, talking to my brother every day, seeing him during the breaks, until your—”

He paused.

Salem followed the trail of his thought. “Until my sister died,” she finished.

He finally turned, leaning back against the window, his hands gripping the ledge by his sides in a way similar to the way she was gripping the bedding.

“Yes,” he stated, a dark look on his face. “It shook Laz, both because he’d liked her and because he was meant to protect her. He had failed, and Laz hated failure more than anything.”

A deep breath filled his lungs, his body tensing, and Salem braced herself.

“The last time I spoke to him, a few months after Olivia died, he told me he was looking into your sister’s death,” he told her quietly.

“For my father?”

He shook his head. “For himself, because things didn’t make sense. He disappeared after that.”

Salem blinked, thrown by that. “What do you mean he disappeared?”

“He disappeared, Salem.” His jaw worked. “I kept calling, his number was unreachable. I called your father, and he was… not stable. I was about to leave and come here to find out what was happening when I got a letter from Laz.”

Salem bit the inside of her cheeks, waiting.

“Basically, it was a fail-safe letter, triggered to be sent if he didn’t contact me for a week. It told me something was wrong, and that if he hadn’t contacted me, it was because he couldn’t. That the chances of him being dead were high. But it told me, in clear words, that he wouldn’t have killed himself, so if he was dead, it was someone else’s doing.”

Salem felt her lips part, her eyes widening. “So you don’t know if he’s actually dead?”

Deep sadness filled his face, the agony in it palpable. “I do now,” he said, turning to look at her murder board, which was covered. Salem looked at it, knowing the board like the back of her hand, and went through everything on it mentally until suddenly it hit her.

Unidentified male.

The journalism student asking questions.

The pain in Caz when he had looked at the board the first time.

Laz Vanguard. Her sister’s protector. Her lover’s brother, and from the sounds of him, an amazing older brother.

Salem’s gaze flew to Caz, realization settling upon her that she had been the one to inadvertently confirm his worst nightmare. Her body was frozen, but she forced her limbs to move, forced herself to stand up, and forced herself to slowly walk to him. She reached out a hand, tentatively touching his arm, letting the sincerity of her emotion show for once.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say.

He moved his hands from the ledge and put them on her waist, bringing her forward between his legs, their faces at a much more level height with him half-sitting on the window ledge.

“Hold me,” he demanded softly, and Salem immediately wrapped her arms around his neck, breathing out the weight on her chest, breathing in his scent and letting it fill her, letting it soothe her as he did the same, his muscular arms completely wrapped around her.

She pressed soft kisses to his shoulder, whispering “I’m so sorry” over and over, and he just held her tighter, his nose buried in her neck. After long minutes of just this, just them embracing and taking comfort in each other, he pulled back a little.

She locked gazes with him, brushing back a lock of hair that had fallen on his rugged face, leaving her hand on his jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble under her palms.

“Are we done with the storytelling tonight?” he asked, and though she had questions, a lot more questions arising from the new information she had now, she could see that telling her everything he had had taken a toll. She pushed down her curiosity in the light of his exhaustion and gave a small nod.

His shoulders relaxed.

Looking at him, and knowing herself, she knew they both needed to rest before going back to their regular routine tomorrow, though her routines had turned upside down over the last few days. Somehow, she was surprisingly okay with that, with adapting to a new routine with him.

She pulled back and tugged him toward the bathroom. “Come.”

Taking her clothes off along the way, she threw them in the laundry hamper and didn’t look to see if he was following. She knew he was, simply by the way her back was tingling with the weight of his eyes and the warmth of his body.

She heard the rustling of him taking his clothes off as well while she turned on the shower, for once turning the water warm, and stepped in, letting it wet her hair and her skin and clean her.

She felt him step in behind her, closing them in the small glass cubicle that suddenly felt a hundred times smaller with his large frame occupying the air within it, filling it to the brim.

She watched in fascination as he tipped his head back, the tattoos on his neck coming into focus, a flower and vines going around with skulls and snake heads, down his chest to join the others. The water pounded on his muscles, running in rivulets down his broad chest, down his tight abs, down the thin trail of hair leading to his groin, leading to the large, heavy length she remembered feeling inside her just the night before.

Had it just been one night? It felt so long ago.

“If you keep staring,” he said without opening his eyes, somehow aware that she was looking at him, “you won’t be able to walk tomorrow without feeling me.”

Her walls clenched once, but she ignored it and picked up the gauntlet he’d thrown. “Or maybe, you’ll be the one with that problem.”

With that, she went down on her knees, doing what she’d wanted to do since she’d seen him naked, and wrapped her mouth around him.

His answering growl was everything feeling right in the world, at least for then.

She would deal with the rest tomorrow, deal with the deaths tomorrow, but for tonight, he was there, she was there, he was alive, she was alive, and they were going to live.

I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray