Elle
“Rie!” I scream hoarsely when I blink awake. I pry my cheek from the bars of the cage and feel the deep indents marking my skin as I massage it with the back of my hand. My muscles protest as I stretch my curled legs, and my stomach roils as I sit up. “ Rie! ”
The cage swings, and my head swings with it. I’m still dangling above the club, but the sea of blondes and Beaulieu students are gone, though a few stray blonde wigs remain as evidence that they were here. Through the balconies’ French doors, I can see that it’s pitch black out.
“Hale!”
I hear Rie Rie’s heels before I see her.
“You’re still here?” she asks, blinking up at me behind her thick lenses.
I can’t believe they just freaking left me up here. Then again… I can. Hale put me in the cage because he sensed the split vibe of the crowd. Maybe he thought he was protecting me. Hale Pierrot caring about me, even a crumb, wasn’t on my bingo card.
“Where’s Hale?” I croak. My throat’s parched despite all the drinks I’ve downed. Water, I need water, and I need to get out of this damn corset so that my ribs can expand enough for me to breathe.
“He’s hosting a private event tonight, remember?” she says, pulling a lever, and the cage begins its slow descent.
“He mentioned something about branching out, yeah.” I freeze. “Wait, tonight? He said the private event was tomorrow night.”
“It is tomorrow night. You partied into the morning and slept the day away. Like I said, I didn’t know you were here.”
“Wait,” I rub my eyes, and they immediately begin to burn. My fingers are sticky, covered in some dried ultra-high-proof alcohol. I try to blink away the sting, my eyelashes sticky from sweat and tears. “Who’s working the private event with him, and why didn’t he wake me up?”
“You saw the new workers. Well, the ones that passed the first round, anyway.”
Round? More like who shook their ass the fastest and made his dick the hardest.
“He should’ve woken me up. I know the ropes.”
“After one day of working?” Rie arches a brow.
“Well, at least I know how to mix drinks and not just balance them on my head. Hale said that client was important. He shouldn’t have taken brand-new, untrained employees. I still have a stake in the club, so I wish he’d spoken to me about it. I would’ve taken the auditions more seriously and not got so shit-faced.”
“I don’t think you had the capacity to,” Rie says. “You looked so broken up there. Like a wounded dove.”
The nickname sends a shot through my heart.
“I thought you didn’t know I was up there,” I say as the cage clears the bar, sliding into its original position.
“I didn’t know you were still up there. The last time I saw you, you were making it rain.”
“Rain?”
“You sloshed your tears and bottle right between the bars on my head. At least you didn’t give anyone a golden shower. You must have a bladder of steel. Me? I got three shot glasses worth tops.”
Golden shower… Gant gave me one on the first day of Beaulieu. I swear I can’t escape him even when he’s long gone.
“Sorry.” I wince, my bladder suddenly on the verge of bursting. I hold my spinning head with one hand as Rie unlocks the cage, and I pat around the golden metal with the other, but I come up empty. Then I realise I’d put my phone on a table in the lounge before Hale raised me to the rafters, so I wouldn’t keep checking for a message that would never come. I scan the tables, but I can’t find it on any of the coffee tables littered with used shot glasses.
“Rie, have you seen a phone anywhere?” I ask, searching for my shoes. Or rather, Bae’s house slippers.
“Hale gave it to me before he left. He told me to secure it in his room for you.”
I nod and scramble down the hallway on noodle-like legs as I grip the walls for dear life. What the hell was in those shots?
I find my phone on Hale’s dresser beside a photograph. I don’t pay it any mind until something slips from my fingers to the floor. A photograph. One my phone had been resting on top of. The one from the box of stuff Hale’s mother had dropped off. There’s slanted writing scrawled on the back noting the year, and when I flip it over, it’s the photo of Hale and his mother at the beach. The one that was inside the homemade picture frame. But as I scan Hale’s baby face, I realise something’s off. I flip the photo back around.
“Did you find your phone?” Rie asks, plunking into the room.
“Yeah, but look at this,” I say, showing her the writing. “The year’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hale’s eighteen. He wouldn’t have even existed in this year.”
“I asked him about that when I saw his kindergarten diploma. He was held back because Romani is his first language and when his mother emigrated from Hungary — ”
“ Hungary?! ” I cut her off.
Rie looks at me like I’m the dumbest person in the world. “Roma people are Hungary’s biggest ethnic group. You didn’t know that?”
I sway and crumple onto the edge of Hale’s king-sized bed.
I did not. But I can bet who does know.
“Anyway, Hale told me they held him back a year because of the language barrier, and he’s always been too self-conscious to admit it.”
No.
No.
“Why’d he pull this out of the frame?”
Rie just looks at me curiously.
“This photo, it was inside a homemade frame, like Hale had made it in arts and crafts,” I say impatiently.
“Oh, he put his new family inside of it. That’s what that Romani word means at the top.”
I follow Rie’s long red fingernail to the dresser, to the frame, and I freeze at the sight of Gant’s black eyes staring at me over Hale’s head as he ‘crowns’ him with his fingers. A finger is midway over the flash. I assume it’s Rie’s.
“Rie?” I croak. “Did you take this photo?”
“Yeah, the other day.”
“What other day. Like, yesterday?”
“A few days ago.”
For a few days, Gant’s known Hale’s true identity… Even before he…threw me away.
He saw the photo. He saw the wrong date on the back, the beach that isn’t a beach upon closer inspection but a pool. A spring.
Panic blooms in my chest. “Did Hale say who the client was? That he’s throwing this private event for tonight?”
“Just some businessman. Hale said he got twelve per cent of his own company’s shares back.”
I freeze at that, my fingers gripping the bedspread desperately. “Twelve per cent?”
‘Her firstborn is set to inherit twelve per cent of Auclair Enterprises.’
“Yeah, I don’t understand how shares work, but it seems like a big deal. Normally, I just click the little curved arrow. Badda bing, badda boom.”
My chest caves, my ribs stabbing my heart. “Bart? Did Hale say that the private client was Bart, as in Bart Auclair?”
Rie shrugs. “Sounds like someone that would own a penthouse.”
Penthouse.
I unlock my phone and dial Hale’s number again and again until my thumb goes numb and my blood grows cold with each redial. Just when I’m about to give up, someone answers.
“ Hello? ”
“ Rie? !” I shriek, looking up to see that she’s gone. I sprint from the bedroom into the hall, and she pokes her head out from behind the bar, Hale’s phone pressed to her ear.
No!
“Why would he forget his phone?” I ask, dropping my phone to my side.
“He was wasted when I woke him up. Once he saw the time, he was frantic to organize the girls before shoving them into the shuttle bus he’d hired. After they left, I found it ringing between some cushions.”
“I have to go,” I say frantically, bending under couches in the lounge until I find a pair of discarded stilettos, a half size too small. I shove my sausages into them, grab someone’s discarded coat and beeline it to the door.
“Where?”
But I don’t have time to answer Rie as I blast out the front doors and into the freezing night air. My numb fingers scramble to open my ride-share app, and I quickly tap Gant’s saved address. After tonight, I’d finally delete it. I’d finally delete everything.
Still, getting to the penthouse is only half the battle. How am I going to get inside? Gant obviously wouldn’t let me up, and Rin’s already left the building. Then it hits me. Aria! Aria lives in the tower, too.
I speed dial her number, and she can barely say hello before I cut her off.
“Where are you?”
“ Good night . On the train, why.”
“The train?” I ask, flabbergasted, as I hail a passing cab. I could cancel my ride-share, but it shoots past me. Given my scant outfit of a corset and stockings and the fact that I’m perched on a corner, they probably think I’m bad news.
“I can’t take it any more. I want to see Etienne even if he doesn’t want to see me.”
“We’re going to Beaulieu tomorrow,” I say with a rush as I wave down another cab. “You’ll see him there.”
But then reality washes over me. Would Gant seriously harm Hale now that he knew the truth? Would he let Bart? And if they did, how could I just go to the academy like nothing’s wrong? As if I didn’t know the truth? As if the murderer weren’t in every single one of my classes? And how would the murderer just let me be when he knows that I know?
“Tomorrow’s too long. Besides, I’m not going to bother him. He won’t even know that I’m there.”
“What? Then how are you going to see him?”
A robotic voice drifts through the train’s speakers with an announcement.
“I’m boarding. I’ll call you once I’m in my compartment.”
Compartment?!
The line goes dead, and Gant’s name appears at the top of my contacts when I pull the phone from my ear. I can barely breathe as my thumb hovers above his name. I have to get into that penthouse by any means necessary… Could I just call him with an excuse? Would he even answer after our explosive encounter a mere twenty-four hours ago? And during his father’s private event no less?
No. I saw the finality in his eyes when he told me he wasn’t chasing me any more. He was bored and tired. Whatever hold I had over him was gone.
But…but what choice do I have? Hale.
Baby Hale flashes across my mind’s eye. Then the Hale who’d hired me and hid me, even if only for a little while. Then last night’s Hale, who’d welcomed me and locked me up safely where I could be alone and still surrounded by humans. If nothing else, I can honestly say that Hale gave me a chance. I have to give him one, too. A chance to get the fuck away from the Auclairs, now.
With a shaking finger, I dial Gant’s number, and immediately, the call disconnects because he’s blocked me. That revelation hits far harder than it should as I blink down at the screen.
Aria’s words from a drunken night in Beaulieu’s dorms come back to me. ‘Imagine that? Being invaluable. So precious one day and a bitch on the side of the road the next. Games. It’s all games. We’re all just little toys for little boys. Until they’ve outgrown us.’
My ride-share, a silver coupe, pulls up to the curb, and I fly in without a clue as to how I’m going to break in.