Chapter Nineteen #2
Miraculously, I found my favorite peony and blush shower oil in the en suite bathroom, a welcome surprise, and was now postponing the frank conversation that awaited me beyond the door. I tipped my head up on the edge of the bath, sighing as I stared at the ceiling.
A dead body lay somewhere on the grounds of this estate.
A soft rap came from the door. I groaned, closing my eyes.
“Apricity.” Tate’s voice, dark and smooth, slipped like smoke beneath the door.
“Don’t you dare come in.”
“You need to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
My stomach gurgled, protesting the lie. I hadn’t eaten anything other than the small chicken Caesar wrap around eleven.
“Even if you weren’t lying, you still need to eat. You are mine now, and I want you well fed.”
I bit my lip down. I didn’t want to accept his offer.
“I also brought booze.”
I sighed, slinking deeper into the water so that only my head was afloat. “Put it in and sod off.”
He opened the door and ambled inside, still in his suit, which was filthy from riding a horse in the woods and butchering someone. He held a wooden bathtub tray and lowered it to rest on the lips of the tub.
There was handcrafted sushi and a Tajín-rimmed margarita. My mouth watered. I was dizzy with hunger. And tired. Bone-deep exhausted.
He stood back, surveying the top of my head. I snapped the chopsticks apart, trying to ignore him. It was a bit difficult to work the chopsticks and manage to keep my sternum below water to protect my modesty.
I brought a piece of a rainbow roll to my mouth. “Did you order in?”
“No. I have a private chef who lives on the grounds.”
How could said chef miss me running then? Or witness Tate’s wrongdoing, for that matter?
“He lives in the pool house across the backyard,” Tate read my mind.
Encouraged by the fact that I still hadn’t hurled any sharp objects at him, he sauntered to a vanity chair opposite to the bath and sat on its edge, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“You can make yourself useful by bringing me my clothes,” I allowed. “I put them on the radiator to dry.”
“You’ve fresh clothes in the guest room,” he said tonelessly, not offering any further explanation. “We need to talk.”
“No. I need at least one more margarita in me and to finish this food before I can hear you out.”
I continued shoveling sushi into my gob until the water got cold. Then I asked him to turn around and wrapped myself in a plush dressing gown.
“I’ll see to that margarita while you get dressed,” he offered.
“Next time you make it, bear in mind my day started with shit-talking colleagues, followed with bad news about Mum, and concluded with the realization my husband is a killer.”
“I’ve had tax days worse than yours.” Tate slinked out of the bathroom with a shake of his head.
Padding barefoot to the guest room, I pushed the door open.
I blinked, confused. All my belongings had already arrived. On the bed. Nightstands. Inside the opened closet.
My Invisalign retainer. Satin nightcap. Blue light-blocking glasses. iPad. My essential oils. Clothes. Socks. Slippers.
“When did you have time to bring everything from the flat?” I yelled to be heard through the hallway.
Tate appeared behind my back in a flash, holding a fresh margarita. He moved like a ghost, in complete silence.
“I didn’t.” He leaned against the wall, the soft light caressing the hard planes of his jawline. “I remembered what you use and bought replicas after our engagement. You were bound to come here sooner or later, and I really didn’t need you whining about wanting your Dots for Spots.”
“First of all, those things are literally lifesaving. Second, when have I ever forgotten any of your stuff?”
“You never forget my shit,” he agreed. “But you forget yours. You have a tendency to put yourself last.”
He wasn’t wrong, unfortunately.
“Anyway.” He scowled. “I was preemptively making sure you wouldn’t run in the middle of the night to get your fucking grown-up braces or something.”
“Tate, this is giving I’m-going-to-cut-you-and-make-sandwiches-out-of-your-meat.”
“I’m not going to cut you.” He quirked an eyebrow, giving me a once-over. “Unless you’re into that kind of stuff.”
“Do you realize how obsessive that is?”
His throat rolled with a swallow, and he looked away, at the wall.
He’d catalogued every single product I’d used over the years. Paid close attention in the few times we saw each other in an informal capacity.
The peony and blush shower oil wasn’t a coincidence; he bought it for me .
Butterflies fluttered inside my stomach.
Kill them now, Gia. Kill them with fire.
“Anything else you want to say to me?” he asked, expecting a thank-you.
“As a matter of fact, yes. Drop dead.”
Slamming the door in his face, I got dressed and brushed my hair into a bun. Once I was done, I made sure my Life360 was on and tucked my phone into the pocket of my pj’s. Cal and Dylan had the app. They’d track me if they didn’t hear from me.
I took the stairs down to the kitchen. Tate waited for me at the table with my margarita and whiskey for himself. His lips were pressed in a grim line, his fingers flipping an unlit cigarette.
He seemed quite cross to be explaining himself, and it occurred to me it was probably the first time he had to answer to someone. I could not recall him in that position before.
“Start from the beginning.” I sipped my second margarita. It was almost undiluted tequila.
“What do you want to know first?” He lit up his cigarette, exhaling the smoke to the ceiling. “Why I hate you, or why I killed that man? They’re connected.”
I flinched at the admission he hated me. Of course I knew it, but it was the first time he confirmed it. I was also puzzled as to why I was connected in any way to this murder. Did I know the man he killed in the panic room?
“Why you hate me.” I cleared my throat. “I want to know what I did to deserve the last five years.”
His index finger trailed the rim of his whiskey glass, and I could not, for the life of me, stop imagining him doing the same to my nipples, which puckered under my pj’s.
“When I was twelve, my late father adopted me. Up until then, my life had been hell on earth. I came to him battered and scarred, inside and out. Angry and distrustful. I was fucked up. I wet my bed until I was fifteen. Suffered from nightmares that followed me no matter where I slept. The first few years, I ran away from home every other week. I’d sleep in the woods.
Graveyards, sometimes. I needed dirt on my skin, darkness in my eyes to feel at home.
“It took my dad years to peel off my roughest exterior layers. And still, he couldn’t manage to take off more than the first charred coats.
” He knocked his tumbler of whiskey back, gulping it in one go before pouring himself three more fingers.
“I was unfit to attend a normal school—too aggressive, too wild, too dejected—so he homeschooled me himself, despite being a successful businessman. He ignored my curriculum entirely, instead teaching me useful things. Latin, medieval history, and computational science. Metaphysics, advanced logic, and Eastern worldviews. Every lesson was art, every class an experience. We’d talk into the night, almost every night.
When he realized I’d been sneaking out to graveyards, he sometimes followed me.
Sometimes sat with me there too. He said I was like the moon.
” Tate’s throat bobbed with a swallow. “Just because I wasn’t whole didn’t mean I wasn’t enough. ”
Tears stung my eyes. His adoptive father sounded perfect. I was surprised he’d never mentioned him in the five years we’d worked together.
“I’d become an extension of him. He took me on work trips.
Business meetings. Holidays around the world.
I learned the ropes and the craft of his profession as a real estate mogul.
I was eighteen when I realized why Daniel decided to adopt me out of nowhere.
It wasn’t because of charity. Not all of it anyway.
He needed someone to inherit his business and had no family to speak of.
And me, I was a genius child. A wonder kid.
By nineteen, I had a master’s degree. I served as his CFO and de facto CEO as he eased himself into early retirement.
A brilliant plan, if you ask me.” He smiled ruefully.
“Why did he need to retire so early?” I frowned.
“So he could focus on his first love and his greatest addiction— gambling .” He grimaced.
“Daniel was a gambler. It was a compulsion. He had no self-control when it came to the poker table. He’d been blacklisted from most East Coast casinos.
The only ones who were willing to let him play were the Ferrantes, and even they only did so because their bouncers roughened him into submission whenever need be. ”
Little by little, I felt my anger melting, giving way to empathy.
Tate obviously went through a traumatic childhood and adolescence.
No one had ever loved this man unconditionally.
The only person who ever resembled a parent to him was a stranger and an addict.
Strings were always attached to him being accepted.
Be it his talent for his adoptive father, money for his lovers, power and connections for his friends.
“It was an artificial match, he and I, but it worked,” Tate explained.
“I threw him into rehab a few times, but he always went back to the tables. Still, I allowed myself to get attached to him. He was the closest person to me. Then one day, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He killed a man. Accidentally. The victim was found with his head smashed in. Dad explained he did it in self-defense. That the man attacked him. The jury went back and forth for days.”
My blood froze in my veins.
No. No. No. No .
My secret, my origin, my sin , was Tate’s personal heartbreak.