Chapter 19
“Iris, you can’t stay cooped up in that flat all day, every day. It’s not healthy. Why don’t you come home for the weekend? Your dad and I would love to have you round.”
Iris smiled tiredly at her mother’s face on the phone screen, and shook her head. “I can’t this weekend, Mum. I have a deadline. And you guys have the ’OMalley wedding tomorrow night, don’t you?”
“Your dad and Robbie can handle that. You and I can have a nice girls’ night in.”
It was tempting, so tempting. Iris would do anything to escape the prison her flat had become these past two weeks. Her anxiety levels were constantly spiking, she had her therapist on speed dial, and she just wasn’t coping. Her work was the only thing keeping her from spiraling into a deep depressive episode. The constant gnawing guilt at the trouble she’d caused her family, her flatmates… Trystan, added to the inability to leave her building without being accosted in some way by the gutter press, were taking their toll. And Iris wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to cope with this.
“Mum, you know I can’t do that,” she whispered, her voice taut with pain. “They’ll follow me. They’ll start harassing you and Dad again. And eventually it will affect the business. Clients won’t want to hire you if it means being accosted in the streets by so-called journalists trying to pump them for information about me.”
“I don’t care, luv. We haven’t seen you in weeks. We can handle this. We can handle anything as a family. Just trust us.”
Iris’s eyes welled with those ever-present tears and her lips quivered, before she brutally bit down on the inside of her cheek as punishment for her emotional reaction. She tasted blood but it worked. The shock of pain jerked her out of the downward spiral into self-pity.
“Let’s do something next week, okay?” she said with a closed-mouth smile. “I just have to finish this edit and I’ll be free to spend some time with you.”
“That’s what you said last time, Iris. Look, this?—”
“Oh, sorry, Mum,” she interrupted quickly. “I have to go—my pizza delivery is here. Chat soon, right? I love you.”
She disconnected the call before her mother could protest and tossed the phone aside to bury her face in her hands.
Things weren’t getting better. Iris had believed they would. Had hoped the situation would blow over. But the press wouldn’t leave her alone. She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Evan the day after she’d returned home. She’d tried to force her former friend to print a retraction, but the other woman had point blank refused to even contemplate it.
“Why should I?” she’d asked with an insufferable smirk on her face. “None of it is a lie.”
“You stole my words. My private, innermost thoughts. You ruined my life, Evan, and laid my soul bare for the world to gawk at.”
“God, you’re always so fucking dramatic. And I didn’t steal shit. You gave me your password. Maybe next time don’t leave your private thoughts in an easily accessible folder in the cloud. Lesson learned, right?”
Iris cringed at the reminder of her stupidity. Her blind trust in her “friend” who’d never really been a friend. She’d given Evan her password years ago, when the woman had needed to use her laptop after her own had died just before a deadline. Iris had used variations of that same password on the laptop since then. It wouldn’t have taken Evan long to figure it out.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Why? Maybe because you’ve never bothered to capitalize on the many advantages you were given. Stanford Carter was your father and mentor for fuck’s sake. This damned interview with Trystan Abbott falls in your lap. But you’re too—what? Principled? Good? Better than the rest of us mortal beings?—to take advantage of that fact. I did you a favor. You’re not that special, Iris. He’d have dumped you anyway. At least this way you’ll be remembered. Maybe even get ahead in your stagnating journalism career. And if I happen to reap a few benefits from it too, why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“No. We’re not friends, Evan,” Iris had responded with absolute certainty. It was the only thing she felt sure of lately. “I thought we were. But it’s clear that I was wrong. We’ve never been friends, have we? You’ve been using me all along. You’re no better than a vile piece of shit stuck to the bottom of my shoe and it’s way past time I scraped you off. You ruined a man’s life, Evan. How can you be okay with that?”
Evan had actually laughed at her words. Iris cringed even now, a fortnight later, as she recalled the mockery in the woman’s laughter.
“That’s so precious. Little Iris trying to be a hard arse. I didn’t ruin his life. Far from it. Trystan Abbott is a movie star. Everybody loves him. And once the shock wears off, people will start to sympathize with him. Nobody will blame him for what happened to Trish Nesbitt. It wasn’t his fault, after all. She borderline stalked him.
“You, however, will always be remembered as the girl Trystan Abbott fucked in a moment of weakness and vulnerability. The woman who took advantage of his grief. It won’t take long for someone to point out that you’re not pretty or talented, and if he hadn’t been hurt and in mourning, he wouldn’t have looked at you twice. What do you think will happen then, Iris?”
Iris shivered at the memory of that taunting question. It had chilled her to the bone. The recognition that the public and press would inevitably turn against her, if they hadn’t already. That it didn’t matter how the story had got out, hers was the name in the story and in the byline. And she was the one who’d seemingly betrayed Trystan’s confidence. Nobody believed her protestations to the contrary. Nobody cared about the truth. Least of all Trystan. Everybody already believed the worst of her, and they would continue to do so. No matter what she said or did. And it had been unbelievably na?ve of her to believe any differently.
She’d known then that she’d never see remorse, regret, an apology, or a retraction from Evan. And it was hopeless even trying to appeal to her conscience on the matter. She was riding high on the success of this article. She’d received the promotion she’d been after. Her boss had been fired. She’d done a shitty thing and had been rewarded for it. Why the hell should she feel any regret about that?
And it had all unfolded pretty much as Evan had predicted. A few days of rabid interest in Iris and her side of the story had quickly morphed into something else. Something darker. The questions yelled at her the few times she’d dared to venture out of her building had been overly intrusive and lurid queries about sex with Trystan:
Is Trystan a good shag, Iris? How many orgasms in one session?– that particularly unsavory gem had come from a leering old man with whom Iris had been acquainted her entire life. One of her biological father’s cronies. He’d proceeded to shout out questions about length and girth and preferred sexual positions. It had made her sick to her stomach and as soon as she’d fought her way back into the building and up to the flat, she’d lost her lunch. The questions had only become more profane and personal.
Trystan, meanwhile, had stopped hiding from the limelight. He was back with a bang. As Evan had predicted, the public had reacted extremely sympathetically to the Trish Nesbitt revelations. When approached for a comment about Trish’s death, he’d gone on the record to state that he had valued her as a colleague and as a friend, and deeply regretted her death and his role in the circumstances leading up to it.
Like an addict needing her fix, Iris picked up her phone—ignoring the hundreds of unread emails, texts, and voicemail notifications—to find the bookmarked interview Trystan had done just last week, with a well-known late-night television host.
He’d looked tired, his features thin and drawn. Her hungry eyes ran over those features with which she’d become so intimately acquainted and she felt that familiar pang of loss at the sight of his brutally shorn black hair. He’d gone for a military-style buzzcut. It suited him, of course—everything suited Trystan—but every last remnant of the man she’d fallen for was now gone.
Iris felt equal amounts of regret and resentment toward him, each emotion vying for superiority in her chest. It confused and frustrated her, these warring factions of hatred and love that had taken up residence in her heart and mind.
“Trish’s loss was a profound one to the industry and to me personally,” he said in reply to a question from the host. “My paramount regret about the resurgence of interest around the circumstances of her death is that it has undoubtedly reopened barely healed wounds for her family.”
Iris gnawed at the skin around her thumb-nail and hissed in pain, before tucking the digit into her palm. She’d torn the cuticle days ago and it couldn’t properly heal because she kept worrying at it.
The legendary talk-show host—Michael Holmes—was making sympathetic noises in response to Trystan’s words, his face contorted in an exaggerated expression of somber concern before he asked the question Iris knew—from repeated viewings—was coming.
“And this woman—this so-called reporter—Iris Hughes…” The man grimaced, as if the mere taste of Iris’s name on his lips was repulsive. “Have you spoken with her, or seen her, since your return?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss her,” Trystan’s voice had gone cold, and she could see the familiar frigid warning in his eyes and knew the man must have strayed off script.
“What she did was unconscionable,” the man persisted, despite the clear warning in Trystan’s voice. “An ethical breach. Will you be pursuing legal action against her?”
“Are you certain you want to continue this line of questioning, Mike?” Trystan asked with a thin sharklike smile. “You don’t want to ask me anything about Cryo Cop?”
“I have plenty of questions about your upcoming release, of course,” the host said with a wide smile and in an agreeable tone of voice, before continuing. “But before we get to that, I was wondering if you’d read the most recent leaked excerpts from Iris Hughes’s journal? It’s clear she has a host of psychological problems. Did her neuroses and anxiety issues remind you in some way of the problems you’d faced with Trish Nesbitt? It must have been traumatic, being trapped with someone like her. Traumatic and undoubtedly triggering. Since you did lock her in her room for a while, you must have felt threatened by her. Did she—wait, what are you doing?”
The last question, following the barrage of others, was panicked and high-pitched and came as Trystan pushed himself up from the iconic blue sofa that he’d been sprawling on like a relaxed cat just minutes earlier.
“I’m done.” Trystan said with an easy shrug, not an ounce of emotion in his level voice.
“But—” Mike Holmes slanted a panicked glance at the camera and then off to the right. “C’mon, Trystan, we haven’t finished yet.”
“I have.” He was tugging at the mic pack, before tossing an exasperated glare off to the side and asking, almost politely, “Can someone get this”—the next word was bleeped out—“thing off me please?”
He strode off stage, ignoring Mike Holmes’s repeated protests, while the camera tracked his progress until he disappeared backstage. They switched back to Mike, who stared blankly directly into the lens for a few seconds before blinking, and smiling with the practiced ease of a consummate professional. He smoothly apologized for the disrupted schedule with a forced chuckle and moved on to their next guest.
It had been Trystan’s only televised interview. He’d made a few red-carpet appearances before and after that—always stag—ignoring all of the inevitable questions about Trish or Iris.
After that disastrous interview, interest in Iris had ratcheted up from rabid curiosity to slanderous and sordid insults. Nothing was exempt from public scrutiny, excerpts from her journal—her private thoughts and insecurities, her innermost secrets, her sexual fantasies, everything that had happened between her and Trystan—had been released on an entertainment blog just hours before that interview. Iris wasn’t sure how, likely Evan, probably at the behest of Mike Holmes’s team.
How it had happened was moot. The fact was it had happened and Iris felt like she’d been stripped naked and flayed alive before a jeering, unsympathetic crowd. Especially since Trystan’s outraged fans had started the teamtrystan hashtag, demanding that Iris be canceled, while labeling her everything from a money-hungry slut, to an obsessive psychopathic stalker, who many believed posed an actual physical threat toward Trystan. It was around then that the death threats had begun too.
Iris felt increasingly isolated from her family, from the few people she’d considered her friends. Her flatmates had been curious and supportive at first but after those first snippets of the journal had been leaked, they’d begun to avoid her. As if they were afraid that the public ridicule was somehow contagious.
The requests—then near demands—for interviews were becoming overwhelming, with some of the more notorious gossip rags offering obscene amounts of money for her “side” of the story. She was pretty certain her steadfast refusal to engage with any of them was one of the reasons the gutter press had turned hostile so quickly. Why she was now being vilified, mocked, and straight-up lied about. She didn’t have the energy or the desire—quite frankly—to fight some of the libelous things being printed about her. And she felt like she was free-falling into a dark abyss, no bottom in sight.
All she had right now to keep her sane was her work. And her writing. The writing gave her an escape from her intolerable reality.
She sighed and tucked her phone under her desk chair’s cushion. Even though the device was on silent, the screen lit up with every new notification. It was distracting and, worse, she would often see the opening lines of whatever horrible message had been sent to her, which—when they came continuously—could send her into a terrible funk.
She was between editing jobs right now. A few of her clients had jumped on the #cancelirishughes bandwagon and dropped her like a hot potato, but her more long-term regulars had stuck with her. It did mean she had less work to focus on and she was concerned she would start feeling the financial pinch soon. In all likelihood, she’d have to move back in with her parents at some point until the world forgot about her, but for now she was only just managing to keep her head above water.
She opened up her manuscript, and reread the last chapter. This was the one thing that brought her any joy at the moment. She loved how the story and characters were developing. Her pregnant werewolf detective would be going into labor soon. And Iris had submerged herself in a happy little research bubble, reading anything she could find on lycanthropy, with materials ranging from serious psychological tomes, to myths and folklore, as well as sexy, fun paranormal romances.
She was watching a fascinating documentary about European lycanthropic mythology when a quiet knock sounded on her bedroom door. She paused and tilted her head, wondering if she’d imagined the sound.
When the timid knock came again, she swiveled her chair to face the door.
“Come in.”
“Hey, Iris” her flatmate Hilary said quietly. “We need to talk.”
Hilary and their other flatmate, Nora, stood framed in Iris’s bedroom doorway, and Iris froze at the sight of them. The women wore matching expressions of apology and both looked supremely uncomfortable. Iris immediately knew what they wanted to discuss with her.
She fought to keep the wobble out of her voice, but couldn’t quite hold back the hot press of tears welling up in her eyes as she asked, “When do you want me out?”
“You have to, Trystan. Seriously, the studio is threatening us with breach of contract if you don’t do at least one more interview.” Bianca, Trystan’s PR guru, glared at him over the rims of her cat’s-eye glasses. It was her signature I mean business, Mister! glower. A look she’d used more on Trystan these past two weeks than she’d done in the entirety of their decade-long business relationship. “Quinn, talk some sense into him. He’s being unreasonable.”
Quinny slanted Trystan a helpless look. He was usually a hardass when it came to shit like this, but he was still treading on eggshells around Trystan after everything that had happened with?—
His brain skittered away from her name. He tried not to consciously form that name in his mind, on his lips, but he couldn’t fucking escape it in his dreams. And that made uninterrupted sleep an impossibility.
“After the shit Holmes pulled at the last one, I’m not inclined to do another fucking interview, Bee,” Trystan told the woman, hoping his tone brooked no argument.
Bee could be stubborn about these things but who could blame her? That was what he paid her for after all. He chugged down his protein shake in one go and slammed the shaker on the marble countertop when he was done. He swiped his forearm across his upper lip afterward—he hated the vile stuff—but after eating pretty much whatever the fuck he wanted over the past few months, and not maintaining his strict workout schedule, he needed to get back into shape.
Bee and Quinny had ambushed him first thing this morning. It wasn’t even five-thirty yet, for Christ’s sake. They’d made sure to show up before Trystan’s morning workout.
“What about a compromise?” Quinny offered, stepping forward with his palms up in surrender. He looked incongruous in Trystan’s kitchen, wearing a three-piece navy-blue pin-striped suit, while Trystan himself only wore gray sweatpants and a navy-blue tank top.
Bee—a petite sixty-something-year-old flower child—was dressed in her usual bohemian flighty style, wearing a flowy caftan-esque chiffon thing. Her hair was up in a messy chignon, bottle-blonde wisps trailing down around her face. Her make-up was caked on as always, with clumpy mascara—that was already smearing despite the early hour—and bright red lipstick, which had left a stain on her incisors. She folded her arms across her chest, and the many bracelets and beads she wore on her wrists, clacked together at the movement.
“What kind of compromise?” she asked, squinting at Quinny suspiciously. Her glasses would be a lot more effective if she actually looked through them, instead of over them, every once in a while.
“Why not let Trystan choose the journalist, the venue, and the medium?”
“Trystan would choose a high school blogger just to fuck with me,” Bee protested, and Trystan grinned wickedly.
“Brilliant idea, Bee! This is why I pay you the big bucks, baby.”
“Shut up, you massive man child,” she said, reluctant affection nipping at the edges of her words.
Trystan braced his palms on the countertop and stared unseeingly down at the grayish-green veins in the white marble between his hands.
“I don’t mind Quinny’s idea. Let me think about it, okay?”
“I’ll need an answer by tonight, Trystan,” Bee implored.
“Yeah, okay,” he said with a careless shrug, not really interested, but knowing he’d pick someone just to get her and Quinny off his back. Better to just get this shit over and done with. He lifted his gaze to Chance, who stood quietly in the furthest corner of the kitchen. He nodded at the man, “You ready?”
Chance’s expression didn’t change. “If you are.”
“Let’s go.”
Trystan had a home gym, and since he’d learned that Chance was proficient in mixed martial arts and Krav Maga, he’d been working out and training with the guy. Trystan was a pretty decent MMA fighter—nothing close to Chance’s level of course—but Krav Maga was new to him and he was enjoying the training sessions with his bodyguard.
He used to go running every day, but since his return it was impossible to leave the building without a crowd of journalists dogging his every step and screaming questions at him. He still did a few kilometers on the treadmill, but his heart wasn’t in it—he missed his outdoor runs too much. Instead, he channeled his excess energy into weight training and martial arts with Chance.
He waved insouciantly at his manager and PR agent as Chance preceded him from the kitchen, ignoring their outraged faces.
“Lock up on your way out,” he told them as he left the room.
“Great workout,”he huffed, an hour and a half later as he lay flat on his back on a workout mat. Chance nodded in response.
“You’re getting better,” the man said, as he prodded the inside of his cheek with his tongue, wincing a little as he found the spot that had split open after Trystan had broken through his defenses to sneak in a punch. His cheek was swollen and would likely bruise.
“Sorry about your face there, mate,” Trystan said.
“That’s fine. Better this ugly mug taking some damage than those fine porcelain features of yours,” Chance said with a rare grin. Laugh lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes which told Trystan that the man’s features probably settled into a smile more often when he wasn’t at work.
Chance had pulled his punches in the beginning and when Trystan had called him out on it, he’d laughed and muttered something about not wanting to mess up Trystan’s pretty profile. But after Trystan had told him to cut it out, Chance had been less solicitous, landing body blows, while still staying away from Trystan’s face.
Trystan pushed to his feet with a pained groan, and limped, barefoot, from the room toward the kitchen.
The penthouse apartment was blessedly quiet, Bee and Quinny long gone. His cleaning staff had also been and gone if the lemon-fresh scent in the air was anything to go by. He usually kept a chef and housekeeper in-house, but had wanted solitude after his return from South Africa and all that had followed it. And so Trystan had dispatched the spluttering Frenchman and his equally outraged wife—the housekeeper—to his home in Malibu, where his brother, Dan, was currently staying with his wife and kids on a short family vacation.
Chance was tolerated because he was a necessity. Especially now.
Trystan withdrew two bottles of water from the fridge and handed one to Chance, who’d followed him into the kitchen.
The man rarely spoke, which usually suited Trystan fine, but this morning he felt the need to speak to someone. Someone who didn’t really give a fuck about his fame or infamy.
“So… know any good journalists I can contact for this godforsaken interview?” he asked, half-jokingly, but honestly not sure who the hell he was going to approach. “Good journalist, what a fucking oxymoron that is.”
Chance unscrewed his bottle top, took a thirsty drink and then eased his bulk onto a tall bar stool, the bottle loosely grasped between his hands on the counter.
“Only the one you introduced me to,” the big Aussie said in such quiet tones that for a second Trystan wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. But when the words sank in, he staggered slightly and sat down on one of the stools as well, swiveling to face Chance.
Nobody within his inner circle had dared to refer to her even obliquely since his return and he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Chance’s statement.
He toyed with his bottle cap, screwing and unscrewing it as he considered how to respond to that quiet statement.
“Iris—” If he hadn’t been sitting down, his knees would have buckled at the sound and feel of her name on his lips. Jesus… fuck, he’d missed saying it. Missed hearing it. He swallowed past the arid dryness of his throat before continuing. “Iris isn’t a journalist. She never really wanted to be one.”
“Yeah? Fucked up that she wrote that article then, isn’t it? Why would she do such a thing?”
“For the money most likely. The fame. The attention.” Every word he uttered felt wrong, bulky and out of place in his mouth.
“For someone who wanted money, fame and attention, she definitely isn’t courting it much now, is she? Hasn’t consented to a single interview, hides out in her flat all day long.”
“What do you mean? How do you know this?” Trystan knew he should shut this down. Chance was being borderline insubordinate—he was pushing buttons, testing boundaries. And yet, Trystan couldn’t bring himself to stop the man. He hadn’t dared think of her over the past two weeks. In his dreams he made love to her every night. In his nightmares, she laughed at him and cruelly mocked his vulnerability and stupidity for trusting her and confiding in her. And yet, in reality, he hadn’t once dared to find out how much she was enjoying all of her fame and notoriety at his expense.
“It’s my job to know things. She’s a potential threat to your safety?—”
“Iris?” Trystan scoffed, genuinely shocked at Chance’s statement. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly would never have written all of those personal things about you.”
“What are you doing?” Trystan asked through stiff lips, leveling a frigid glare at the man. “This is none of your fucking business.”
Chance shrugged, taking another sip of water.
“You asked. And I thought we were just talking.”
Trystan was clenching his jaw so hard, he could hear his teeth grinding.
“What do you mean she hides out in her flat all day long?” he heard himself asking, his tone of voice intense, as if the words were being spoken by another iteration of himself. One who cared very much about the answer to that question.
“Well, she can’t leave without being accosted by the press. She’s shut down all her social media accounts—not that she was very active on them before, mind you… terribly negligent for an attention hog to not post every detail of her life on social media. Anyway, shut them all down because of the harassment.”
“What harassment?” Trystan asked tautly and Chance’s gaze sharpened on his face.
“The usual unimaginative bullshit, people calling her a whore, slut, cunt…”
“Jesus,” Trystan muttered, running a shaky hand over his face. The thought of the sweet, gentle Iris he believed he’d known confronted by such hatred and ugliness was sickening.
“Well, they think it serves her right for the way she treated you. And then all that stuff in her journal about her anxiety and phobias. Fucking weird shit to reveal about yourself to an unforgiving public, if you ask me. Don’t know why she’d do that.”
Trystan glared at the man, knowing what Chance was doing, recognizing that he had a point to prove, but unable to stop him from doing so. Because he wanted to—needed to—hear this.
“Those are the randos on the street. The paps are worse. Because she’s refused to grant any interviews, they’ve gone feral on her. All the pseudo-psychological articles about her so-called clinical depression, pathological stalking tendencies. I think she was described as psychotic and psychopathic in a single article.”
“She’s staying with her family, right?”
“She didn’t want to bring the shitstorm to their doorstep. That was a little na?ve of her… because, of course it affected them. They’ve lost business, been harassed, had to change their numbers. The kid brother has been in several fights already.”
Chance said na?ve, while Trystan called it innocent. She was so damned innocent. Despite what and who her father had been, despite what she had aspired to be, she had no real concept of how ugly people could get. After all, she’d once confronted a near-rabid beast with sweet optimism and confidence and the belief that he would never really hurt her.
“And Iris is where?”
“Trapped. In her flat.”
Trystan swallowed back a moan at those words.
Trapped. God. She would hate that. She had to be terrified. With no freedom of movement, it was her worst nightmare.
“She checked her messages for the first time last night. Thousands of them. Dozens were threats of bodily harm or death.”
Trystan’s head shot up and his stomach churned.
“What?”
“You had to know this would happen,” Chance said, his voice even—almost affable—and his green eyes somber. “You’re you. She’s a little nobody from Southfields with no weight behind her name. And when you left her unprotected to face the wolves by herself you sent out a very clear message to all the sickos and fuckin’ crazies out there: open season on Iris Hughes.”