Monarch

26. Elena

26

ELENA

W hen I wake up, I’m back in my bed, tucked in so nicely that I know Atlas must have done it. My curtains are open, but the light streaming in is watery gray, the sky an uneasy sea of clouds, the ocean beneath dark and churning.

I slip out from under the covers and stand at the window, looking down into the walled garden. It’s empty, no Atlas and no Ivy, only the bare, thorny bushes, every last bruised petal now blown away.

I shower and dress quickly, wanting to check in on Ivy. She looked terrible last night. But when I get to her room, Lorne is inside. He’s sitting on the couch, almost as if he’s waiting for me.

“Where’s Ivy?” I say, looking at her empty seat next to the window.

“She’s in bed.”

I start walking toward her door, but Lorne stands up from the couch and cuts in front of me, blocking the way.

“She’s sleeping.”

I glance from Lorne’s cold, stern face to Mrs. Cross’s. Her barely concealed glee gives the whole game away—Lorne is punishing me by not letting me see Ivy.

“When should I come back?” I ask tentatively. “I’m supposed to help make her costume.”

“I’m making it,” Mrs. Cross says, not bothering to hide her satisfaction in the slightest.

“She wanted to be an owl?—”

“She’s going to be a princess.”

Ivy and I made careful plans earlier in the week. She drew the costume in her notebook, and I promised to help her source the feathers. She’s been highly interested in the Halloween decorations going up all along Main Street. I made Lorne promise that she could come with us to the Reaper’s Revenge.

But now that’s all turned on its head, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Mrs. Cross knows it. It’s why she’s smiling like that, smug and gloating.

Lorne knows it. That’s why he’s watching so closely to see what I’ll do.

I make one last, pathetic attempt. “What about the work on the house? Shouldn’t Mrs. Cross be there?”

“The work is as good as finished.” Lorne is still watching my face. “We can move in right after Halloween.”

“Amazing.” I hope my smile looks more convincing than it feels.

Inside, I’m silently panicking.

Halloween is less than a week away.

Lorne glances at Mrs. Cross. She takes the hint and gives the little bob of her head that’s practically a curtsey, saying, “I’ll tidy up before you start writing.” She slips through the door connecting Lorne’s suite to Ivy’s, closing it behind her, leaving me alone with Lorne.

My stomach sinks like a stone. I try to edge toward the exit without being too obvious. But it is obvious to Lorne and it makes him smile. He grabs my wrist and pulls me close, taking my chin in his other hand, tilting up my face to look at him.

“What’s your rush?”

“I…I don’t want to make you late starting work.”

“How considerate.” His blue eyes search mine, cold and searing, until I feel utterly exposed. “What about last night…were you successful?”

Sensations flood my brain, Atlas’ huge hand down the front of my shorts, his dark eyes looking into mine, the warm, wet flush that flooded through my body like a spring melt after a hundred years of winter…

“I, uh…I think I’m getting close.”

My cheeks burn and my heart pounds. Lorne’s eyes narrow as he studies my face.

Whatever he sees, a slow smile spreads. “I can’t wait for you to show me.”

He releases my wrist.

I could almost sob with relief.

Especially once I’m out of the room, practically fleeing down the hallway.

I walk down to the restaurant alone, no Ivy with me, wishing I could have checked for myself to make sure she was okay. I don’t believe she was sleeping.

How long is Lorne planning to punish me? Until I prove I can have an orgasm?

The thought makes me enraged.

And moving in with him next week ?

Yeah, I can’t think about that at all.

Marrying Lorne and moving into his castle was becoming conveniently hazy in my head—a future problem that future me would have to deal with.

Now it’s crushingly close.

It’s October 27. Something else my brain had subtly stopped keeping track of. It’s so easy to let the gray, gloomy days bleed together in Grimstone. Halloween is on Friday, four days away.

Lorne might expect me to move into his house as soon as Saturday. And get married…right away.

My heart is squeezing, jerking in my chest like a fish out of water. My skin is cold and clammy.

Am I actually going to marry Lorne?

“Table for one?” the hostess says in a slightly sassy way. This is Sienna, who was dumped by her boyfriend my first morning in Grimstone, and who likes to stand by the silverware gossiping with Olivia. They’re friends with each other but not with Ralph the bartender, who hates his lederhosen.

“Table for one,” I confirm, trying to make it sound bold instead of pathetic.

I’m looking for Atlas, and I keep looking way too long after it should be obvious he’s not here. I try to hide my disappointment, but Sienna smirks and says, “He hasn’t come up yet.”

“Who?” I act innocent.

Sienna snorts, tossing my menu down on a table. “You know who.”

I sit down, blushing furiously. Only to lock eyes with Ralph, who winks at me.

I cannot imagine what color my face is now.

“Got your cappuccino, Amy!” Ralph cries, swooping a cappuccino from out of nowhere in front of an extremely startled Amy.

“WhoaJESUS!” She has to take it or wear it.

Ralph is always doing favors for Amy, usually unasked. I think this indicates a crush but one that does not seem to be reciprocated.

“Thanks.” Amy dumps the cappuccino directly into a plant.

Ralph looks heartbroken.

Amy looks supremely chic. No apron today, she’s in a smart black suit.

I ask, “Are you staging a coup?”

She winks at me. “You just keep Atlas distracted.”

I pull her down into my booth, hushing her. “ Does the whole goddamned staff here think I have a thing for Atlas?”

“No,” Amy says, smiling and gently extricating my hands before I wrinkle her suit. “They know that he has a thing for you. ”

My blood chills. That means Olivia knows, and there’s a very good chance she’ll tell Lorne—if Atlas lets her have five minutes alone with him.

“Why do they think that?” I’m wondering how much I can backtrack.

Amy gives me a look that says I can backtrack about zero point zero meters. “Because it’s completely obvious. He’s acting insane. By which I mean he’s stopped acting insane in all the ways he used to and has begun acting insane in entirely new ways.”

“I have to know what that means.”

Amy lists her boss’ sins on her fingers: “He used to work twenty-four seven, never sleeping, constantly roaming the halls, popping out where you least expected him, sticking his nose into everything. Running this place…” She raises her hands in a gesture like an orchestra conductor and says, in a remarkably accurate impression of Atlas, “Like a well-oiled machine.”

I am very curious to know if Atlas is aware how well his assistant can imitate him.

“And now?” I ask because I’m shameless. If I have the power to knock that boulder one inch off its path, I have to know it.

Amy’s eyes glint. She’s unashamedly gleeful. “He’s a goddamned mess. Still never sleeps, but now he’s never working, pays attention to nothing, and follows you around.”

I laugh. “You’re exaggerating.”

“I wish I were. He’s been on a rampage about someone breaking into your room, again, despite all his draconian rules about your keys. He told me to send up a new locksmith and put on an extra bolt this time, plus new locks on the windows.”

“I don’t think anyone came in through the window.” I remind her, “I’m on the sixth floor.”

Amy shrugs. “I’m just telling you what Atlas said.”

“He’s lucky to have you.”

“Damn straight.” Amy lifts her chin proudly. “I’m taking over before he sleepwalks into traffic or his business crumbles. Plus, I’ve got to get the hell out of the Onyx. You think the guests are weird here, you can’t even imagine the types they get there.”

“I’m a guest here,” I remind her.

She grins at me, unrepentant. “If the shoe fits…”

I realize now that we’ve truly become friends. Amy can tease me, and I can know that it’s said with love.

And finally, I can ask her, “What’s the deal with Ralph? You don’t like him?”

Ralph is blond and dimpled and has a body under that lederhosen that looks made to hew timber. Also, his cappuccinos are heavenly. I was shocked when Amy dumped hers into the Ficus.

But Amy’s face darkens until she no longer looks mischievous and laughing and begins to look like a dangerous woman. “Oh, I did like him. A long time ago.”

The “not anymore” and the reasons why remain unspoken as Amy takes a moody sip of my cappuccino. I knew she’d regret throwing away hers.

Apparently her thoughts are not on Ralph at all because when she speaks, she says, “You know, I was just a maid last year. I mean, I’m still a maid at the Onyx. But not here.”

I smile. “Atlas knows talent when he sees it.”

Amy laughs. “He knows a good deal—it’s not hard to beat what the Onyx pays me.”

“He trusts you. He already told me he’s going to hire you on full-time.”

“Really?” Her eyes light up.

“Yeah. But don’t tell him I told you—he says he wants to see what else you come up with in the filing systems while you’re still trying to impress him.”

“Oh, don’t you fucking worry!” Amy is gleefully profane. “I’ve got filing systems that’ll blast his fucking brain!”

“You’ve got Atlas right where you want him,” I assure her.

“That’s right.” She lifts my cup again, sipping slowly. Her eyes fix on Ralph across the room, and that fixed fury burns in them again. “And that’s why I’m not going to kill him.”

I’ve heard a lot of people joke about killing their ex. This is the first time I felt like that ex got lucky.

“Right,” I say carefully.

Amy glances at me sideways, raising an eyebrow. “He’ll be fine. We’re never dating again, so he can’t cheat on me twice.”

I snort into laughter, and Amy laughs, too, so wickedly that I really can’t decide how safe Ralph might be.

But I’ve got other things to worry about—somebody who needs me more.

“Amy, what rights does a fiancée have?”

Amy tilts her head, eyes as bright as a raven’s. “What do you mean?”

“I was just wondering…” I pick at my paper napkin, tearing it to shreds. Trying to figure out how to say this. “I’m worried about Ivy. And I wondered if…I have any say in what happens to her. Since I’m engaged to Lorne.”

Amy’s face fills with sympathy. “You really bonded with her, huh?”

It didn’t happen how I imagined it would. I thought it would be me, Lorne, and Ivy as a trio, making popcorn, watching movies together, laughing and joking.

There are not a lot of jokes with Ivy, at least not verbal ones, and not a ton of laughing, though she can be silly and playful when the mood strikes her. And we hardly spend time with Lorne at all.

But Amy’s right—the bond I hoped to build with her is there all the same. And it’s purer and stronger and more fulfilling than I could have imagined.

What I pictured was shallow and generic because I didn’t actually know Ivy yet. I didn’t know what was fascinating and charming and heartbreaking about her as her own little person.

And I didn’t know how easy it is to get invested in kids, their triumphs and failures, fears and elations. Ivy kept trying to sketch the rabbits in the garden, but they’d always dash away. When she finally crept up on a cottontail and completed her sketch, she ran to show me, her face euphoric. And I felt just as euphoric.

Powerful little emotions can brighten or darken a day in an instant, and Ivy’s affect me all the more because they’re so overwhelming to her. I feel the need to take care of her because she needs it more than most.

And if I’m honest with myself…I don’t like how Lorne treats her. I thought he was this great dad because that’s what he told me. But when I had the chance to see for myself, it was yet another instance of his words and reality not lining up.

“She’s a good kid,” I tell Amy. “What they say about her isn’t true.”

“Who?”

“Lorne and Mrs. Cross. They think she’s badly behaved, but she isn’t at all. She just gets upset because Mrs. Cross is constantly messing with her. Making her wear these itchy clothes she hates and go to all these places she doesn’t want to go, picking at her and criticizing her…”

I trail off because I just realized two things.

First, everything Mrs. Cross does, she does on Lorne’s orders.

And second, everything I just listed is exactly what Lorne does to me.

“I…I’m just worried about her,” I repeat, confused and uneasy. “So I wondered, legally speaking…do I have any say?”

Now Amy looks both sad and sympathetic, and my heart sinks. “No, honey. I’m sorry. He’s her dad.”

“And a fiancée…doesn’t really mean anything.”

“Not really. After you’re married, if you adopt her, then she’s your daughter. But at this moment…you might as well be a stranger.”

“But what if he doesn’t take care of her?” I think of Ivy up in her room, banished to her bed, mouth swollen. I don’t trust them to get her something she can actually eat. If they bother to order food for her at all.

Amy’s face slackens, and her eyes get a slightly hollow look. “It’s got to be pretty bad for them to do anything about it.”

“How bad?”

Her mouth tightens, the corners turning down. “My mom was a mess for a while. She did some pretty fucked-up things. Bad enough that some people reported it—but never bad enough for anybody to do anything about it.” She shrugs in a jerky kind of way. “That was a long time ago, though. I don’t know what the new sheriff’s like.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She shrugs again, almost like a reflex, like that’s her way of brushing aside the whole thing. “Just trying to be realistic with you. Like I said, a couple of people tried to help me and my brother Aldous—a teacher at our school, for one. But parents have a lot of rights.”

I give up on the napkin and do what I actually want to do, which is bite the edge of my thumbnail. Except, I’ve been doing that so often lately there’s no thumbnail left and not a lot of cuticle, either.

“What about if they’re not actually homeschooling her?” I’ve never seen Ivy doing schoolwork. Just errands and art and a whole lot of window-gazing.

“Pretty flimsy,” Amy says with brutal honesty.

I sigh. I’m glad she told me the truth. It’s what I guessed, anyway. I can’t do anything if Lorne assigns Mrs. Cross to babysitting duty purely out of spite or even lets her ruin Ivy’s Halloween costume. Being an asshole isn’t a crime.