Chapter 40
Chapter
Forty
STEFAN
It took me six days to get an audience with the man who had bought my life.
I looked terrible, red eyes, scruffy beard, calling a phone that never answered, standing in his office lobby where security had learned my face days ago.
So I did the thing I was apparently good at now.
I used the private investigator’s last report—the one that came with Kai’s weekly schedule—and I waited for him on a public street.
He came out of the trustees’ building at four forty p.m., alone, coat open, and saw me before I’d stepped off the curb.
Of course he did. He has never once in his life been surprised by me.
“Give them back to me.” I hadn’t planned an opening. Six days of rehearsing, and that was what survived.
He glanced at me, bored, and then walked leisurely toward the black car that was already waiting for him, engine running, door open.
“Kai. Please.” I dogged his steps. He didn’t bother slowing down. “Whatever money you spent on me, I’ll return it with interest. I’ll resign from the magazine. Take back the house. Your lawyers can draft any agreement, and I’ll sign without reading. Just give me back my family.”
He looked at me for a long moment, the street moving around us like we were furniture. His brows raised slowly, mocking me. “You speak as if I’m holding them hostage.”
You are. You put a spell on them.
“They won’t see me right now,” I whispered. I was a broken man, robbed of everything that mattered.
“I’m not stopping them.”
I ignored his free will sentiment because, no matter what he said, he was the only one who could give them back to me.
“We both know you’re the only one who can fix this.
You can ask Amelie to return my calls. She said I can’t see the kids either, not without a social worker present to supervise the visits.
She won’t see me, but she’ll listen to you if you talk to her. ”
That made Kai laugh. I saw red but gritted my teeth to keep from screaming. Antagonizing him had gotten me nowhere. I was at this man’s mercy, and he knew it, too.
“You have everything in the world, Kai. Money. Power. Connections. You’re the fucking Prince of Darster. I’m nobody. Amelie and the kids are all I have in this world. Please don’t take what little I have from me.”
His dark eyes went over my shoulder and fixed on the middle distance. The last time his eyes had done that, it had cost me everything. So, I turned around.
The billboard stood three stories over the intersection, so new that the crew was still folding up their lift beneath it. My own face looked back at me—camera in hand, my good side, Lucy’s best work—over five words.
THE NEW PRINCE OF DARSTER.
The street rat had become the prince. Fifteen-year-old me would have wept at the sight of it. Twenty-four-year-old me cringed.
“I wish to be the Prince of Darster.” Kai returned my own words to me. “That’s what you said. I asked what you wanted from our arrangement, and you didn’t ask for your wife or your family. You looked me in the eye and asked for that.” He nodded at the billboard.
I turned back around. “Kai—”
He tossed a folder against my chest. My hands caught it on reflex.
“The board of trustees signed off on it today,” he said.
“I was going to have my lawyers send this over, but now’s as good a time as any.
Everyone in this town watched me buy it out from under them.
The real estate. The mall, the cafes, and the restaurants.
Sixty-two businesses and the land under all of them. ” He nodded at the folder. “Open it.”
I opened it. Deeds. Transfer instruments. Page after page after page, executed, notarized, stamped. And on every single one, in the box where his name should have been, was mine.
“It was never for you,” I said, dumbfounded. All this time, Kai had been working on buying this town, and it had all been for me. “You were buying it for me.”
“So you could own this town and become the Prince of Darster. That’s what you wished for in exchange for fulfilling my wish.”
The wind took the top three pages off the stack and carried them down the sidewalk, and I watched a stranger step on my property without breaking stride.
“Take inventory.” He straightened his cuff, unhurried, a man closing a meeting. “Owner of a travel magazine. Ruby Sarafina wants you. And now, you own the town itself.” A beat. “I have made all your wishes come true.”
“I don’t want any of it.”
He had the gall to look irritated. “Don’t be a bad sport after the fact.”
“I don’t want it.” The folder was shaking. It took me a second to understand it was my hands. “Keep all of this and return my wife to me.”
Kai Cavendish laughed.
I had known this man for less than a year.
I had eaten at his table, bled on his lawn, lost a wife and a war to him, and I had never once heard his real laugh.
It was quiet and brief, and it was the worst sound I’d ever heard, because there was no cruelty in it at all. Just genuine, astonished amusement.
“You’re offering me money in exchange for my wife?” He shook his head once. “There isn’t enough money in this world. That was always the difference between us.”
He stepped past me, toward the car idling at the curb.
Desperate, I followed him, throwing everything at him for a sliver of my old life back.
“Then share her with me. You can convince her of anything. Let me back in. I don’t even need her to leave you.
I’ll adjust. As the third. It won’t cost you a thing.
You keep the money. You keep the crown, the magazine, all the businesses in this folder—” The wind took another page, and I let it.
“—I’ll sign the whole town back to you. I’d rather have half of her than a hundred percent of this. ”
He paused, listening to my pleas. Slowly, he turned to face me. “Now why would I do that?”
My voice trembled. “You once asked me what was better—sharing her or losing her altogether.”
“But you only lost her because you shared her. Why would I do that when I finally got my wish?”
“Your wish.” I repeated the words as if they were foul.
He laughed again. “You were so blinded by your own greed that you forgot to ask me, didn’t you? You forgot to ask me what my wish was.”
I racked my brain. “Your wish was Amelie, right? Then let’s continue the arrangement we’d agreed upon. I’ll behave, I swear.”
“That wasn’t my wish. But now, I finally have it, and nothing will make me give up an inch, not even if it costs my life.” He turned toward the car once more.
Above us, my own paper face stared out over the town I now owned. The lift beeped, descending. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun kept going down on schedule.
He disappeared inside the car, leaving me to realize that I had all the money in the world, but I was the poorest of them all. Because the only thing I wanted would never be for sale.
“Kai.” I ran up to the car and spoke to him through the window.
He waited.
“What was your wish?”
“My wish was for her to love me. It was the only thing my money could never buy.”
Two Years Later
I wasn’t supposed to be here.
There was a wife in a rented chalet a mile down the mountain who thought I was out on a walk.
Along with her was a horde of people who called themselves my closest friends, drinking thirty-year-old scotch on my card, and not one of them, in two years, had called me for a reason that didn’t have a favor folded somewhere inside it.
Tonight, they wanted to speak about a new restaurant opportunity.
Everyone wanted to speak about this or that.
There was a board meeting in Darster that needed my attention, sixty-two businesses that answered to me, a magazine to my name.
Yet the Prince of Darster was standing in the tree line at the edge of another man’s property, drunk, watching another man’s wife build a snowman with my brothers and sister.
Two years, and the geography of my life had been reduced to this—the wrong side of the fence. The wrong side of the property line in Vale at Christmas.
Vale, of all places.
Years ago, a girl I loved was invited here without me, because everyone involved knew I couldn’t afford the parking, let alone the cabin. She had turned down the offer without thinking, never wanting to go somewhere I wasn’t invited to as well.
I used to lie awake, promising myself that someday I’d buy that entire town a drink just to watch it choke.
Well. I could buy Vale now. I owned pieces of three resorts on this mountain through holding companies I’d never visited.
And I was standing outside it in the dark all the same, because the thing I’d actually wanted was on the other side of a split-rail fence, wearing a red knit hat, packing snow with both mittens.
I drank, I did drugs, and I watched. It was what I did now. I had gotten unspeakably good at it.
Back in Darster, I had a spot. Past the fence line of my parents’ old house—because Kai decided to make that a permanent home for Amelie, my brothers, and my sister—at the exact place where the kitchen light gave out and the dark began.
Somebody had stood there for years before me, learning that window by heart.
How ironic that I stood where Kai must have once stood—on the viewing side of the glass—studying the family in my own mother’s kitchen.
They decided to go away for the holiday, and, of course, I followed them like a moth to a flame.
I found her without trying. Amelie knelt in the blue evening snow in a long white coat that didn’t close all the way anymore.
She was six months pregnant, glowing with visible, undeniable happiness.
Kai orbited her like a man guarding a lit candle in the wind.
He had cleared the path twice. He had produced a thermos from nowhere.
When she reached too far over the snowman’s base, his hand arrived under her elbow before her balance even asked for it, and she laughed at him and swatted him off.