Chapter 46 #2
“Duchy, I’m sorry.” I quickly finish my bite and to hold her hand. “If it’s any consolation, I get how difficult it is. Family can be complicated.”
I don’t mention that it’s usually the enemy part that’s complicated in my family, but she doesn’t need to know that.
She winces. “No, I’m serious. I don’t mean difficult.
I don’t mean complicated.” She pulls the thread tighter around her finger, squishing the pillow.
“I mean my family tree is full of the kind of people who could blame another tree that’s on fire for catching one of our branches aflame, and then all the branches are expected to jump off so we can light the rest of that other tree on fire until everyone’s ash and all that’s left is rotten stumps and scattered leaves. ”
She sighs then asks, “You know?”
I swirl another bite around as I think. Then my nose scrunches. “I think so?”
She gives me a look and grabs my free hand.
“And then, if they don’t like where the wind has taken one of the leaves, they call her a traitor and don’t stop looking for her.
Not even when she’s fallen in love with another leaf who’s boss is his own mean, big-ass tree that he has to be loyal to, even when two whole other leaves from other tree branches come and shake all the leaves on the small island up. ”
I grimace, shaking my head. “Okay yeah, I’m sorry Duchy, I think you lost me on that one.”
Her shoulders sag and she massages her brow with shaking fingers.
“Duchy? Hey, are you okay?” I take squeeze her hand that’s still in mine.
“No,” she answers, her voice small. She shudders, and her shoulders sag with defeat. “Don’t you ever just get tired of being treated like pieces on a chess board?”
The phrase goes through me like a tuning fork. I take another bite, letting the sweetness dissolve on my tongue as I think about my father in his Las Vegas poker room. Sol Bordeaux holding court for his shadows in New Orleans. The Lucianos’ mafia connection. The Furys and their arranged marriages.
“Yeah. I do,” I admit. “All the time.”
“I hated being a pawn in it,” she agrees, and her voice has fallen into a rhythm that sounds like something she’s rehearsed a hundred times in her own head, waiting for the right person to hear it.
“I hated that my purpose in the family was to be useful. To be leverage. To marry the right person, or deliver the right message, or show up at the right dinner and smile. Lie on the stand for someone who’s definitely guilty.
Smuggle shit into prison. Be all the right things for the wrong people. I couldn’t… I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“You ran.” I nod.
She looks at me with tired eyes. “Yeah. I ran.”
The word hangs between us.
“I ran too,” I say, before I can think about whether I should.
Something in her expression breaks open. Not dramatically—Duchy doesn’t do dramatic unless it doesn’t matter. Just a hairline fracture in her composure, a tiny shifting of weight.
“I know,” she says softly. “I always knew you were like me. I could tell from the beginning.”
The heater cuts off despite the fact that my skin has gone cold, leaving the cabin goes very quiet. My breaths are too loud in the silence.
“But…” she begins. “When you find someone crazy enough to keep you,” she lifts a shoulder, “you stay.”
She squeezes my hand, and my fingers go fuzzy at the tips with the pressure.
“Xavier is that for me, ya know? My family is insane and violent and they don’t forgive, but Xavier is my family now. I’d do anything for him. Anything.” She holds my eyes. “I need you to understand that.”
“Of course I do,” I begin. “I totally get…”
The sentence drifts slightly, and I reach for the end of it, but it’s moved just beyond my tongue.
I frown down at it and take a bite of tart, then tap the tip of the lazy muscle with my fork.
Wait. Is that weird?
I yank my hand down.
That’s weird… right?
No, because it was right there. I was going to say something. About running, about staying, about how I understand because—
I take another bite.
“What happened?” My voice sounds fine, I think. “With your family. When you left.”
“They found me,” she answers it simply. “They always find me. That’s what they do.
It’s part of their game now. I run, and they let me think I’ve gotten away—every fucking time,” she curses with a slight shake of her head.
Then she swallows. “Until one day there’s a knock on your dressing room door and you’re called up to your boss’s office to watch the worst video you’ve ever—” she hiccups and alarm races in my chest.
“Oh my God, Duchy—”
She waves me away. “Don’t… Seriously, I can’t have you being nice to me right now. I’ll…” she begins to shake. “I won’t be able to do it.”
I frown, but my lips feel strange. Numb, almost, and I eat another bite of tart. Dang, my friend is on the verge of tears right now and I can’t stop eating sweets.
What’s wrong with me?
“And then…” She breathes out and in. “And then people you thought you’d never see again look up at you, smiling from the carnage they’ve left.
From the person—” She swallows. “From the person you love, they look up from him and directly at the camera to say, ‘We own you, we’ve always owned you, wasn’t that a fun little game? ’”
The chill in my skin sinks deeper, despite the heater coming back on, settling in my chest like a weight.
“Duchess…” I breathe. “What happened?”
“They’re everywhere, that’s what happened. Just when you think you’ve escaped. They catch up.” She shakes her head. “There’s no distance that’s enough.”
I find my hand bringing another bite to my mouth. The tart is still good, still sweet. I don’t taste it so much anymore. I take another bite to make sure.
I should be paying closer attention to what Duchess is saying, but there’s a strange film over my tongue that I can’t scrape with my teeth.
Plus, my body has decided that the accumulated wreckage of the past forty-eight hours is finally coming due.
My limbs feel loose and heavy like I’ve taken a good long bath.
As if my body thinks I can relax for once around someone other than Hatton.
That makes sense. Duchy is here. Food is here. Hatter will be back in thirty minutes. My body is just… letting go.
Finally.
I lean my head against the wall behind the bed.
“There’s something else,” Duchy says, and her voice sounds slightly further away than it should, which is silly because she’s right next to me. She holds the lump in her arms tighter and begins to rock. “Something I should have told you a long time ago.”
“Mm.” The syllable comes out soft and warm. Sleepy. “Tell me.”
“When someone threatens X—” She stops, then starts again. “He’s my family. The only one I claim. And if someone hurts him—if someone threatens him—”
“Who?” I growl. The word takes slightly more effort than I expect. Like pushing through gauze. “No one… hurts my friends.”
She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, they’re bright purple for a flash, then back to their blue.
“My family is threatening him. Castle told them where I am.”
The name registers, but distantly. Like hearing a car alarm from several blocks away. Important, probably. Something to deal with. Later.
“Castle,” I repeat, my tongue is thick.
“He has leverage on Xavier. He has—” She exhales, those long lashes fluttering as she wipes the wetness from the corner. “He has things he can use. Against both of us. And I’m trapped, Lucy, I’ve been trapped for months, and I—”
“You’re really pretty.”
She stops. “Shit.”
“Did I ever tell you that? Your eyelashes are so…” My eyes blink to show her how many more eyelashes she has in comparison. My hand reaches toward her face, aimed at a wet one. I squint at them. “How have you ever tried counting them? You have so many of them.”
Duchy’s eyes well with moisture and her lips wobbles, so I snatch my hand back.
“Shoot. Sorry.” I take another bite. The fork is harder to find than it should be. “I tried to touch your eyelashes. And now you’re mad.”
But I look at my own hand with some confusion. “I thought I tried to… Didn’t I? But that’s strange. I wouldn’t do that.” I frown. “Probably.”
Duchess is talking again. Something about Castle, about leverage, about being trapped.
I want to tell her I know exactly what she means—I could write a whole book about being trapped, several chapters about syringes and warehouses and poker games and ocean water and surviving secrets—but the world spins and I grab the bed before it flies away.
“Stop!”
Duchess stills.
“Duchess… I don’t want to scare you,” I try to be calm. “But the boat is moving.”
I look at her, my eyes hurting they’re so wide.
I glance toward the porthole. The lamplight on the dock is swaying. No. The dock is swaying. No—
“It’s because of the turtles,” I whisper loudly. “They’re mocking us.”
I focus on her bright red hair, the edges growing like a big hat until it melts into the walls. She’s not blurry, exactly, more like a photograph slightly out of focus.
My gaze drops at the baby Duchess is holding—
“Oh my God! Where did that come from?”
Duchess sucks in a breath and looks down but then she blows it out. “What do you mean? It’s your pillow.”
“Nuh uh, that’s not a pillow. That’s a baby.”
I peer into its black eyes against its pink skin. They almost look like buttons. “Maybe it’s a pig.”
“Jesus, there was too much.”
“Too much what?” Instead of listening I collapse back against the wall and blow out a breath, trilling my lips.
I’ve been so tired. The past forty-eight hours.
The Smoke and Mirrors Room, and Hatton, and the truth, and everything, and of course my body is shutting down, of course it is.
I’ve been running on adrenaline and sex and terror for two days straight and now I’ve eaten real food in a warm room with my friend beside me and Dinah on the bed and—
“Dinah!” I go to grab the pig in Duchess’s arms. But it’s too soft for a baby or a pig or a Dinah.
“It’s a pillow.” I jolt back, dropping it.
“I know, Lucy, I tried to tell you.”