CHAPTER TEN
A week after the party and Jules is still upset in that mercurial way of his, sullen moods and fiery silence. Lachlan suspects he’s building up to a new escape; half wants to let him at this point. Lachlan tries numerous times to apologise, although for what is better left unspoken.
Lachlan isn’t a genius but he’s not stupid either.
He knows he’s jealous.
Unfortunately, whenever he tries, Jules curtly demands to know what exactly he’s apologising for and then Lachlan falters and Jules glowers smugly and the whole thing resets.
Word has spread about him and Fenwick (they weren’t exactly discreet) and now, Lachlan has fresh reasons to regret all two and a half minutes of it.
He thinks of what happened between them as mutual masturbation, something that occurred a lot in boot, but accepts it’s probably not how it looks from the outside.
Blaire isn’t upset, but he can tell she’s a little disgusted and probably thinks less of him now.
Carrigan is now someone he either actively needs to heal the breach with or reassign to the outer rings.
Lachlan has a secure circle he trusts, Blaire firmly in the centre of it but he needs Carrigan back or he needs her gone.
Fenwick, for his part, remains a consummate professional. Nothing is changed, nothing is charged.
Mimi knows nothing and remains perfectly content spending her afternoons outside with Lachlan, Mari and her brother, sometimes Blaire too.
It’s been nine months since he signed that contract while it poured rain outside and the crows cawed loud.
Nine months and Lachlan Tanner’s whole life has changed.
As the tenth month creeps in, Jules does something truly shocking.
?
It’s not like Lachlan didn’t notice it.
He notices everything about that boy.
Where he goes, what he does, what he’s reading, what he eats, what he drinks, how often he uses the restroom, what he wears, who he talks to.
It’s Lachlan’s business.
Jules Penhalyx is his business.
So of course he notices Jules starting to flirt with Fenwick.
The kid has some sort of crush on Lachlan, upset about what was blurted out that night involving Fenwick and the hate sex. It makes sense that he’d do exactly this because this is how Jules operates. He’s way too fucking smart, and just sodden with feelings, cascading storms that stir dark seas.
He’s the brokedown God of this small world.
Powerful and powerless, ruler and prisoner.
So in the weeks leading up to what Lachlan walks in on, he notices the flirting, he notices Fenwick’s rejection of it…
crumbling over time. Lachlan is preoccupied with Mimi whenever he’s not managing safety and security for this mammoth Estate, so he doesn’t have spare time to devote, but he sees it.
Jules flirting with Fenwick is grating enough to be sufficient punishment for Lachlan anyway.
It’s exactly how he was in the ballroom that night, only much worse, whispery and targeted.
‘You’d make a better bodyguard than he ever would,’ and all that shit.
Lachlan doesn’t want this kind of battleground for Jules.
He wants cartwheels and sunshine and friendships for him.
He wants exercise, training, teaching Jules to fight.
He wants to give those extra five minutes of dancing if and when he breaks out.
Lachlan is starting to wish he would.
But in the weeks leading up, Jules Penhalyx’s focus is well and truly on the head of household, Mason Fenwick, and Lachlan can’t do anything about it beyond trust that Fenwick is a decent man at his core.
It’s a mistake hard-learned.
Lachlan walks in on them in his own room, his private quarters.
Jules is standing upright with his pants around his thighs. Fenwick is kneeling before him; movements and noises leave no doubt whatsoever as to what Fenwick is doing, what’s happening. Jules’ cheeks are brushed with delicate, pink heat and he looks drunk, but not on pleasure. Power, maybe.
It’s grotesque. It shocks Lachlan to his core.
Lightning strikes somewhere it never has before.
He counts the rings in a cut-down tree.
One.
Two.
Three.
And then he adjusts instantly.
A normal person might break down, lose it, lash out.
Lachlan has been trained against such outbursts.
He’s been tortured, drugged, trained, harmed, broken, built and deprived until his skeleton shone and his skin was leather and his mind was a machine.
Killer. He’s a trained killer.
And trained killers do not lose their temper.
He masters himself after less than three seconds, stone-wall neutral, though displeased.
Jules looks darkly thrilled. He has Fenwick’s fingers in his mouth while the older man sucks him off.
He and Lachlan hold each other’s gaze, and Jules is daring him to step in, to speak. Fenwick hasn’t even noticed.
Lachlan assesses the situation for threat, finds none, so he leaves.
?
Lachlan takes a personal day, drives out of Varrow City limits, leaves that fucking place behind until he sees the ocean. He then sits on grass-speckled sand and looks out at the water, the waves crashing in, grey skies above.
He just sits there. Exists.
Not guarding, not parenting, not fighting, not protecting.
Who is he when he sits still?
He never wanted to find out, and he doesn’t really care now.
But he’s starting to wonder if he’s bad to his core.
If he’s only going to make these kids worse.
He stays until it rains.
It feels as if the skies are calling him back to the Estate, as if those kids hold sway with the water and all the silly stories he heard once are real.
Those whispers in the ranks of RB when there was a big mission the next day and strong soldiers talked in soft voices of things they heard about, rumours.
Paranaturals and other kinds.
Bullshit.
What’s real is the sky, the clouds, the sea, the sand.
Blood, bullets, schedules and safety.
Skin. Voice. Hair. Hands.
Paper. Wood. Trees. Fire.
Life and death.
Food and water.
This world.
The people.
Life is short and brutal.
Lachlan is the one who makes that so, sometimes.
Master of death.
Killer.
God, he’s losing his fucking mind.
This job is making him crazy. Mimi is all that’s keeping him sane.
She is the anchor and Jules is the storm.
‘Get it together,’ he tells himself through tightly gritted teeth.
He drives back through the rain and enters the underground garage via the tunnel road. Inside the Estate, he notices his quarters have been meticulously cleaned, despite housekeeping running mornings, not afternoons.
He ignores it.
Showers, shaves.
Looks at himself in the mirror.
Grey eyes and dark hair that’s reached an inconvenient length where it no longer sits neatly, the sides thick, the longer top breaking into careless waves that curl the more he lets it grow. He either needs to cut it or settle in to let it grow another inch so he can tie it back.
He usually cuts it, but this time he thinks he’ll let it grow.
Mimi will like it, he suspects.
Sometimes, if he closes his eyes, Lachlan can still hear his father’s last breaths before his mother came in, but he can’t remember his face anymore.
It’s a blur. Others have replaced it.
Time changes everything.
That’s not a bad thing.
Not always.
He wraps his hand around the Mari tattoo.
And then Lachlan goes back to work.
?
Fenwick speaks privately to Lachlan later that day, clearly conflicted, but Lachlan is shutdown furious, not interested in helping him navigate anything about it.
Lachlan is making rounds, touch-stoning the windows for correct magnetic alignment.
He doesn’t stop, doesn’t look at Fenwick. Let him spill his guts, let him babble.
‘I should resign,’ the older man says, tone pitched low, ‘but I checked the contract and there’s no option whatsoever for it.’
Lachlan knows he won’t leave this place, neither of them will.
Even in death he’ll just go into the furnace, same as Clara Barnes.
Plenty of space for ashes.
No one leaves.
‘I know you’re disgusted with me,’ Fenwick presses on, the most human Lachlan has ever seen him. ‘I know that, but please believe me—’
Lachlan whips around, gets him by the throat and slams him into the wall so hard that the ebony cracks. The heel of his palm chokes Fenwick, who gags. Lachlan’s fury runs ice cold, he is all control, nothing but measured violence.
‘Julian is a child,’ he says clearly. ‘You have no excuses. No reasons. If you try to make it his fault, I’ll—’
‘Th-that’s not what I was gonna say,’ Fenwick chokes out. ‘It was… Penhalyx g-gave me permission.’
A small part of Lachlan had suspected that deep down, but it changes nothing.
‘You’re not listening,’ he tells Fenwick, stepping closer, tightening his grip, which has ended lives one-handed in the past and could easily do so now.
‘He. Is. A. Child. Permission means nothing. It’s wrong. You sicken me.’
Fenwick scowls. ‘How old were you the f-first time? Don’t be so nai—ack!’
Lachlan knees him in the balls, lets him drop like garbage and goes about his routes to do his job, and it’s only when he returns to Mimi, who runs to him and jumps into a bounce-hug that he catches easily… it’s only then that he feels human again.
‘Hello, princess,’ he greets, settling her where she belongs on his hip. Jules is in her room too. Lachlan doesn’t really want to look at him. This kid is the source of his exhaustion, the bad feeling inside that will have to assimilate and scar, no removing it, only living with it.
Someone else would leave.
They’d run, probably.
Lachlan James Tanner doesn’t run.
And he can’t.
He’s certain now the previous bodyguards are all still in the Estate, ashes and bone. He can’t leave and he wouldn’t anyway. Whatever else, no matter how much it hurts, he knows that this is where he’s meant to be.
So he looks at Jules, calm and neutral.
The boy has never seemed so uncertain before.
If Lachlan had the energy to read him, he’d see regret and a desperate searching in those lovely eyes, all his fire subdued by the watery mist of what might be an unspoken apology.
But he doesn’t have the energy for any of it.
He only has this job, and her. His sunshine.
His daughter, until he too is ashes and bone in this place.
But hopefully these kids will be far away by then.
Penhalyx is wrong. Lachlan can get them free.
He just needs to figure it out, somehow.
‘Puddle jumping?’ he offers Mimi now the rain has stopped.
‘Puddles!’ she echoes, with fiendish glee, ‘Make big mess?’
He smiles for her. ‘Yeah, why not?’ Then he looks back at the source of his headache, still sitting on the bed, shoulders rounded. ‘You too, Jules.’
‘I’m not… you’d probably have more fun without me.’
‘Nah,’ Lachlan says, adjusting his hold of his little girl.
‘There’s no one better at making a mess, come on.
Suit up.’ The Estate is free of Penhalyx’s shadow once more.
Fenwick won’t be an issue for a while at least. If Lachlan doesn’t lead them into some semblance of joy, there won’t be any.
‘Then we’ll have ice cream after.’ Ice cream is a magical promise in the East Wing, just like cookies are the best currency and secrets hold it all together.
Mimi kicks her legs with excitement, already promising not to tell anyone about it.
Anyone is him, Alistair. ‘Good girl,’ he whispers, kissing her cheek.
Lachlan looks at Jules, waiting.
A few moments pass before Jules rises to stand and then comes closer.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’ Lachlan winks subtly at him. ‘How about we have a race?’
‘A race?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You and me?’
‘I’m pretty sure I’ll kick your ass.’
A tiny flicker of a smile curls Jules’ lips. ‘I could beat you.’
‘Could you, though?’ Lachlan muses as they walk outside. The sun is peeking through the clouds, but the rain has left behind some spectacular mud if you know where to look for it, and Lachlan does. ‘I just don’t know. What do you think, princess?’
Mimi reaches for Jules’ hand, holds it while Lachlan carries her outside. She’s wrapped in a warm jumpsuit, brand new of course. She never had coats for outside before Lachlan came here.
Now she has dozens.
‘No one stronger than my Daddy,’ she whispers, head on his shoulder as the sunlight hits her face.
Lachlan lets it wash over him too.
‘Damned right, babygirl,’ he promises.
And so the rest of that first year in the Penhalyx Estate passes without incident. The new routine is formed to perfection. The kids are both safer and more secure than they ever have been, although those words carry double meaning in this place. All but one of the childminders are let go.
Lachlan’s one-year anniversary being the bodyguard to these children comes with a large bonus cheque and larger, more impressive quarters closer to the Cove where the kids sleep. He’s given a new car.
He’s given a new budget for Applied Innovations, although he keeps Jolene well out of Penhalyx’s clutches, despite how the old man sometimes asks for an introduction. Lachlan designs several new things to keep the Estate tightly guarded, and she brings them all to life from a distance.
He’s given whatever he likes, limitless rewards.
But it’s the flower Mimi picked for him that sits on his bedside table, and it’s Jules slowly coming around to the idea that Lachlan isn’t here to make his life worse that helps him sleep at night, and it’s that one picture that Blaire took of all three of them on the sunny day they took turns doing cartwheels that he looks at whenever things are hard, and it won’t stop raining and the crows caw so loud he has to go be with the kids to drown it out.
That first year has aged him.
Changed him.
Reshaped him.
But Lachlan Tanner can be reshaped.
He can withstand change. Torture. Pain. Loss.
Maybe that’s why Alistair chose him.
Maybe because anyone older and more experienced wouldn’t have touched that contract with a ten-foot pole.
But after a year he understands more than he thought possible.
He’s the bodyguard.
He will die for these kids.
It’s a certainty.
He’s made peace with it.
And then the second year hits him like a fucking meteorite.