CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nine Years Ago
It’s raining the night he finds Jules in the grounds, drunk.
Lachlan’s hair is dripping wet, his suit is soaked, even the inside of his boots are squelching. It took so long to find him due to several issues, chief of which was that Jules had somehow learnt to divert his ring tracker signal to a false ping miles away, so miles away is where Lachlan went.
Only Jules wasn’t there.
He wasn’t anywhere but home, hidden out by the waterfall, drinking thousands of dollars’ worth of crystal-bottled Scotch. It’s all in his blood now.
Lachlan is freshly twenty-five years old.
He’s so fucking mad.
‘Control, I have him,’ he radios in, mouth twisted with muted irritation. ‘He never left the Estate.’
‘Heard, Kestrel,’ Fenwick confirms dispassionately. ‘Need backup?’
‘Negative.’ Lachlan turns back to face the teenager who’s watching him with an uncomfortable degree of expectation, arrogantly warm and sly.
‘Did you miss me?’
‘Get up.’
‘Tsk, that’s not very nice, Bodyguard.’
‘It’s pissing rain, get inside!’
‘Why?’ he snorts, drinking more. ‘You scared I’m gonna catch a cold? It’s summer.’
‘It’s never summer in this city. Get inside, Jules.’
‘How long did it take you to realise?’
‘I’m so not in the fucking mood, kid.’
It’s a mistake to call him that. Lachlan’s just too fucking frazzled to stop himself. He had units on standby, had to let Fenwick know Jules got out, which means the old man has been notified, and Jules was here the entire time.
It’s embarrassing.
‘Kid,’ Jules echoes with malevolent interest. ‘That’s funny, I didn’t think I was a kid anymore after what I did with Fenwick.’
Lachlan looks away. He hates when Jules brings this up.
It’ll never not curdle his guts.
‘Yeah well, adults don’t pull attention-seeking bullshit like this.’
‘That’s not what TV tells me.’
‘Get your ass up or I’ll carry you.’
Time was, a threat like this would be enough to motivate Jules, but a year after their first meeting, his tactics with Lachlan have evolved significantly.
Just as he measured Lachlan’s response times for the vent trick, so he has apparently been measuring plenty else about him, including what makes Lachlan uncomfortable.
So Jules cocks his head and says, ‘Gonna throw me over your shoulder, Daddy?’ Lachlan’s lip curls, irritation flaring in a way it never does with anyone else. ‘Have I been a bad, bad boy?’
Lachlan can’t—won’t retaliate with hands. Instead he holds Jules’ gaze and says, ‘You remind me of your father so much sometimes.’
Jules’ expression sours.
A low blow for a low blow, the theme of the insults shockingly similar yet hurtful in different ways. He’ll make Lachlan pay for that; they both know it.
But for now, the rain is turning cold.
And his little trick already played out.
So he takes the hand Lachlan offers and goes back inside, but not before shoving one last splinter of fuckery deep between Lachlan’s ribs once they’re inside his bedroom in the Cove and he says, ‘I feel sick, stay with me?’
Lachlan keeps his countenance.
The risk of it being real always comes first.
‘Do you need a medic?’
‘No, just stay with me.’
It’s petulant, soft, deceptively sweet.
He’s always testing Lachlan, this boy.
‘To make sure you don’t drown in your own vomit?’
Jules’ eyes move between Lachlan’s own. ‘To keep me safe from myself.’
‘I’m on duty.’
‘I am your duty.’
Mimi is right next door. Lachlan feels pulled to her like always. He worries often, likes to check in on her to ensure she’s sleeping comfortably. He’ll do that after he leaves. Pull her covers just a little higher and kiss her cheek.
Jules reads it.
‘She’s fine,’ he says, maybe with a little bite of impatience for the first time. ‘You’re my bodyguard, aren’t you?’
Lachlan reasons that he’s drunk and exhausted in ways no child should ever be, and he is a child, no matter that he’s six months shy of nineteen.
‘I am, yes.’
‘Then stay.’
‘I don’t answer to you, Jules, but I’ll stay until you fall asleep if you—’
‘Sleep with me.’
Lachlan rolls his eyes. ‘Dream on.’
‘Not like that. Just in the same bed. We can cuddle.’
Lachlan wishes he had the naivety to believe any part of it because if anyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, it’s Jules. But all of Lachlan’s goodwill goes towards keeping him safe, and he has precious little left over for handling his emotional tricks.
‘That’s inappropriate.’
‘You cuddle her.’
‘She’s not you.’
Lachlan knows Jules is hurt by that but better running headlong into a firm boundary than freely off a cliff. The boy’s jaw works when he smiles coldly and says, ‘What a fucking loser you are, Bodyguard.’
‘So true,’ Lachlan encourages flatly, scanning the room in a perfunctory manner to signal his exit. ‘If there’s nothing else?’
‘Get out.’
Lachlan does.
?
June arrives with an early heatwave that draws immediate attention to the fact Mimi can’t swim, and apparently never has.
‘She’s allergic to chlorine, apparently,’ Blaire explains when Lachlan asks.
That makes sense to Lachlan, who had always wondered about the absence of a pool. ‘I could teach her to swim in the lake.’ Temperatures are hitting unbearable new highs, evidence of the planet’s displeasure.
‘It’s not swim-safe, you know that.’
‘OK, then, ask permission to build a freshwater construct.’
‘I will,’ Blaire says, typing fast on her tablet. She must know it’ll be met with resistance but she’s his go-between, she manages and handles so much for him. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, though.’
‘I won’t. Thank you.’
The lack of an accessible pool, paired with the lake being strictly forbidden, means Mimi is mostly limited to splashing around in the shallows beneath the manmade waterfall.
But the place sits too deep in the shade, and she hates the drifting leaves that stick to her legs and chase after her in the water, so for most of June, it’s sprinklers or nothing, but at least Mimi likes them.
The little girl loves eating apple slices on wet grass under the light spray.
She especially likes how crazy Lachlan’s hair gets when he joins her, is fascinated with it, studies his hair intently, muttering findings to herself and Mari, whose fur is now more practically set after having been washed many times, tail no longer fluffy but still colourful.
She’ll mutter about how some people don’t have curls and others do, all her secret things she thinks Lachlan can’t hear. He wishes more than anything he could say he is her real Daddy.
But there are certain lines he must not cross.
And he doesn’t want to lie to her.
What they have is real enough besides.
Mimi will be five years old in late August.
She’s getting good at hurling herself into a messy roundoff.
Lachlan likes teaching her about balance because it always ends with her wanting to play punchies and he can’t help but encourage it, uses his hands as pads for her increasingly well-formed little blows.
He imagines her as a young woman just absolutely flattening some creep one day. It makes him smile.
Mimi Penhalyx hasn’t been raised on rainbows and sunshine, which is maybe why she loves them so much, but it also gives her a morbidly pragmatic approach towards the things she doesn’t like.
If Mimi is scared of a shadow in her room, she tells Lachlan to shoot it.
If she has bad dreams, she’ll climb into his lap and whisper, ‘Kill the bad dreams dead,’ and he promises he will, even pretends to grab them out of thin air and break necks.
‘Bones go crunch,’ he says and she giggles when he does that, sleeps better after.
He hopes she forgets all about Belkin.
Sometimes when she’s angry at the invisible wall between the things she wants and can’t have, she scowls so hard it dents her brow and whispers very quietly, ‘Kill Farfar for me, Daddy.’
Farfar is probably the worst of all Mimi’s little names because it’s the most dangerous.
Alistair Penhalyx might tolerate his daughter calling Lachlan Daddy, but Lachlan doubts he’d react nearly as well to Farfar.
He can usually pass it off as her mispronouncing father, but the truth is stranger than that.
She picked it up from her storybooks, all those repeated lines about things happening “far, far away”, and turned a version of it into a name for the man who is almost never here.
She’ll say, ‘Kill farfar for me, Daddy,’ because she knows Penhalyx is the reason she can’t get what she wants nine times out of ten.
Lachlan has to gently correct her, all the while promising in total silence that he will one day, he’ll get her free and safe.
Sometimes, though, when she says that, they share a secret smile and rub noses.
She’s his little girl.
His daughter who draws his gun in lovely shades of crayon black, who always chooses a small, sturdy stick for a sword and loves animals more than the waking day.
A worm in the sun is an emergency. An iridescent beetle is a new friend.
A butterfly will make her whole day. The crows are curious about her, often watch from a distance. She’s the kind who could befriend them.
Lachlan is far less talented at making and keeping friends.
Carrigan considers his failure a betrayal, and Lachlan can’t even argue with her because it is. He brought people into this place before he understood they would never truly leave it, before he realised he would come to love this child enough to let it warp the shape of his entire world.
Lachlan still recruits people even now. Estate security continues to expand, but he insists on interviewing every candidate personally and deliberately selects the ones he thinks already have something rotten living inside them.
Men with mean eyes and redacted files. Service histories that read suspiciously vague.
Those are the ones he doesn’t mind dragging down into the lower rungs of hell with him, keeping them out on the outer edges of the world he’s built around the children.