Gant
Insanity.
It’s rippling through my veins as I step into the penthouse after another immersion therapy lesson with buffalo chicken wings, hotrod live streams, and piss coloured beer.
The maniac wave I’ve been trying to contain in my chest leeches into the surrounding tissues the moment I lock the door. It seeps through my brain, drowning it.
Bae’s contact hasn’t been successful in gathering any new information about my mother’s killer. I still don’t know where the fuck this heir was born, much less who he is. And Elle is still missing.
I’m at a complete standstill.
Answers. I need answers. And I need Elle.
I look from her worthless father cowering timidly in the corner of the theatre to my mother’s death portrait. Neither can give me answers, yet I have to deal with both of them. Time in the penthouse feels an eternity, a void, but how could I leave the live beast entirely alone when it’s not time to drug him yet? Outside the horsemen, who I trust with my life, I can’t let anyone see him, help him, not even Heldina.
“Eyes like springs,” I hiss to myself as I turn to face her. The sound of icy, rushing water in the tank matches the pacing of the blood rushing in my ears as I turn on the jets. I want tea.
“A name fit for a prince. In a country where the government controls a child’s name,” I whisper to both of us. “Japan? Japan has lots of springs. A long royal lineage. One of the oldest countries. Able to reject inappropriate names at the birth registry.”
She just stares through me. I look over my shoulder at Jarett, whose useless pools of spring are glued to the rushing tank.
“Well? Did she tell you where she ran off to have this baby?” I ask him for the fifth time, my footsteps echoing in the dark room as I approach him. “Did she even tell you that she was pregnant at all? Or was she too embarrassed to be carrying your offspring?”
But how could she be embarrassed when her letters alluded to a whirlwind love? Then I think of Elle. I couldn’t deem his seed utterly worthless. Not when he’d given Jaime my Elle. El. L. Ll…
But this bastard brother of mine isn’t Elle, and what are the chances that Jarett produced two good things in one lifetime? None.
“Elle and I could have a shared sibling. You could have another child. A child that could try to take what’s mine. My empire that she,” I hiss, jabbing a finger at the death portrait, “built with me. That she left for me in her will. Her firstborn son. ”
Jarett whimpers.
“She worded it just like that. A little loophole to cut me out. It can’t be legal, can it?”
But it can be in this county, or so my lawyers had informed me.
“My father has more money than I can spend in twenty lifetimes. My mother’s? I can blow it in a half-decade. It’s not about the money, not to me. Bart is concerned about the sub-companies he gifted you,” I say to the portrait, then to Jarett. “He didn’t bat an eye until he realised she’d already birthed another calf. That’s what this bastard brother of mine is to Bart, a calf to be slaughtered, your calf to be sacrificed.”
Jarett whimpers again, but he’s not looking at me. He’s not hearing me. He’s too occupied with the mangled corpse and the rushing water.
“He, this crowned prince, has slaughtered my perception of who I thought I was,” I say quietly. “And when he’s slaughtered, it’ll be restored because like I said, I don’t care about the money, the prestige. I care about the time. The time spent hiding from my father while my mother trained me to be the best dancer despite his wishes. The time sneaking around with lawyers and realtors and cash so my father couldn’t trace her organisation until it was too late because he never wanted her to have anything of her own. The time spent during those late nights pouring over paint and flooring samples, things my ten-year-old self cared about because she cared about it, so we cared about it together. Ballet was us. ” I turn back to the portrait. “And you want to give it all to his offspring? Him who left you to rot on your back and push out a prince he doesn’t give a singular fuck about?”
A surge of adrenaline rushes through me as I grab the cricket bat I’d used every day last summer, hitting Kookaburra balls around with Hale to distract myself from the fact that I was dying.
The same bat I’d replaced ten times over because it’d never managed to make a dent in her icy prison. The thick wood would only shatter with my energy upon the final blow. And still, I grab it and swing it at the display with a satisfying bang.
“Answers,” I hiss. “Where is he? Who is he? What country?”
Of course, she doesn’t speak. She just stares straight through me until my palms are raw and I’m out of breath. Until the bat splinters and snaps, yet the reflective glass remains as pristine as the day it was installed.
A whimper to my left alerts me to Jarett crawling up the theatre’s ramp and back to the comfort of his newspaper-lined cage.
The whininess of the inhuman sound sends another bolt of adrenaline rushing through me as I grab his ankle and wrench him back down into this dark hellhole they both created and trapped me in.
“You can fucking answer me, but you won’t,” I bark over him. “All you do is sit in your own shit. It doesn’t matter that Bart’s idled your brain; you’ve always been nothing, and yet she let you into the deepest parts of her. Why ? The only special thing about you is Elle, and you tried to ruin her. You treated the only precious gift you’ve ever been given, like fucking rubbish. My pretty baby. My little dove.”
Jarett’s eyes grow wide, and still, he doesn’t speak.
Hatred, blinding hatred, bleeds into my vision. “Can’t you be fucking useful for once?” I hiss. “Be a good fucking boy and tell me! Tell me where he is! Tell me why she picked you! You, fucking , you. What the fuck is it about you?”
More whimpers. More trembles. More nothingness.
“I’ve always loathed my father, but I could respect his business savvy. My mother? For a second, I thought I hated her too because she’d lied to me my entire life. I’m not her special prince. I’m her spare. Even with all of that, with my father making me dance with her corpse, and her utter betrayal, nothing tops the sheer despisal, the revulsion that snakes through my veins every time I look into those pitiful eyes of fucking spring she loved so much.”
He merely cowers, pulling himself into a tighter ball.
“Such a pretty baby doll…” I pound on the ramp’s railing, and the metallic reverberations cut through the deafening silence that falls between us. “ My dove … I don’t just hate you and that bitch you bred, Jaime. I abhor you.”
Inhuman strength ripples through me as I tear him off the floor and slam him into the railing. I use the smooth metal to drag his ass up the ramp as those crystal pools widen to the size of saucers.
“Why don’t we have some tea, hmm? ” I ask when we reach halfway to the living room above. At that, Jarett grows a spine and resists our ascent, falling off the rail and onto all fours with a sickening thud. I fist the back of his shirt and pull until he gags and chokes, a trail of spit dangling from his lips. “Oh, that scares you? Don’t you think that scared my baby, your baby , when you shoved her into that pool? You didn’t care about her screams, so why do you think I’ll care about yours when they're music to my ears?”
He screams like a fucking kettle as I drag him into the dim lighting of the living room.
Fuck the plan and Bae’s positive reinforcements. Fuck Bart and fuck this whiny, bitch.
I tug him so hard, his front paws leave the glossy grey tiles as I pull him halfway over the tank’s entrance.
“?” A feminine voice calls behind me.
It cuts through my brain fog and brings me into the present, back to the fact that I’m dangling Elle’s father like a tea bag over a whirlpool of water. Back to the fact that those eyes looking at me and pleading for mercy aren’t beastly. They’re human.
Still, even with all my senses, it changes nothing, because I still don’t give a fuck. I shove Jarett face-first into the swirling tank and turn in time to see Aria coming through the foyer.
She and Eti are the only ones who visit me because the corpse portrait doesn’t disturb them. She’s used to it. Used to me.
She takes in the broken cricket bat still clutched in my left fist, the shredded pieces of paper still littering the floor since last night, and the massive dog cage behind me. She doesn’t ask a singular question as she settles on the couch in front of the fireplace with eyes as dead as my mother’s.
“Can I stay the night?” she asks calmly amongst the chaos.
“Where’s Etienne?”
“Gone.”
I stalk toward the couch and plunk down beside her, suddenly exhausted.
“So you’re all alone.”
I don’t need her to tell me that she and Stassi aren’t on good terms. They haven’t been all year.
She doesn’t look at me with bloodshot eyes identical to mine. We stare straight ahead at nothing in particular, and suddenly, the silence is bearable.
“I figured we could be alone,” she whispers. “Together.”