Chapter 10 #2
He looks in their direction, then back at me. “I said get in the damn car, Nicola!”
“No,” I say. “I’m not coming this time.”
“They’ll catch you. They’ll blame you. You’ll go into a cell and never come out.” He makes a fist and punches the hood of the car hard enough to dent it. “Get in the fucking car.”
If it wasn’t for the sirens, he would come around and throw me into it bodily. But he doesn’t have time, and I know it.
He gives me one last look, then gets in the car, slams his door, and peels out.
I am left standing in the midst of the small massacre. The police do find me when they roll up. But they don’t take me to jail. They take me somewhere worse. A home for girls.
They get psychologists to talk to me about it, but I tell them I can’t remember anything. They put it down to shock, amnesia due to a traumatic event. Their official story is I saw something that I blacked out so hard, I didn’t know who I was anymore.
When I’m eighteen, I leave with a trash bag. I start traveling. Hitching rides, hopping trains. Meeting people. Finding my little band of runaways.
I never see my father again.
A tap on the door pulls me from my reverie.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
I come out to face Fescue, who clearly does not believe me. “You look pale,” he says. “I think you need some rest. I am going to take you back up to the bedroom.”
I let him make the decision for me, because suddenly I really do feel utterly exhausted.
I’ve been fighting so much for so long, and now everything I was ever supposed to want is sitting out in a fancy dining room ordering the venison and I am the garbage child of a serial killer and he has no idea.
“Would you like to remove the tracksuit, or would you prefer to get into bed with it still on?” Fescue asks the question with a calm register that makes me almost think he is being earnest until I realize that of course he’s being his apparently snotty self.
“I know how to take a nap,” I tell him. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You need to be brought up for a nap,” he says. “So perhaps the comparisons to babysitters should be examined more closely.”
I make a rude gesture at him and take the tracksuit off, leaving me in my undershirt and underwear. He seems unaffected by my state, and turns back the coverlet of the bed so that I can get in.
“Would you like some chamomile tea? Warm milk? A binky?”
I throw one of the many no doubt expensive pillows at him.
“The attitude!” I exclaim.
He gives a brief ghost of a smile. “Sleep well, young lady,” he says, dimming the lights.
I close my eyes for a moment.
Next thing I know, I am opening my eyes. Time has sped by. The lights are now dim because the sun has fled, and I am once more being woken by Fescue.
“Would you like to freshen up in the shower?” he says. “I have several dresses for you to try on for the dinner tonight.”
“There’s a dinner tonight?”
“There’s one every night, but yes, this one is a little more special than most. The pack is excited to meet you in an official capacity.”
I groan and sink down in the bed. I don’t much feel like being met in an official capacity. I liked leading the Runaways. There was no pressure there. The ones who looked up to me came from even more desperate circumstances than I am. Or at least, just as bad.
The Regent pack are not from those backgrounds.
The wolves who grow up in this pack are funded.
They go to good schools; they are raised well.
They share in the proceeds of the profits from all of Regent’s proceeds.
Essentially, everything I am trying to build for the Runaways has already been built here generationally.
The covers are removed from me forcibly, which is very annoying.
“Where is Rex?”
“The alpha is in a meeting,” Fescue says. “He will be here to dress shortly, but I suspect you will take longer to prepare. Please go shower. You are still scuffed. There are fresh sets of underwear in your size in the bathroom, and towels.”
I go and do as I am told. I do feel scuffed, as Fescue puts it.
I’m going to hold my own tonight, I decide.
No matter how unsuitable I feel on the inside, I know once I get my hair done and my makeup on, I’ll be untouchable.
When I get out of the shower, I dress in underwear, pat my hair dry, and pad out to the bathroom where the dresses were.
Fescue is still here.
I thought he’d be gone by now. I assumed he was not going to stand around and dress me up like a Barbie doll. Apparently that is precisely what he intends to do.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you dressed.”
“I know how to dress myself.”
Fescue gives me a dour look. “You know how to don basic clothing,” he says. “I do not think you truly know how to dress, all respect.”
“I run a fashion line, my guy.”
“Indeed,” he says. “A crisp white dress might suit you well. I’ve booked a hairdresser. She will have the arduous task of taming that color into something more suitable.”
“Suitable for what?”
“To be seen in public, for starters,” he deadpans.
I scowl, offended. “I don’t need to stand here and listen to this. I like my hair. I like my clothes.”
“Your clothes were covered in blood when you came in,” he says. “And I hear tell you ruined a bespoke shirt by likewise shedding sanguine essence.”
“Sanguine essence? Who talks like that?”
“Someone who has read a book,” he says.
I am losing this round of verbal fencing, and he is not even trying.
“Just give me the little black dress and leave me alone,” I tell him.
Fescue looks surprised. “A good, conservative choice,” he says. “Classic and timeless. Perhaps you are not a complete lost cause.”
“Get out or I’ll ask for something in purple and rip a slit up the side and go to dinner looking like I just escaped from an asylum,” I threaten him.
Another tap at the door heralds the arrival of a hairdresser, a nice woman who defuses the tension by chatting incessantly from the moment she gets into the room.
“I love your hair!” she says. “It’s so original. I wonder what it would look like if we put it half up?”
Charmed by her, I let her do what she wants with me. She doesn’t touch the color, of course, but she does manage to put it up into a complex style I’d never be able to reproduce on my own.
Then I put the dress on, some stockings, some heels. Another woman, Cherie, comes in to do my makeup. Fescue tells her not to make my lipstick too scandalous. She rolls her eyes where he can’t see him and picks a brighter shade of crimson than she was going to originally.
I enjoy the underlying spirit of rebellion that is emerging. I thought the Regent pack would be homogenous and snobby and treat us all like outcasts. So far there has not been any sign of that.
The door opens again, and Rex steps in. He sees the final finishing touches being put on my face. I can see him in the mirror. His expression softens as he sees me, and he seems to settle into a quiet admiration.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
“Thank you,” I blush. I feel a little shy, which is unlike me. It’s the dress. It’s making me demure.
We go down to dinner together. Rex in his handsome suit, me in this classic dress, and Fescue somehow lingering in the background while also remaining prominent in a way that you couldn’t teach someone who didn’t know how to do it instinctively.
“Does he follow you everywhere?” I murmur to Rex as I go down the stairs.
“In a sense, yes. Though, today, it’s safe to say he followed you,” Rex says. “You needed the protection more.”
“I really didn’t. We held our own in the fight.”
“What fight?” Rex lifts a brow at me and cocks his head to the side.
We are walking into the dining room now, though, so I plaster on my best approximation of a nice smile and refrain from answering him.
* * *
Dinner turns out to be far easier and less high stakes than I had imagined it would be.
There are a lot of people present, at least a hundred or more, and they are mostly enjoying each other’s company.
I am not being presented officially. I am being integrated naturally, and I am very grateful for it.
Rex introduces me to some people. There is Grant, Tyler, and Sylvia.
The three of them occupy high-level positions inside the company.
In spite of being very different in visage and gender, they somehow blend together in my mind as the evening progresses.
Grant reports… I don’t even pretend to care.
They’re smart, educated people, and Sylvia has raven hair and brilliant green eyes and I think Tyler must be her mate, or maybe that was Grant. Or maybe it’s both of them.
I sip a little wine and try to be polite, because I know this is the easiest way to fit in. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I want to be seen as pleasant and faintly boring. That’s the safest bet.
In a matter of hours, it is all over, and Rex and I are finally alone. I breathe a sigh of relief, exhaling a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding most of the day.
We are on the balcony outside the bedroom, and a little set of stairs leads from it down through the forest. I wonder what’s down there.
For the moment, Rex wants me where I am.
He has his arms on either side of me on the railing and is looking down into my face with an expression of intense interest and care.
“You haven’t been yourself tonight,” he says to me, brushing a few stray wisps of hair out of my face.
“No. That was the point,” I say. “I know what myself is like. Nobody wants that at a dinner party.”
He smiles at me, sweetly and handsomely and I feel something gentle inside me start to stir. It feels so out of the normal way of things that my initial impulse is to stuff it back down where it came from.
“I’m a monster,” I add, in case he hadn’t gotten the point.
“You’re really not,” he says. “Or, if you are, it’s a small, cute one.”
He drops a kiss on my nose and I let out a playful but feral growl that makes him chuckle and pull me closer for a proper kiss that makes my head spin.