“Session saved,” Cain said.
“Send it to Ethan, then call my father.”
“Session sent. Calling Declan Callahan.”
I listened to it ring twice before he answered, “Hi Melon; your mom and I were just talking about you.”
“Daddy…” I spun around in my chair, looking up at the ceiling, “You’re in trouble.”
“Story of my life,” he snickered. “What have I done now?”
“Gabriel?”
He didn’t reply.
“Sweetheart?” My mother came on the line.
“Did Dad just palm me off to you—?”
“Forget about that. How’s Gabriel? Does Donatella like him?”
These people had no shame. “Well, she sent six men to kill him.”
“You ladies are dead-set on being alone, aren’t you?”
I stopped spinning at that and sat up. “Mother, there better not be any random men ready to claim they’re engaged—”
“I’d kill him!” I heard my father yell in the background.
“So, you’re still there?!”
I might have been the black sheep, but the wolves loved me and because of that love I built Cain alone to make sure they were always the hunters and never the hunted. It was the one thing I could do for them, seeing as how I didn’t get any blood on my hands. I wasn’t a fighter like Donatella. I wasn’t determined to prove myself like Nari. I was the guardian.
Gabriel didn’t need to know that, though.
SIXTEEN
“Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn't enough for me. Can you understand that?”
~ Sidney Sheldon
DONATELLA
“Is Ivy coming today, Donatella?” Brigitte, the governor’s wife, asked as we walked through the high-school building - another Callahan foundation chore.
“Am I not enough company, Brigitte?” I asked her, looking up at the wall of the self-portraits the senior class had drawn and displayed. They were all terribly bad; many of them looking as if they hadn’t even tried. With the expectation of one who hadn’t focused on realism, instead drawing a self-portrait of themselves in Cubism, only partially in color.
“Ms. Callahan?”
I looked back over my shoulder to the small group of women around me. Principal Pomar, a thin Hispanic woman who wore glasses I didn’t think she needed, hurried to my side.
“Do you like them? Our seniors worked really hard on them this year.”
I pointed to the only one that caught my attention. “Who did this one?”
The woman frowned then took a deep breath, shaking her head and fingering the fake pearls around her neck. “Penélope Muñoz who is, as you can see, a troubled girl. I told the art director to take down but he insisted it would add contrast—”
“I’ve heard that name.” Fatimah Gupta came forward and leaned in, whispering, “Is she the pregnant one? Her mother came down here once, correct?”