The Dirty Ones

Going down the wide, stone steps, I am reminded how pretentious this house is. I mean, yeah. We all—except Kiera—came up in a pretentious mansion. But this place feels like a fucking palace. Ninety-seven rooms. I just can’t even imagine it. My family estate is big. I’ve never counted the rooms but there’s definitely no more than forty. Fifty absolute tops. And that includes all the little rooms.

Hell, the room count in this house could just be suites, for all I know.

Down at the bottom of the steps there’s a group of doctors and nurses conversing quietly. Presumably about Emily’s unknown whereabouts.

How do they even know she’s still inside? I mean, how many doors does this place have?

“Where do you think she is?” Sofia asks me as we pass the search team and follow Hayes through a wide room that is still technically the foyer, but I know from first-hand experience that they’ve held balls in this hall.

“Probably a thousand miles away by now.”

“God, I hope so.”

We’re all silent after that. Just the sound of footfalls across the polished marble floors as we follow Hayes into a wide hallway that leads to the south wing where the actual ballroom, kitchens, and formal dining hall are located.

“Where are we going?” Bennett asks. “Do we really need to eat in the dining room? It’s stupid.”

It is stupid. We all know this. Because the table seats twenty-six people.

Which means when we finally get there, there’s six place settings at the far end and the rest of the long wooden monstrosity is bare.

“Wow, Hayes,” Camille chortles as she crunches ice from her now empty glass and picks up a little white card with a name written on it in scripted calligraphy. “Seating arrangements? Really?”

“It’s just how the staff does dinner, Camille. And you’re the one who insisted on eating down here.”

“I’m tired of being cooped up in that stupid library. You have a bazillion square feet in this place and we’re stuck in three thousand of them. It’s not fair.”

Kiera is next to me now. “Do you think she’s just… clueless? Or does she say that shit on purpose?”

I smile at Kiera. She makes me happy and even though this whole book thing sucks and will suck even harder in the coming weeks when the full intention of this development becomes clear, I’m glad I went to her house yesterday. I’m glad we’ve reconnected. And I don’t care what Hayes says, we can be together. It’s taken me a while to see that, but now that I have I’m not gonna let her go again.

“Definitely a little of both,” I say, answering her question.

“OK,” Camille says. “I need to make a revision. Miss Peacock, in the dining room, with the revolver.” Then she cackles a drunk laugh as everyone stops to stare at her. “What? That’s funny.”

“Not really,” Kiera says, unconsciously rubbing her shoulder where the bullet went through.

I take Kiera’s hand, then shift my feet when I notice Sofia watching us.

Maybe… fucking around with them both upstairs was a mistake after all.

My problem—and theirs too, if they feel like being honest—is that I lose all sense of control when the two of them are alone with me in a room. And I have to wonder, did they condition me to feel this way? Or did I do that to myself?

I’ve heard friends talk about cheating. How a woman they barely know can supersede the one they know so well. Can overtake their thoughts and consume them from the inside out. Take away everything they thought they ever wanted and replace it with divorce papers, and custody battles, and failure.

And they don’t care. They can’t stop. This woman, these women, they eat them up and spit them out.

Lust, I guess. It’s just lust.

But that’s not what this is. It isn’t like that. It wasn’t like that. Sofia and I were forced into a situation that required we work together. And by work together, I mean fuck.

Kiera was just… there. Watching. Writing down what we did. So when Sofia wanted to invite her in… hell, it was just hot. That’s all. That’s the only explanation I have for it. Having her in the room with us was hot. Even Sofia got into it.

“Please,” Hayes says. “Take your seats.”

“Can I get another Scotch and water?” Camille asks one of the servers as we all take our assigned seats. Hayes is at the head, Kiera on his right, me on his left. Then Sofia and Bennett on my side of the table and Camille next to Kiera.

“How about we hold the Scotch? Hmmm?” Hayes tells the server nearest Camille, who turns her head to glare at Hayes with contempt.

“Good idea,” Bennett says from the end. Then, “Hayes, why do you have to sit way up there and make this all uneven? I feel left out down here by myself.”