Chapter 1
Wet hair lies against the fluffy thread of an expensive hotel gown that Sash wouldn’t even be wearing if Dante hadn’t put it on her. She watches him pace back and forth, cell phone pressed against his ear while she deliberately avoids her own, tears muddling with bath water and dripping down her chin to explode against the laminate floor. Jason Walker is dead. Not missing. Not injured. Dead.
She can hear the words as a wall of noise, senseless and foreign. When Dante finally finishes speaking, he looks at Sash as though staring at something
he can’t understand.
“You need to get dressed”, he says, as though it’s the third time he has done so.
Sash feels numb inside, but Dante’s too busy to notice her silence. As soon as he’s pulled clothes out of the wardrobe and thrown them on the bed for Sash to put on, he’s back on his cell phone organizing the details of their travel.
When a few moments pass and he notices Sash still hasn’t moved, he puts the call on hold and quickly comes over to her.
“Darling”, he says, his finger under her chin. “We need to get back to New York and sort this out.”
Sash stares into his eyes. He couldn’t have. Not her stepbrother. Not Dante. It has to be a coincidence, a piece of bad luck woven into their story.
“Sash”, Dante says again, “I know it’s a shock, baby, but we need to go. I thought this was what you wanted anyway, huh? To tell the whole world?”
Baby. Having him say it sends shivers up and down her spine. On the TV in the background, the news story continues. Crowds collect outside Dante’s sleek black office tower and people in the street give opinions. At Sash’s family home, Tracy refuses to comment, both on the whereabouts of her husband and the relationship of her son and stepdaughter.
Sash nods. She braves a smile. She pushes the thoughts to the back of her mind and wipes the tears away from her eyes. Baby.
“Ok”, she says finally. What she feels is nothing like it.
She takes the toweling robe off and lets it drop to the floor like swept snow. In the mirror she catches a glimpse of her belly, the light hitting it in such a way it seems to be accentuated. There is no stopping what’s coming for them both, and soon enough she’ll be showing.
Sash pulls crumpled clothes over sticky skin while Dante waits patiently, fielding calls as they come into him, barking orders and refusing to answer questions.
In the elevator, they stand side by side, the words burning Sash’s lips as they descend. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant.
“Are you ready for this?” Dante asks.
When she turns to look at him, he’s already turned himself, his eyes tilted downwards, sharp and hungry like a hunting wolf. Is he enjoying this?
Sash doesn’t know what to say. When she opens her mouth, the only words she wants to come out of it are the words that seem like they’ll never come. Because of that, she wonders for a moment whether it’s true.
Before she even has a chance to form a single sound, the elevator indicates they are at the lobby, and the doors slowly slide open.
It hits her like a train coming out of a tunnel in the countryside. One moment absolute silence, the next a cacophony of pushing and screaming. Dante takes his hand in hers, fights his way through the collected paparazzi, follows the guided instructions of terrified hotel staff and makes his way through to the private corridor behind the concierge’s desk, that will eventually lead them through the kitchens, laundry room and staff’s private quarters, and out to a driver at the back of the hotel.
Sash can hear them thick in behind her. More than once she feels someone pull her arm, only for Dante to pull it back the other way. She feels like one of the fish in the tank in the antechamber to his office. Flash bulbs sting her eyes, while Dante and several other staff members do their best to protect her.
Outside, a huge crowd have gathered. Here, general public stand shoulder to shoulder with journalists, cell phones primed and ready to upload any salacious content immediately to social media. Dante refuses to answer questions. For Sash, the whole thing is completely bewildering.
Eventually, they push their way past the gathered throng and force their way inside the waiting car. Surrounded by people, Sash feels less safe here than she did in the lobby. Like this, she feels completely trapped. Some of them have banners, some pound on the car windows with their fists, others smile like lunatics and try to take selfies.
“Drive”, Dante orders.
As the car revs, jerking forwards threateningly, the crowd begin to part. Up ahead, police officers are beginning to arrive on the scene, already far too late to make a difference. At the window by Sash’s side, a woman is screaming fiercely.
“Sick”, is all Sash can’t make out. “Fucking sick.”
Spit explodes against the windscreen just before the car pulls away. As they make their way out onto the street, a huge crowd trying to be controlled by the police behind them, the driver makes streaks with it in the hands of the wipers.
Sash’s heart is beating much more wildly than she realized. Looking at him, Dante seems to be less affected. Distracted by something else, he stares out of the window, losing himself in the peaks behind the city line.
How the fuck is he going to deal with this one?
In New York, Alex stares blankly at the unfolding news, flicking from time to time to other channels hoping a bigger story will come along to mute it. On her desk is a spread of several of the morning’s newspapers, all of which have run with variations of the same headline, ranging from mild surprise to complete disgust.
There are profiles of Dante and Sash, intimate details of their lives, half of which have clearly been fabricated, and promises of more juicy tidbits to come in subsequent editions. In short, it’s a complete fucking shit storm, and one Alex is not happy at all about having to put out, especially since Dante was so convinced that his head of public relations would do it for them.
Chapter 2
Caulder sits in a highway dinner, half lens glasses perched on the end of his nose bringing into focus the morning paper he has folded up in his hands. On his plate sit remnants of a large fried breakfast, almost every item of which he saw fit to cover in torrents of salt and ketchup so what remains looks like the miniature crime scene of a chilling murder. Up on the TV in the corner, footage plays of Dante and Sash leaving through the hotel lobby in L.A., eagerly pursued by a swarm of journalists. Watching this are several staff members and almost all of the handful of other customers.
Someone comes over to refill Caulder’s coffee. As she pours the syrupy liquid into his chipped enamel cup, she can’t help but look over his shoulder at what he’s reading.
“Can’t believe there’s space in there for anything else today.”
Caulder looks up to her and smiles. He takes off his glasses and sets them on the newspaper. The waitress, a mid forties housewife called Betty, thinks he’s either about to say something profound or propose to her. Silence hangs in the air like a winter chill.
“Check, please”, Caulder says finally.
Framed in the concave lens of his glasses is the body of Jason Walker, grayed out even further by newspaper print. Half a column has been dedicated to the apparent death by drowning of the twenty one year old boy, while the news of Dante Hix’s improper affair dedicates over eight of the newspaper’s front pages.
Caulder can’t help but feel the timing of both plays quite nicely in their favor.
Outside, he finds the phone booth and places a call to the police.
On a cold slab of morgue metal, the autopsy has already begun. Jason Walker is one of six other bodies in the dimly lit room, most of which are still covered with white sheets to preserve what little remains of their dignity.
Even in this state, it’s clear that he looked after himself. His body is toned and his arms are tight with muscle. A tribal tattoo wraps itself around his bicep, while another one, a badly rendered female face, clings to the inside of his upper thigh.
The mortician closely examines legion marks around his wrists and ankles, making detailed notes as she goes, before doing the same around the underside of his neck. Even without the torch it is clear that his neck is red, and shows marks that wouldn’t normally come up if the victim was desperately trying to save themselves from drowning.
She examines cuts on his upper arm that have long since scarred over, and light puncture marks on the crease between his forearm and upper arm. Here, gray skinned and dead beyond compare, Jason Walker looks like the perfect plastic m
old of a juvenile ghost.
The mortician takes a knife and begins to cut him open.
Chapter 3
Special arrangements have been made at LAX airport for Dante and Sash to coordinate all normal security protocols in a more favorable manner, in order for them to avoid unnecessary embarrassment before departure.
Sash, still utterly bewildered by what’s happened already this morning, thinks nothing of their unusual approach to the airport, the clandestine checks conducted in utter silence and the first rate, sovereign style treatment. It is only when she’s aboard Dante’s private jet does she finally begin to let reality sink in. Their relationship is no longer a secret. Abbey will know. Her dad will know. Hell the pilot probably even knows.
There are newspapers already aboard the plane. Sash pushes them around carefully, soaking up the in depth coverage.
“How did they know?” Sash asks.
Dante is already preparing himself a drink. Normally he’d have someone to do it for him, but getting hold of staff members on such short notice didn’t seem as important as ensuring the pilot was able to fly them back home.
“That was the blackmail threat I told you about”, Dante says. “They wanted a hundred million dollars not to print them.”
“You didn’t pay it?”
Sash wants to believe he didn’t do it for them, but she knows the truth wouldn’t be quite that romantic.
“I didn’t pay it”, Dante says. “Perhaps I should have done.”
Sash concentrates on the New York Times. Without even reading the content, she turns the pages just to take the photos in. Intimate, personal, theirs.
“How did they even get these?”
Something about it makes her mad. If she was able to allow herself to be so, she might scream, but too much nothingness all over her body won’t let it come out. If he’d done it her way, they wouldn’t have something that should only belong to them. It feels like they are taking everything they have between them away from her. At least there is one secret they don’t know yet. One secret Dante doesn’t know either.