I shook my head at him, an equal smile on my face. “It runs in the family, big bro. Don’t forget that.”
The cameras ate it up, snapping pics and recording the loving conversation as I walked forward to give Anton a hug. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close, whispering as quietly as I could, “Is Dad not running again?”
“We’ll talk about that in the car,” Anton said quietly, then gave me a kiss on my cheek and pulled back from me, leaving a hand on my back so he could guide me to the limbo, thereby ensuring I didn’t hear anything else from the clamoring journalists. He opened the door and said, “After you.”
I ducked into the limo, where my older brother, Vincent, was waiting. He was Anton, but older and slimmer. His hair was a bit longer, and fell down the back of his neck, curling up slightly at the bottom, and his fingers were decorated with many rings, among which was his alma mater ring from Harvard, and his class ring from high school.
If smug were a person, it’d be Vincent Narzand.
He didn’t even look up from his cell phone as I climbed in, only offering a quick, “Avion, good morning,” as I sat on the seat across from him. “You’re late.”
“I’m not,” I responded. “I said I’d meet you at nine.”
Despite the fact that he was looking at his cell phone, Vincent felt it necessary to flick his wrist out of the sleeve of his pinstripe suit and check his half a million-dollar watch. “It’s currently nine-o-two.”
“That would be because of the circus outside, gathered by some rumor that father isn’t running next term and ceding to you,” I explained. “Wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? I assume you wouldn’t have made me meet with you for six hours earlier this week to go over his campaign trail if you knew there wasn’t a campaign to trail.”
“It came as a shock to us too,” Anton said as he climbed in after running off the cameras, shutting the door behind himself. “It was a sudden tip that we got...”
“I don’t believe we agreed to discuss this with her,” Vincent said, eyeing Anton.
Anton dwarfed himself. “Sorry.”
“First of all,” I said, looking at Vincent and trying to force eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t even look at me, “I’m right here, please don’t talk about me like I’m not. Second of all, being his campaign manager is my job. If he’s not running for Governor, I don’t have a campaign to manage. Are you telling me I’m out of a job?”
That finally brought Vincent’s gaze over to me. “No one said that. I’ll still require a campaign manager.”
That thought made me want to unlatch his cufflinks and stab myself in the eye with one of the pins. “My dedication is to our father, not to you.”
Vincent smiled at me then. “You have always been a ray of sunshine, little sister.”
I smiled back, giving him the same forceful gaze, he was giving me. “And you’ve always been the rainbow after the rain.”
Anton clapped his hands, snapping the tense silence between us. “Well, it looks like we’re all geared up and ready to pretend like we love each other for the next twelve hours.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “It’s gonna be a riot.”
How was I going to be able to pretend to be a loving sister with these two for the next twelve hours, when I didn't even know if I was going to have a job tomorrow?
3
AVION
My father’s estate was far outside the city, making it that much more ridiculous that he should insist upon the limo picking me up first when I lived only a few minutes from our first destination. The issue was that my father soaked up on chances to get familial candids because peoplelovedseeing a happy family.
When my mom was still alive, she was the one responsible for smashing her face against his and taking pictures that belied how fucked up our family was, but once she died, my father’s obsession with the concept changed. Now, he wantedallof his children together when he was in any place where photographs would be taken of him. He liked to claim that his loving wife’s death made his family even closer, as evidenced by the fact that we were always together.
What a farce.
It also meant that I was forced to spend close to an hour with my brothers on the way to pick my father up, and then more than that with the whole gang on the way back into town. Vincent had his phone in one hand and his tablet in the other, and I knew it was going to be a less than thrilling ride.
“Can you give me a rundown of the day?” Vincent asked.
I shot him a narrowed glare, irritated with the way that he treated me like some dumb, floozy assistant. “Do you even know that we have a word for asking people nicely? I know you struggle, if you read it slowly, you should be able to sound it out.”
Vincent’s eyes shot up to me. “What was that?”
“I also sent you the schedule via email,” I hissed, “or is making use of my hard work not worth your time?”
