Why couldn’t he have been my friend? I hadn’t had a real friend since he dropped me. Except for my mom. She’d attended every one of my recitals, even skipping out on important meetings to be front row center. She went out to the store for snacks when I was in the middle of my Juilliard audition prep. She curled my hair and gossiped about boys and celebrities like we were BFFs instead of mother and daughter. And above all, she showed me by example what a woman had to do to succeed, for in business as in life she was fierce and unapologetic and impossibly kind.
Now she was in a coma.
And poison put her there.
Now I cried for real – fat, silent tears rolling down my cheeks like Elena’s had moments before, smearing my perfect makeup. I didn’t dare wipe them away and draw attention to myself.
Dorien finished and stood to take his bow. He returned to the piano to accompany Heather for some Vivaldi. He was faultless, of course, but her notes were flat and lifeless – or perhaps that was because I heard them through a lens of my own silent screams. After Heather, Aroha wowed with a performance of Turkish composer Fazil Say’s sultryCleopatra. Her cheeks glowed with pleasure as Hans praised her treatment of the unique piece. Looking at her, it was hard to believe she needed drugs to step into her power.
Madame Usher clapped her hands and signaled for us to leave. Numb, I followed her from the room, peeling off into the men’s bathroom to collect the broken pieces of my violin. When I emerged clutching the remains of my instrument in my trembling hands, Dorien and Heather were just leaving the ballroom. Heather looped her arm in his and leaned into him as they passed me.
Dorien’s eyes fell on the pieces in my hands. He stopped in his tracks, wrenching Heather’s arm. She yelped in surprise, then she tried to pretend it was intentional.
“Dorien, you arevicious,” she purred, gazing up at him with adoration. “I thought you were going to hide her instrument. This was so much better.”
“I didn’t destroy it,” Dorien’s voice coursed through my body. “I hid it in the bathroom. That’s all.”
What a fucktrumpet filled with shit. We were all together in the ballroom. Who else could have destroyed it? Harrison? The manor ghost?
“I didn’t do this.” Dorien looked up at me. A different sort of storm flashed in his eyes, dragging me back out to sea, to a recital when we were eight years old where he missed a note and his mother yelled at him in front of everyone. “Faye, Iswear. I knew how much this violin meant to you.”
He did. Hedidknow. He’d been there – the three of us having a fancy birthday dinner at Denny’s (all we could afford after my tuition and Dad’s career) when Mom presented me with the box.
He knows exactly how to cut me to make me bleed.
I shook my head. If I opened my mouth to speak, I’d scream. Heather broke down into a fit of laughter, her singsong voice peeling along the vaulted hallway. “Oh, the poor little charity girl. Are you going to cry, Faye? Are you going to blubber like a baby? Look at you, all dressed up like you think you’re one of us. Your fat rolls are spilling out of that dress. You’re disgusting.”
I’d been called fat and ugly my whole life. The words rolled off my skin, unable to penetrate because I didn’t care what people thought of me. But tonight I held the remnants of my violin in my hands, and I stood in front of a boy who’d once been my friend, and Ibroke.
A fresh waterfall of tears toppled from my eyes, rolling down my cheeks. Dorien stepped forward, but I jerked away, spinning on my heel and fleeing to the not-safety of my attic room, Heather’s laughter chasing me the whole way.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ivan
I slammed the door so hard the entire wall rattled. A cascade of Elena’s lipsticks toppled from the overstuffed shelf and skittered across the floor. My whole body trembled. Fuck.Fuck.
I knew I should have gotten rid of that coke. Iknewit. But I kept it because… because I was abouof the first order.
Across the room, Elena curled up on her bed, like a dragon queen guarding her gaudy treasures. My own eyes peered back at me from behind her long, tangled lashes, wide and frightened.
“What’s going to happen to us now?” she asked in a small voice.
I shook my head. I had no idea. Neither of us stuck around after the recital to find out what Madame Usher had in store for us. That Sword of Damocles would dangle over us for a bit longer.
Would she wash her hands of us? Send us back to Romania? Cold dread washed over me as the options lined themselves up in front of me, each bleaker than the last. Would she hush it up and add more to our sentence?
Elena’s lip trembled. I knew she was thinking the same things – what would this mistake cost us, for we both knew everything we did came with a price. I crossed the room in three strides and dropped beside her, sweeping her into my arms. Cosmetic tubes and handbags jabbed into my spine as I lay beside her. Elena rested her head on my chest, her fingers tracing the filigree patterns on my shirt. She waited for me to speak, to announce my grand plan. I was the older by two minutes – all our lives Elena had looked to me to be the responsible one, to find a way out of any mess.
But I could see no way out – only darkness, only the gilded bars of our cage closing in on us. We were in too deep.
“Ivan, open up.” Dorien hammered his fists against the door.
“Dorien, what the fuck—” I jerked upright just as he rammed the door with his shoulder, tearing the lock from its screws. The door banged open and Dorien barged past, moving to the window to pull the curtains shut. He turned to Elena, his voice a maelstrom of barely-restrained rage.
“Get out.”
“Don’t talk to her like that.” I threw myself in front of my sister, hands balled into fists. “This is her life, too.”
