“No, his book club.Yes, his cult.”
Slash tossed his wine glass behind him, splattering the wall with glass and liquid. He took out a red coloured lollipop, inhaled it and licked it once before returning it to his pocket and gestured to me. “Who’s this?”
Dig clenched his jaw. “She’s no one.”
I looked at Dig aghast. How dare he.No one!“I am Delphine De—I am no one. Yes, I am no one.”
Slash stood up and stretched, the action made his pink-sequined crop top lift further up his midsection, exposing his sharp muscled abdominals. It seemed everyone in prison all had gym memberships. He sauntered down each step languidly, his lips peeling up into their grin and bent down to Dig.
He snatched Dig’s jaw. In response Dig tried to bite him but failed.
“Join me,” Slash said, his voice slippery like a serpent. “It’s what Daddy would have wanted.”
I yawned. Honestly, this all could have been an email.
Dig jerked, trying to remove his jaw from Slash’s grip. “That man was a piece of shit.”
“You should be proud Dig—”
“Don’t—”
“—you have the might inside of you—”
“Get off—”
“—all you just need to do is see it.” Slash snatched away Dig’s sunglasses, revealing his face to the world. “There you go little brother, just like Daddy.”
38
Dig Graves
He had fucked her in his head so many times that the image of her stained into the smallest thought.
After Dig Graves had tried to connect to her, and it had failed, he had wondered if he had been incorrect.
Why did her heart not lead her to him?
Why did their insignia not sink over the skin of their hearts?
Was she really his?
It wasn’t difficult to follow her. His heart knew where she was every second that it beat. Dig went to sleep in his bed, knowing that she was in hers. In the mornings, he woke up and walked to his refrigerator, knowing that she had left her front gate to jog around her estate. When he walked down the street to go to the mart, he knew her driver had taken her to her favourite café on Laybank. When he sketched in the park, he knew she was in the yoga studio three streets away.
If Dig wanted to see her—which he did, before and during and after each breath that he took—all he had to do was follow his heart and there she was: his Soulmate.
He learnt all that he could about her. He kept her in his journal and logbook, marking her daily and then weekly activities. On Mondays andWednesdays, she went to class, and so did he. Dropping into a seat outside of her class windows, he peered in and watched her fiddle with strands of her hair, type into her laptop, lick her fingers to flip pages in her textbooks, giggle with a friend. On Tuesdays she worked with a charity for children, and he hung out by the front entrance, flipping his pencil between his fingers, catching glimpses of her in her matching skirt and blazer. The top pearl buttons on her loose blouse spilled open on occasion when she bent to the table, exposing the bare flesh over her heart where she waited for him to mark her. On Thursdays she worked with her brother, heading to conferences, to speech rallies, to his office. On Fridays, she ate sushi for lunch and so he ate sushi for lunch. When she went out to dinner with a friend, wafting by him in a perfume he hunted down after, he watched her order a hundred-dollar steak and so he ordered a hundred-dollar steak.
He could not directly approach her. Not with her personal guards.
But, that did not stop him.
Whatever café she sat in, he sat in too. Whatever path she walked, he walked too. Whatever store she went into, he followed right after. He jotted down her shopping tastes: face masks and lotions and a pen with a penguin on top, eight-hundred-dollar high heels. She only bought A-line dresses, never halter neck. She once said that coriander tasted like soap.
She couldn’t cry.
He did not know why, and it seemed neither did she. He watched her trying to cry, scrunching up her face when she passed a window or a mirror, looking on with envy when a child dribbled with tears, or an elderly woman padded under her eyes with a handkerchief.
Delphine De Astor couldn’t cry.
