Dogs love me.
“Crap,” I mumbled, heart racing. This was where Fen lived, his aunt Zabel’s place, a mile or so from the villa. It was almost as if the universe kept bringing us together.
Bad timing, universe.
Part of me wanted to go to him, to make sure he was okay. He was really upset, and I knew it had to be doubly bad for him because he’d had a confrontation with his father. I didn’t comprehend all the family dynamics in play, but I knew enough about Fen to understand that this was majorly upsetting for him.
But did he want to seeme? The girl who was in the middle of all this mess? Maybe he didn’t want to see my face right now after what just happened.
Maybe I needed some space too.
I put the car in reverse and quickly got out of there, then sped all the way back to the lodge, laying my head on the steering wheel when I got it into the garage. Thankfully Dad wasn’taround—I couldn’t deal with his stony face right now, judging me about my decisions.
They were bad. All of them. What was I going to do about it?
I stole upstairs to the staff quarters and changed into my uniform. On the way down, I ran into Norma.
“You’re back already?” She narrowed her eyes at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Went okay?”
Definitely wasn’t going to confide in Norma. Exie, maybe, but I didn’t know where she was. So I just replied, “Mrs. Sarafian said to thank you for the wine.”
She nodded, glancing over her shoulder as if she’d be caught, then left without saying anything else. After I put on a walkie, I gathered from the hubbub in my earpiece that Norma was still in a tizzy about the dead squirrel floating in the pool and was trying to figure out if she should call a pool professional or animal control to take care of it or scoop it out herself.
Eddie might be sitting in a jail overseas until he was in his thirties, but here in the Larsen household, we were concerned about clean pools.
Finding Frida, I turned off my earpiece and sank into my anxious thoughts about the Sarafians, blessedly alone, until the one person I couldn’t ignore strolled into the prep kitchen.
“Quiet. Where is everybody?” Mad Dog said, completely oblivious to the squirrel in the pool. The king didn’t always pay attention to the details going on at his castle.
“Out back. Did you need something, sir?”
He sighed. “Makes me feel so old when you call me that.”
“Sir?” It took me a second to realize. “Oh, sorry. Um, Mad Dog.”
“That’s better.”
He was dressed in a T-shirt and white linen pants, a chunky pair of professional studio headphones hooked around the back of his neck. He had a red splotch on his arm. At least, I thought it was red. Hard to tell beneath all his tattoo work. But I could definitely tell that the crow’s-feet around his eyes were longer.
“You okay?” I asked. “Sleeping out in the Grotto Cabin?”
“Fuck no,” he complained. “I’m having a new mattress delivered tomorrow, so if you’re the one who answers the door, send the person down there. The current mattress has fleas or something. I’m being eaten alive. Look.”
He showed me the splotch on his arm, and I could tell he’d been scratching it.
“We’ve got cream for that,” I told him. “I’ll get it.”
“Thank you,kattekat.” As I was rummaging through a drawer with first aid supplies at the far end of the prep kitchen, he said, “You don’t look great yourself. Allergies?”
“No.”
“Oh. How is your brain? Did you happen to make peace with the lake, like I suggested?”
I stilled over the drawer. Maybe it was because we were alone, and that didn’t happen often. Maybe it was that his bug bites made him seem a little less like a giant. Maybe it was because afterthe confusing afternoon at the Sarafians’, I just needed to talk tosomeone.
