Stone Cold Fox (58)

I felt nauseous. A familiar taste in my mouth, I could already taste the whiskey that wasn’t from my own lips. A familiar scent in my nose, the black-dipped tuberose candles mixed with the smell of cigars. We weren’t even in the ballroom yet, but it was all rushing back. The sounds of deep laughter, big booming guffaws when nothing about it was funny. The faces of those men, some with their masks down when they got too comfortable, flushed from the drink and what was before them, a feast not only for their eyes. We were their prey, but the easy kind. Just girls. Girls who mistakenly thought we were women because of the people around us. Girls who thought we were in control when we were anything but.

I don’t know how I kept moving. My muscle memory wanted me to dissociate entirely but I couldn’t. I had to look alive. I had to get through this. I had to follow Gale. I couldn’t let on a thing. The fear was all-consuming.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

I wished that Syl was still with me. I would have held her hand.

Another man waited for us at the door, sporting a top hat, white tie and tails, with a small, handheld mask of his own and a self-righteous grin on his red face. I didn’t recognize him, but he looked like one of them. In his forties, maybe his fifties. Taking his turn at the door. Leering. Checking. Approving. Just another monster.

“Pretty, pretty,” he growled. “Guest of?”

“Hawkes,” Gale said to him, though not quite as confidently as before. Any woman worth her salt would pick up on the sordid energy in that house, even someone like Gale. Clearly she hadn’t really known the full scope of what she was getting us into, but she was going to see it through. Getting to me was more important to her, that much was obvious. She possessed that personality of pointed cruelty. Even when you think they won’t go so far, they do. Some women are just like that, I guess.

Mother was.

I wondered if this party would be the same as the parties before. Probably so. Different men maybe, different girls for sure. Would some of their mothers be there, too? The second the door swung open, those long-buried memories clamored to the forefront of my mind, overlapping with everything I saw before me. So similar. The masked men. The women in lingerie. No, girls. Girls in lingerie. I was light-headed. Too much. Breathe in. Breathe out. I’d be okay. I had to be okay. I wouldn’t let her get me. I wouldn’t let anyone get me ever again. I steadied myself. Head over body always. Focus. Focus. Focus. I could sit there, have a drink, observe, be silent, until it was time to leave. I wasn’t one of those girls anymore. I wouldn’t let Gale prove that I ever was.

I felt a hand on my waist. Someone trying to get into the room around us.

A man.

It was him.

I looked right at him.

Not very tall. But bold. With presence. Silver hair now.

He looked right through me.

I didn’t register to Francis at all and yet I’d know him anywhere.

I’d have to remember him until the day I died, but he didn’t even see me.

I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

It all came up.

Fast and violent.





CHAPTER


    12



WE HAD BEEN drinking all night. It was so late. It wasn’t suspicious that I vomited. Not glamorous, but not unheard-of behavior for a bride at her bachelorette party. Chloe and Calliope insisted that we leave right away, so we did, but I knew we would have been escorted out anyway within seconds.

They never wanted the girls to be sick at the parties.

Gale didn’t say anything back in the car. Whatever her plan was, it had been derailed by my outburst. And soon the wedding would be upon us. I was truly afraid of what Gale Wallace-Leicester might do. She was clearly very serious and I needed to stay ahead of it, but I was failing thus far. I should have started planning an attack of my own. After that display on East Eighty-First Street, she would deserve it.

But I couldn’t. I was too close. I’d stay on the defensive for now.

I wasn’t my mother.

I could play defense for one more week. Survival mode. I knew it well.

One more week and I’d be married and Gale wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.



* * *



? ? ?

IN THE WEEK leading up to our wedding, I noticed Collin’s mood took a noticeable dive. He seemed different. Changed. Perhaps it was the clinical depression rearing its ugly head, but he had the medication to combat it, I assumed. Or worse, he was getting cold feet. Did Gale get in his ear under the cover of night? I was keeping close watch on him, but she was clever. No. That wasn’t it. She couldn’t have made any lasting impact, not without making sure I knew that she was behind it. Curse that beast, she was rattling me. I’d been thrown off my A game since the bachelorette party despite my best efforts. I needed to calm down but take extra precautions. So I decided to kick it up a notch at home, as far as domesticities went, going so far as to cook for him myself, instead of ordering in or making reservations, and I performed four nights in a row of enthusiastic fellatio. Still, he was rather vacant, even as he came. It made me anxious. Wifely duties were not checking the box, so I needed to dig deeper.

“You can talk to me, you know.” I snuggled up next to Collin after a quick brush of my teeth and an Altoid. “I’m here for you. Always.”

“I know. I’m okay. There’s just been a lot going on.”