Kiss the Sky (Calloway Sisters #1)(65)

But what can we do? She has to finish prep school, and I can only guess the kind of ridicule kids are casting on her. She’s famous now. Her sister is a sex addict, and she’s been painted as a sex-addict-to-be. Her photographs are everywhere—sometimes deliberately from modeling, other times not consented from paparazzi. It’s an abrupt change from her old life, and none of us can relate to her current situation. We’re all in our twenties, out of prep school by now. We don’t have to worry about bullying like that.

“We’re going to take care of this,” I tell her. I’m going to surround the fucking townhouse with security. We had iron fences and a guarded gate at our home in Princeton. We should have had better things in place here. “How’d he break through the front door?” I ask Ryke.

He glares. “I didn’t have time to fucking ask.”

My lips tighten. “Did he touch her?”

Ryke stares back down at Daisy. “Did he fucking touch you, Daisy?”

She shakes her head repeatedly. “No…I’m sorry…” She wipes her eyes quickly and tries to bottle her emotions.

“Don’t you ever fucking apologize for another guy’s offense,” he growls. He layers on a few more curse words as he glares at the ceiling.

Wow. Ryke jumped up twenty points in my book. Not for the swearing, to be clear. “When did you become such a feminist?” I ask him.

“Since I learned my alcoholic father cheated on my mother. Then he fucking left her so he could raise his bastard son.” The bitterness and resentment pours from his harsh words.

“I shouldn’t have asked.” His family tree is fucked up. I smooth Daisy’s hair.

Connor pads over to us, pocketing his phone. He no longer has the guy by the shirt. In fact, the man is gone. “Your father’s security came and took him,” he tells me. “He broke through the front door with a bump key.”

“We need—”

“Your father already hired extra security to stand outside. He’s taking care of the incident quietly. No one will know about this unless Scott decides to air it. He has footage of the man coming up the stairs and through the hallway.”

I look for Scott, but he’s gone too.

“Lily and Lo…” Daisy murmurs, rubbing her eyes.

“They won’t ever find out,” Ryke says. “This stays between the four of us.”

And Scott. But no one adds him or my father’s name to the mix.

And we don’t ask why Lily and Lo can’t know. It’s what Connor had told my father on the phone. The guilt would hurt them so much. The crazed media was spawned from Lily’s addiction being publicized. But I bear some of the guilt myself—for putting my sisters through a reality show with awful security, for ditching their bodyguards. But I can withstand that guilt and come out strong.

Lily and Lo can’t. They’re addicts. This is naturally going to tear them apart, and they could turn to their vices to numb the feelings. And none of us want that. We’ll be the walls that shield these terrible events from them. We can endure the pain for however long they need to heal.

It’s what the four of us agreed to the moment Lily was afraid to step out of the house and meet the world. The moment Lo looked sick each time he tried to convince her to go outside and face the coldhearted media.

There was a very dark point where we all believed they’d die together. Where they’d call it quits. There were moments where I wondered how any girl could endure what she was going through. And I think the only reason they both didn’t leave the world was because they refused to leave it together.

Leaving separately—causing the other to suffer that horrific loss—I doubt that was even an option in their minds.





CHAPTER 22





CONNOR COBALT





“What is it?” I ask Rose while I pay for the check at the crowded restaurant. The seven of us—Scott included, who feels more and more like a tagalong as Rose and I grow closer—ate out at Valentino’s for dinner.

The more popular Princesses of Philly becomes, the more press has latched onto us. Besides the drones of photographers outside, families in booths snap pictures of us with their phones as we sit at a long table.

But that’s not why Rose’s brows have pinched together. She cups her cell on her lap and concentrates on the blue-lit screen.

I hook my ankle to her chair and drag her closer to me.

“She’s relentless,” Rose says stiffly.

I read the text.

3 months and 24 days – Mom





“Should I even ask about wedding dress shopping?” Last time I questioned about the cake, Rose almost went manic, spouting off things that her mother told her in a discordant mess. I couldn’t understand anything she was saying, not even as she spoke in French. She kept pacing in our bedroom and breathing abnormally. It took me an entire hour to calm her down.

“Lily said she didn’t want to go,” she says. “I can get Daisy and Poppy to be fitted for bridesmaids’ dresses without Lily there, but I can’t just go pick out a wedding gown for her.” She stays relatively at ease, so she must have thought of a solution.

“And?”

“I’m going to sew her one,” she tells me. “I’ve been designing it for the past week. I think I can finish it in the amount of time I have left.”