New York Billionaires Series

“You look similar to your big brother too. I’ve always loved that about siblings. The same features but tossed together in a different order. How much older was Phillip?”

“Three years.”

“Did you look up to him?”

A memory breaks through, and I chuckle. “Yes. I followed him around everywhere when I was a kid. Every single interest he had, I picked up a week later, without fail.”

Cecilia smiles down at the picture, and then back up at me. “I have a feeling you were even more stubborn as a kid.”

“I’ve been told I was, yes.”

She walks around the desk, picture frame still in her grip. “Are they part of your nightmares? The time you lost them?”

I can’t get air into my lungs. They work, uselessly, against the tide of shame that rises up inside me. It had been too much to hope that she’d never bring them up.

In all the years I lived in this house, my grandfather had mentioned my nightmares exactly once, and then only to tell me to keep it down. They got rarer and rarer with the years, but fatigue or stress brought them out in full force. Or, it seemed, lusting painfully after Cecilia.

She puts the frame down on the desk and steps behind my chair, hands landing on my shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We can pretend I never asked.”

Her palms against my chest restarts my breathing. I look down at the frame, at the familiar image of all of us happy and blissfully unaware.

“Yes, they’re what I dream about.”

Her hand traces the scar through my shirt. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s put it together. What surprises me are my own words, slow and pained. “It was a car accident. A drunk driver. We were driving home from dinner in this very house, actually.”

I grip her wrist and tug her around, pushing back from the desk. She settles onto my lap with a sigh. I fit my hands to her hips, pressing her tight against my chest. Something to hold on to.

“Dad and Phillip died right away. They were on the left side of the car, where the other car hit.”

She tightens her grip on my shoulders, and I see them in front of me, my brother and my father. Stuck next to me in the crushed car, not breathing, not…

I clear my throat. “A piece of metal went straight into my chest. Not deep, but wide. The rescue team had to cut me out of the car.”

“Oh, Victor.”

I say the next part because it belongs to the story, because it’s important, because it’s her memory. But I hate every single word. “Mom spoke to me in the car, when it was just the two of us and the silence, before the sirens came. Told me to hold on. We both made it to the hospital in ambulances, but I was the only one who left. Turns out a giant piece of metal in your chest isn’t as bad as a head injury and internal bleeding.”

The memories of those long, painful days in the hospital are ones I’ve never managed to suppress. Lying in a hospital bed, body half-broken, and being told that Mom had gone. I hadn’t even seen her. They’d wheeled her into surgery, and then she was no more, and I was given Jell-O and pitying glances and the crushing sense of being absolutely and completely alone in the world.

Never again would I feel that powerless. Grandpa saw that desire in me, helped me mold myself into someone who took control. Someone who wasn’t at the mercy of fate.

Cecilia leans back in my hands, shimmering green eyes meeting mine. Her voice is shaky. “I’m so sorry, Victor.”

I close my eyes. I don’t want to see her pity, I don’t want to hear it. Women I’ve dated in the past have always looked at the scar like that. At first, it seems to make them want me more, for some reason I’ve never understood. But then they want an explanation, and the explanation leads to pity.

And I’ve already had so much fucking pity. My entire life was full of it back then, in the months and years after. Every single time someone at school asked an innocent question about my parents and I had to say the words. They’re dead.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t want it.”

With the uncanny way of knowing she has, she shakes her head. “It’s not pity. It’s compassion.”

My thumb moves in a sweep over her hip, and I can’t think of a single thing to say. She doesn’t say anything either, just kisses me, and that’s good. That I know how to do.

I lift my head a while later. My throat and chest both feel uncomfortably tight, and it’s not from her glorious weight on my lap. I reach for her left hand and hold it between our chests, running my thumb over her wedding rings.

“Oh,” she murmurs. “I forgot to give them back to you earlier.”

I separate her engagement ring from her wedding ring, pressing my thumb down on the emerald-encircled diamond. “This was my mother’s engagement ring.”

“It was?”This belongs to NôvelDrama.Org - ©.

Her voice is quiet. “Thank you for letting me wear it.”

“It’s been in a safe for over twenty years,” I say, eyes on the rock. “And it’s just a ring.”

“It’s not just a ring.” She starts to worry it off her finger, sliding first the engagement ring off and then the wedding band. Her ring finger looks bare without them. She puts them in my palm, warm from her skin.

I look at them for a long time, but then I slide them back on her finger. “I’d rather they be with you than in my safe.”

“You want me to wear them?” she asks. “All the time?”

I keep my eyes on the rings. “If you don’t mind.”

Her hand closes, rings on. “I don’t mind.”

“So this is a code red situation,” Nadine says.

“It’s code black. Code… midnight. Whatever’s worse than red.”

“You’re definitely overreacting.”

“Am I really, though? I talk to her on the phone every single week and I haven’t mentioned this. She’s not going to be happy.”

Nadine cocks her head. She’s done her hair in braids and they’re a waterfall down her shoulder. She looks comfortable in Victor’s living room, curled up in one of the armchairs. “Your mother never reacts the way you’d expect. I bet she’s going to congratulate you and ask when the grandchild is due.”

“She is the living embodiment of ‘screw the establishment.’ She never got married herself.”

“She did marry Jeff.”

“Not legally. The ceremony was ancient Mayan.”

Nadine grins. “I remember. Your job was to invoke the fire element.”

I’d accidentally dropped the match and it had lit the hem of my mother’s dress on fire. She’d laughed and Jeff had stomped it out, and their friend Harry, fulfilling the role of shaman, said it signified a fiery union to come.

And it had been, all two long years of it.

“You did an excellent job on wind,” I say.