Daybreak (Sorrowsong University, #2) — Chapter no 14

Chapter 14

ALEX

If Ophelia wasn’t so worried about Clementine walking in, I’d have kept her in that hall all night.

“One down, eleven letters, first letter M,” I straighten her up to place a kiss between her shoulder blades. She smells like coffee and fireplaces and something so uniquely her. “An outstanding piece of art, our finest creation.”

“A masterpiece,” she breathes, on a laugh. The paper in front of us is damning evidence of our transgressions, littered with orange and brown handprints, smudges, claw marks from Ophelia’s delicate fingers.

It’s priceless.

I divert my eyes from it before I bend her over all over again. I turn her to face me, tucking a wayward copper wave behind her ear. Her freckles are lost in her flush, whisky-brown eyes wide and watery when she breaks the

tranquil silence. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I gather all seven drawings, treating the final one with extra care while she quietly dresses behind me. The silence isn’t awkward; it isn’t full of unspoken words and stifling tension like that day in my car. It’s contented and comfortable, like we’re right where we should be.

When I turn, Ophelia is in some sort of long, strappy sundress, green and floral and paired with thick tights and boots. The straps are thin, neckline low. I rub a hand over my mouth, trying to think of something to say that isn’t wholly inappropriate for such a sweet moment. “That’s a new dress.”

My voice sounds strained, cracking on the final word like I’m fourteen years old. She notices, of course, laughing at me like I’m an idiot. I am an idiot. “It was two pounds from the charity shop.”

She bends to tie her laces, stretching the thin cotton that covers her ass. I almost lose my mind. “It looks good. You look good.”

A little smile creeps onto her face, and she swishes it at me, doing half a twirl like she might be starting to see herself the way I see her. Her confidence is recovering, small but steady. It makes my mood buoyant.

“Colette picked it out for me.”

I’m going to have to start paying that woman a commission.

She pulls her phone from her pocket and reads a text. “Eike took Colette back to the hotel.”

“Do you want me to drop you off there?” I offer, even though I’ll probably put one of these pastels in my eye if she says yes.

Lucky for my retinas, she shakes her head with a soft smile. “Shall we get dinner? I’m fifteen minutes from hangry.”

Shit. Ophelia when hangry is a force to be reckoned with. “Better go get pasta before you start punching members of the public, then.”

“It’s when the car smashing starts that you really need to worry.”

I tame my hair and smooth out my shirt, trying to retain just a modicum of discretion for Ophelia’s sake, even though there’s no universe in which Clementine didn’t hear her not-very-politely asking me to fuck her faster about five minutes ago.

But Ophelia seems convinced we can maintain our innocent facade, so when I tug open the door and find our brightly dressed host in the hallway, seemingly battling it out with my girlfriend for who can blush the hardest, I fight to keep the ridiculous grin off my face.

Tucking the drawings under my arm, I give her my most charming smile —the press conference smile—and toss a forty-pound tip on the side table in the hallway. “Fantastic event, Clementine. Thanks so much.” And sorry for fucking the model.

“You guys have a good sleep … sleep together … night together … have a good night,” she chokes out, all hot and flustered. Ophelia manages a mangled thanks very much, and I think my lip might actually be bleeding from my pathetic attempt to bite back my smile.

God, I’ve missed her.

THE FIRST THREE restaurants I stopped at were full, and the fourth offered me a table in return for a social media post about how good the food is. Then Ophelia’s mood slipped from ebullient into hangry. She was annoyed at the rain, annoyed at her bra straps, annoyed at the traffic.

Fancy dinner plans long abandoned, she’s in the passenger seat of my car, hugging two steaming pizza boxes to her chest, sneaking tiny corners of crusts every thirty seconds when she thinks I’m not looking.

Her miserable music plays through the speakers, her thigh drumming beneath my hand. The darkness inside me has shrunk enough to let me take a full inhale.

“Saw that,” I say, as she sneaks a piece of pepperoni from my pizza and

eats it.

“Saw what?”

“You’re stealing my toppings.”

She frowns over at me, face illuminated by the red light we’re stopped at. She’s ethereal. “You really are getting old. Let’s book you in for an eye

test.”

I squint at her. “Who said that?”

She giggles as the light turns green, humming softly as I steer us through the driving rain and busy evening traffic to my father’s house in Kensington. It’s a five-bedroom house at the end of a terrace on a well-kept road, furnished as tackily as you’d expect from a billionaire CEO who thinks gray crushed velvet is still on trend.

I park on the street, glancing around as I do. I have zero doubt that my father would love to get his hands on Ophelia. The street is quiet, neatly manicured hedges perfectly still. No sign of anything amiss.

I walk over to open the car door for Ophelia, taking the boxes from her lap. She’s quiet as we walk up to the front door, as she always is whenever she’s taking in how people like me live. I know she’s disgusted by the excess of it all.

“Another spare house,” she mutters, as I turn the key in the lock and enter the security code into the pad. “It’s like real-life Monopoly for you people.”

“And you’re the best Chance card I ever drew.”

She rolls her eyes, but her face flushes pink. “All right, Corbeau. Calm down.”

The house is cold and still, and I try to remember the last time the eight of us stayed here. Paris, we’ve spent a lot of time in, but London was a place we stopped visiting when my dad stopped caring about being a parent.

“Show me your bedroom!” she says, excitedly. “Have you got posters up? Embarrassing childhood pictures?”

I laugh, but it’s slightly strained. “It’s not that sort of home, love.” It wasn’t that sort of childhood.

I don’t bother with a tour, nor does she ask for one. She follows me up the stairs and into the bedroom I usually sleep in. The walls are white, the bathroom is marble. The bookshelves are full of those clothbound coffee table books that no one would ever read. Luxury Handbag Collections of the Nineties. That kind of thing. There’s not a photo, poster, toy, or splash of

color in the whole house. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She flops onto the bed, taking her pizza from me. “We can stick your drawings up.”

I lie down beside her, flipping the lid of my pizza box. It looks like a mouse has been at it. “Your drawing is going in my office, where I can stare at it all day.”

She folds a slice in half and eats it in one bite. That’s my girl. “Sounds inappropriate for a corporate environment.”

“So is having phone sex with you while I’m sitting at my desk.”

She turns bright red. “Oops.”

“Yeah, oops.”

We lie on the bed, sprawled out over the duvet while making light work of two extra-large pizzas.

I pull my phone from my pocket, catching up on the sibling group chat.

Mia has very thoroughly documented the baking process for her pistachio cookies, complete with a selfie of her and Evie at the end, cheeks full like hamsters.

Mia You’re missing out, Alex

I look at the girl beside me, hair still messy from our time in the hall, a smudge of pizza sauce on her pink bottom lip.

I think I’ll manage.

Alex You guys all okay? Save me a cookie, M.

Mia All good here. Mom is currently telling the gardener that you’ve got a girlfriend again.

Evie Breaking his heart, no doubt

Alex I’m sure George is happy with his wife of twenty-five years.

Mia Did Ophelia forgive you for being an ass?

Alex Might’ve gotten away with it

Evie Pics or it didn’t happen

I laugh, sending a blurry photo of the two of us on the bed.

Élé Cute dress

Mia Send that to Mom. It’ll make her entire year.

I do just that, and then I toss my phone aside so I can make love to my

girl.

I WAKE UP with a jolt, like something might’ve startled me.

Ophelia is sprawled out on top of me, naked limbs tangled with my own.

Her hair fans out, fiery and wild in the strip of moonlight that bleeds through the white curtain.

I trace my finger over her cheek, waiting for my racing heartbeat to return to normal.

She’s here. We’re safe.

So why do I feel on edge?

I grab my phone from the bedside, careful not to wake Ophelia, and text

Fleur a message.

Alex Is all good at home?

Fleur Isn’t it like 2am for you?

Alex Woke up with a bad feeling

Fleur Might be the clinical depression??

I snort quietly in the silent house. Yeah, might be.

Fleur We’re all fine. The others are watching a movie before bed

Alex How’s Freddie?

Fleur Do you actually care?

I couldn’t summon two shits to give about her idiot boyfriend even if I

spent all night trying my best, but I do care about Fleur, and should she find a man who makes her happy, I’ll try to get over my irrational fear of my

sisters growing up.

Alex I care about every element of your life, Fleur.

Fleur Except my safety when Dad is on a rampage, of course.

I shut my eyes, letting out a slow exhale. If I apologize again, it’ll be the

one thousandth time. But I’d do it again. My father while at the head of a billion-dollar company is completely bulletproof. Now, he has nothing.

Fleur Freddie’s fine. Maybe you were right about him.

My phone is pressed to my ear in half a second, Fleur’s exasperated sigh

in my ear. “What did he do?”

“Why are you anger-whispering?”

“Because I’m angry but Ophelia is sleeping. Tell me what he’s done.”

“He’s just … funny about my outfits.”

Nope. He has to go. I won’t have one of my sisters falling into a relationship that’ll end up like my parents’, where the honeymoon phase rots into a twisted dynamic where one of them sucks the life out of the other. “That’s a slippery slope, Fleur.”

“His dad is a really great modeling agent, though. He landed a Dior campaign for Bea.”

“And our mother is one of the most famous supermodels of all time.

You don’t need to stick around with him for industry connections.”

“I’ll see how it goes.”

“And if one of Rocco’s hitmen accidentally pushes him off a bridge?”

Her laugh is so rare nowadays, sometimes I wish I could bottle it.

“Don’t you dare. Night, Alex.”

She hangs up before I can rant about her boyfriend anymore, but I text Brendan and ask him to find me Freddie’s phone number, just in case.

Now I’m even more stressed than I was when I woke up. I slip out from beneath Ophelia, drape a blanket over her sleeping form, tug on some sweatpants, and gently pull the door shut behind me.

Scrolling through a few work emails in the darkness, I pad down to the kitchen for a glass of water.

The house is quiet. Everything is eerily quiet, especially for a busy London borough. I’m tempted to check under all the beds, but I’m wary of giving in to paranoia. I don’t want to fall onto the same road my mother fell onto.

I flick the lights on in the ostentatious reception room, and in the home office. My father’s oversized poster of a Green Aviation helicopter behind the desk makes my stomach churn.

In the kitchen, I pull a pint glass from the cabinet, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. In the window above the sink, I glance over the shoulder of my reflection to check no one is there, like when I’d stayed up too late watching horror movies as a kid.

I turn the cold tap on, and then the glass window in front of me shatters with a nauseating crack.

The whole house is drowned in a deafening alarm that’s so jarring, it sounds like it’s coming from inside my head, rattling the bones of my skull.

I snap my head to the side in an effort to avoid the thousands of glass shards that fly toward me. Light burns behind my closed eyelids, and when I swing them open and make a break for the door, the floodlights on the security system drown the small garden in a harsh white light.

At the far end, a black-clad figure is scrambling up the trellis on the brick wall.

I yank open the glass door, hurtling across the garden just as the hooded figure drops down the other side of the wall. I climb it with ease, but when I push myself up onto the cold brick, the overgrown alleyway beneath me is deserted and quiet.

Fury burns beneath my skin, chest rising and falling with badly contained frustration.

If Ophelia wasn’t in the house, I’d search the streets. I bite out a curse as I drop back into the garden, gaze snagging on the black glove that hangs on the trellis, tangled in the ivy.

I pluck it free from the inky green leaves and head back into the house with one person on my mind.

She’s pale and wide-eyed in the threshold to the kitchen, the security alarm so loud that it’s hard to form a thought. Her small feet are bare on the tile, too close to all the broken glass. I slip past her and reset the system in the hallway, and the silence that follows has my ears ringing.

“This is my fault,” is what she eventually says, the two of us standing and staring at the glass that looks like a layer of snow all over the kitchen counter. There’s a brick in the kitchen sink.

“No,” I manage, but I’m too angry to say much else. I fire off a rapid string of texts to Mack and Brendan.

Whoever that was, they’ll die for scaring her.

I grab our jackets from the door and pocket my wallet, slipping my hoodie over her head. “Brendan is sorting us a room somewhere.”

She shakes her head. “I should get back to Sorrowsong.”

“No.”

“I was warned so many times.”

“Ophelia.”

“It’s not safe for you to be with me. Not until I’ve found whoever is doing this.”

“This was probably a teenager trying his luck with a burglary. This has nothing to do with you,” I say, though I’m not even convincing myself.

Whoever this was clearly waited for me to be in the kitchen before … what? I don’t understand their motive.

They didn’t anticipate the security system. That much is clear.

“Let’s just get some sleep, let the cops search the place.”

There’s a distant look in her eye, her shoulders drawn up like she’s just waiting for something else to hit us. I exhale a slow, steadying breath, tugging her into my embrace. I bury my nose in her hair, and no matter how hard I hold her, it doesn’t feel hard enough. Her heart is a thundering, galloping beat in her chest. “You’re okay, Twist.”

“I wish I had a home to run to.”

It’s a whispered confession, perhaps not meant for me to hear, but it’s a red-hot poker to the chest, because she’s right.

I’ll get off the plane home, and the house will be busy and full. My mom will be waiting for me; my sisters will be ready to insult whatever public appearances I made this week. My bedroom will be warm, and Josie will be snoring in the room next door.

I’d do anything for her to have that feeling.

I curl my fingers into the hair at the back of her head like maybe I’ll be able to hold her together, even a little bit.

“I should call Colette.”

“Ophelia, you—”

She pulls away, eyes on the small cut I can feel just below my bottom lip. Gently, she runs her finger just beneath it. Her eyes are a boiling, swirling sea of emotion. “They threatened you, Alex, they almost … you almost … If something happened to you because of me, I wouldn’t survive

it.”

“It didn’t. It won’t.”

She flips my palms, grazed from the broken glass and the brick wall. “I was warned to stay away from you, but everyone told me to ignore it.”

“As you should. Don’t let whoever this is strip your life of all the good.”

“You are the good in my life, Alex. I could’ve lost you. Your sisters could have lost you.”

I pull the glove from my pocket, draping it over my palm. “They dropped this.”

She frowns, seeing what I see. I don’t think my hand would fit in that glove even if we had half an hour to try. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

She hovers her hand over the black fabric. It looks like a perfect fit.

“It’s not my father, Ophelia,” I say, telling her what she’s been told a hundred times before. “I know you think it could be him, but it isn’t. This stalking is sloppy, disorganized. Weak threats, as though they want to hurt you but can’t pull it off. That isn’t Cain at all.”

Her shoulders sink, like she’s been knocked back to Go on this fucked- up board game we’re playing. I know it’s not that she’s desperate for her stalker to be my father; it’s that she’s desperate for something, anything, to suggest we’re making progress.

“Don’t do whatever they ask you to do, Ophelia. Rocco’s men will catch them in Sorrowsong.”

“They won’t, clearly,” she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “It’s like this person is invisible, forgotten and left off all records.”

“Tread water a little longer. And come to a hotel with me.”

“Go back to New York.”

“No.”

“Please. Until we’ve caught this person, until I know they can’t hurt you.”

Her lips are pillow soft, her face warm between my palms. I drag an inhale through my nose, trying to drag enough of her into my lungs that the next however long without her feels more manageable.

I love you, her gaze says.

You’re the reason I’m grateful to be alive, I hope mine says back.

I brush a lock of hair from her forehead, holding her gaze so intensely in the quiet, dark house that it feels more intimate than anything else we could do. “Don’t go all no strings attached on me again.”

“Our strings are stitched through my heart, Alex. I can’t get rid of them even when I try.”