Crowne jewel, p.13
Crowne Jewel, page 13
part #1 of The Crowne Brothers Series
“Water.” I sit down again. “This is a nice house.”
“Thanks. Oh, I have Fresca too.”
“What is that? Apple?”
“Grapefruit, I think? Liang likes it.” She holds up the can. It looks inoffensive enough, and I like grapefruit.
“I’ll try it.”
She puts the Fresca and a Coke on the counter and stretches for the cabinet. The hoodie rises a few inches above the edge of her waistband, exposing another patch of soft, secret skin.
Didn’t I just fuck her twenty minutes ago? What’s going on with me?
“You a glass-and-ice guy or a right-outta-the-can guy?”
Does she not remember, or has everything changed?
“Glass.” I stare at the laptop, punching in the settings to catch all the incoming and outgoing signal.
“I’m a buy-the-can but drink-from-a-glass person. The metal can keeps it extra cold and then with the ice…” She cracks open the cans. “It’s as close to fountain as you can get.” She gets the bucket of ice from the freezer and drops the half-moons into the glasses. “And honestly, there’s nothing like a 7-Eleven big gulp full of Diet Coke with a ton of crushed ice.”
I try to keep my mind on my work as she fixes the drinks and speaks about absolutely nothing, but she threw the hoodie on over her bare skin, and all I can think about is how I was too impatient to give her breasts the attention they deserved.
“I was thinking of getting a soda fountain thingie and crushed ice, but I can just go out and get it. Do you want lemon in yours?”
“No.”
“Yeah, that makes no sense in a Fresca. Duh. I’m a no-lemon girl myself.” She chucks the cans in the recycling.
“You surprise me.”
“Because I don’t take a lemon in my soda?”
“Because you’re this nervous.”
“I’m not. Do you want a straw?”
“No, thank you.”
“Me too, I—” She stops herself short. Shrugs. Takes a sip. The way she stopped herself as if she realized that she’s babbling through nerves is as much of an admission as I’m going to get from her. “Whatever.”
She brings the drinks around to the dining room table and stands above me, condensation dripping into the seams between her fingers and the glass.
“I’m working for your father,” I say. “And now that part of my job is you.”
She hands me my glass. “You’re sitting here like it’s your whole job.”
“I shouldn’t have touched you.”
“You didn’t. Officer Everhard did.”
“I’m not playing games, Lyric.”
“Fine. Look, have you heard of Nelson Fried?” She sits in the chair diagonal from me. “The congressman-slash-actor-slash-wingnut?”
“I’ve been living in another country up until a month ago.”
“Come on. Moustache?” She puts her finger over her lip. “Eyebrows?” A spread hand goes over her eye. “Never met a book he didn’t want to ban? Bangs things when he talks?” She puts her fist to the table as if she’s pounding it.
“Actually, yes. My father associated with him, I think.”
“Yeah, well, he and my father were not buddies, let’s just say that. Whatever. I went to high school with his daughter. She had a driver and a bodyguard and the whole nine yards. Let me tell you, Nellie was fun as fuck. This one time—it was before the family moved to DC, obv—I was at Dougie Corn’s wrap party after Dear Evan Hansen, and it was a rager. If he hadn’t hired security, someone would have peed on the Monet… anyway… Nellie got lit up like the Vegas Strip, which—her dad, being into performative piety and all—should have gotten her grounded for life. But her bodyguard, I think his first name was like a last name… like Smith or Jones or something… he got her home and never said a word about it.”
“Is there a point?”
There’s always a point. How could I forget her stories with the point written in Sharpie and slipped under the door?
“She wasn’t careful, but her bodyguard? He had secrets. Tons of them. He said nothing. He just zipped it. That was his job.”
The sniffer beeps to let me know it’s finally online. A series of connections and protocols rolls up on the laptop screen.
“My job isn’t to ‘zip it.’ My job is to protect you. I can’t do that if I’m fucking you.”
“Sure, you can. But I’ll tell you what. Let’s make it easy on you.” There’s a smile in her voice, even if I can’t see it because I’m looking at the screen. “You can stay outside, in your car, staring at my door and wishing I’d come out and bring you a glass of Fresca. And when I go out to a party, you can—”
“No parties.”
She knows that, so I don’t remind her again, because looking at the packets as they roll up, there’s something wrong here. Too many protocol adjustments and an anonymous pipe that shouldn’t be there.
“Yeah, parties.” She leans closer to look at the screen with me.
I stop the scroll. Copy a line. Screencap just to be sure.
“Listen!” I didn’t decide to shout, but my demand echoes off the walls and she flinches. I’ve never seen Lyric Crowne flinch. I don’t like it. I want to punch the guy who made her afraid. “Just…” I have to breathe before I remember what I wanted to ask her. “You have just the one modem?”
“It’s a small house, so… yeah?” She shrugs and stands.
“No. Listen, I need to get Mike in here. He has to see this.”
“Okay.” She walks to the living room area and throws herself on the couch where I can’t see her.
“He’s going to bring equipment.”
“Fine, I guess.”
“Lyric. You’ve been compromised a long time.”
“Fix it and let me know.”
The TV flashes on. We should have talked about what happened, but I’m shut out, and I have to call Mike right now, before this gets any worse.
One thing is for sure, I’m not leaving this house if she’s in it, and she’s not going anywhere without me.
CHAPTER 20
LYRIC
“Pack a bag.”
I’m trying on big, clunky shoes. Terry, my old shopper from Bendel’s, holds up the Dior tote I carried around my first semester at NYU—before I realized hauling my books in a four-thousand-dollar bag wasn’t making me any friends.
“Lyric,” Terry says in a man’s voice.
Ah. I’m dreaming. Okay.
“You need to get up and pack.”
Anton. I fell asleep on the couch to the chatter of Big Brother season seven and Anton and Mike saying shit I couldn’t understand. They went in and out with stuff for hours.
“Excuse me?” I rub the goop out of my eyes.
“Please.” He’s a fuzzy black turtleneck against the white ceiling. “Get some things together.”
“Why?” Blinking, I get up on my elbows and look around.
Mike, Anton’s half-brother, is at a bank of monitors and boxes on my dining room table. He looks like he’s managing a space mission at NASA.
“Good morning,” he says when he sees me looking over the back of the couch at him.
“Morning. You can make coffee if you want.”
“Tha—”
“Someone’s in here,” Anton interrupts. “In the house.”
“What?” I’m awake now.
“Not…” He holds up his hands and takes a breath. “Not physically. Someone’s using your signal to watch you.”
“My internet? Like what I click?”
“Maybe. Can you please…?”
“Maybe? What’s the alternative?”
“Buttons,” he says softly. That’s my nickname, and I’m sucked back in time, hearing it from his lips. Part of me wants to melt into a puddle of contentment. The rest wants to punch him in that time-traveling mouth.
“You can’t call me that anymore.”
“Pack. Up,” he demands without acknowledging the boundary he just leapt across. “You’re not safe here.”
I look around my house. Everything I placed here is mine. It makes me feel as safe as he thinks I’m not.
Anton’s not kidding. He has dark circles under his eyes. Drawn cheeks. He hasn’t slept.
I should take him seriously.
“Okay.” I throw off the blanket. “Okay.”
He nods and goes back to the equipment. I make a mental list at the top of the stairs but stop when I hear him on the phone.
“Bring Peter. We need to sweep down to the studs.”
“You packed enough for a month,” Anton says, slamming the back of the Range Rover. Frustratingly, it won’t let him slam, slowing itself like a nanny telling the kids to wait until she’s finished cutting their carrot sticks.
He unlocks the car and opens the passenger side door.
“Well, how long is it going to be?” A maple leaf flies into my hair. I pull it out.
“Get in.”
“Don’t worry about it, Lyric,” I say in a fake deep voice. “Everything is going to be okay. We have it under—” He slaps the door closed. When he gets in, I finish. “We have it under control.”
“We have it under control,” he repeats. “You’ll be home soon.”
“When?”
“When it’s safe.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“You have two choices. One, your parents’ house.”
“No. They’re going to treat me like some damsel in distress and I’m not.”
“Two, then. I can take you where I live.”
“Oh, fucking great.”
“There’s a guest house in the back. It’s all yours.”
“Fine. I give up. Whatever.”
“Believe me, I’m motivated to get you out. The sooner this stops, the sooner I can get on with my life instead of fucking with all this past-life shit.”
“That can be over like this.” I snap my fingers and leave the middle one straight up.
He nods, confirming he sees it, but that’s all I get out of him. He turns on the car.
“So, you don’t think you’re bringing me to your house and, like, trapping me, do you?”
“You won’t be trapped. And I don’t live in my own house.”
“Okay?”
He pauses. Checks his side mirror. Adjusts his ass in the seat. “I live in my mother’s house.”
“Great.” I laugh. “I’ll finally get to meet her.”
“This isn’t a social call.” He whips the car around into a K-turn, pulling right up to my driveway gate.
“Fuck.” I rub my face. This sucks. Everything about it sucks. I did want to meet his mother, but now we’re not even together and this is one hundred percent not a social call. “You know what? It’s fine. For the best. Can we not tell Dad, actually?”
“Tell him what?”
“Whatever. That you saw some… code? I don’t know. What did you see?”
“Things that shouldn’t be there.”
“Fantastic. Yeah, you can’t tell him that. He’s going to get me a police escort to take a shit and my mother’s going to die of worry. Forget it. Don’t say anything.”
“I’m not sure I can do that.” He throws his arm behind my seat to look behind him when he backs up, cutting the wheel confidently. If I lean forward enough, I could just about kiss that scruffy jaw. Bury the entire bottom half of my face in that spot where his neck meets the hard angle of his face—if I wanted to, which I don’t, even if I do.
“You can.” I hold a finger up to him because what I’m saying is absolutely correct. “You totally can.” My phone rings. It’s Kevin from Meta. “You start by shutting up whenever you’re tempted to say anything to them.”
Anton isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at my driveway gate.
“Give me a second.” He gets out without further explanation.
I shrug and answer my phone. “Hey, Kev. You’re on speaker.”
“Hi, Lyric, just calling on a recorded line. This call may be—”
“Whatever, Kev, you don’t have to—”
But he goes on his spiel anyway. Meanwhile, Anton’s standing in front of my gate—a solid wall of wood—and taking a picture of it.
“Got that?” Kevin says.
“Yes.”
Anton turns away from the gate and walks back to the car. My eyes follow him. They have no choice. The way he moves is like a rock-solid agreement between his body and the area it occupies. Space folds around him, and he moves through it as if he owns it.
The driver’s door snaps open.
Right. I’m here. Kevin’s talking. “Our head of security has a possible solution to your problem. Would you like to come in to discuss?”
“Yes,” Anton says, pulling down the block.
“That’s… um…” Saying he’s my ex isn’t going to help anyone, so I dig his actual title from the back of the closet. Anton stops at a light, opens his mouth to answer, but I find what I’m looking for before he makes a sound. “He’s digital security for Crowne Industries.”
Kev pauses, then puts the customer service voice back on. “Great! Will he be joining us?”
“Yes,” Anton says, turning west on Sunset.
“You heard the man.”
“Sure did.”
We make arrangements and I hang up.
I try to make stupid conversation, but Anton’s distracted. He’s all grunts and hmms. I sigh and watch the city whip by.
North of Sunset, the estates are either behind hedges too thick for a machete, or deceptively, daringly open. Which am I getting?
“I forgot all about my account being shut down,” I say pensively. “It seemed like the worst thing in the world. But it wasn’t.”
“No?”
“Getting yanked out of my house is.”
“It’s going to be all right.” At a stop sign, he looks at me, then squeezes my hand. “We have it under control.”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
He takes away his hand and turns onto a dead-end street.
“We do. Trust me.” He turns into the driveway of my new home for the foreseeable future.
CHAPTER 21
ANTON
Lyric deserves my attention, but I can’t give it to her. I’m convinced she saw what I saw on her gate and she’s so terrified she’s babbling, but when she tells me the worst thing about all this and it’s not someone jerking off onto her house, leaving a trail of translucent spooge, I snap out of it.
“Trust me,” I say, creating a lie of omission. If she didn’t see it, she doesn’t need to know about it.
Vlad greets us. I introduce Lyric and let him take care of the bags.
“Come,” I say to her, guiding her around the side of the house to the back.
What if this doesn’t work? If she’s threatened again, where will I move her? What if something happens to her while she’s here?
“You look really uncomfortable,” she says.
There’s no way I’m addressing what she thinks she’s seeing. “My mother’s back here.”
“I promise not to say anything really dumb.”
“I’m not worried about that.” I open the gate to the backyard before she can ask what I’m worried about and I have to make up something.
Lyric hangs back as Mom runs to me… robe flowing behind her, holding down her wide-brim hat. She loses a slipper, and when she bends to aim her foot back into it, her sunglasses fall off. By the time we reach her, she’s properly shod and clutching the glasses in one outstretched arm.
“Anton!” She’s hugging me before I even say hello. She unwraps herself.
“Mom, how are you?” I kiss her cheek. We both speak Ukrainian and Russian, but even in the house, we communicate in English.
“And who’s this?” she asks.
“This is Lyric.”
“The one you talked about?” Mom looks at the new arrival as if she’s inspecting a melon at the market. “From New York?” They shake hands.
“He talked about me?”
Shit. I am not going to encourage this particular exchange of information.
“You can sleep in the guest house,” I say, walking toward the back house. “I’ll get your bags after—”
“All the time,” Mom says.
“Really? When he was in New York?” Lyric asks.
“Is it open?” I ask. “Because I want her to get settled.”
“Yes. And Kyiv, constantly. And Mariupol, which was…” She laughs as if it’s funny. “Over the bangs and booms. It sounded like a war zone, more or less, and wasn’t it, sweetheart?”
She’s looking at me. I wish she wouldn’t. I don’t want to answer or even think about the war in front of Lyric.
“That sounds terrible,” Lyric says.
“Sofia!” I call in the general direction of the house.
“You said you were a propagandist and computer guy.” A knot appears between her brows. “You didn’t say you were in the war part.”
Sofia’s in front of me later than I’d like but as quickly as humanly possible. She’s lived in our houses in St. Petersburg and Crimea since I was shorter than a fire hydrant, and she came to America with us when I was ten.
“Can you make sure there’re clean sheets and towels in the back house?”
“Changed on Monday.”
“Can you do it again?”
“No,” Lyric interrupts. “That’s fine. It’s not even a week.”
I’m about to insist, just to get Lyric off the subject of the war and my place in it.
“Can you get us something to drink, dear?” Mom saves me.
“We have iced tea,” Sofia offers. “I’ll get it before anyone refuses.” She’s on her way in before I can assure her she doesn’t have to serve us anything.
“Lyric, come sit!” Mom takes my charge by the arm and leads her to the patio table, throwing herself into a chair so hard it almost tips over.
I’m going to have to control this conversation until I can get my mother aside and tell her to put a lid on it.
“Where’s Sabrina?” I ask.
