SOPHIA
The inside of the house… Scratch that. The inside of the mansion is just as grand and austere as the outside. Carl leads me by the hand inside the marble floored foyer, and my breath catches in my throat. Two huge, imposing staircases sweep around, rising up to the second floor, just like out of a Jane Austen book. Likewise, the cut crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling is beautiful. It spills warm, honeyed light over everything. The heavy gilt-framed paintings on the walls. The plush maroon-colored rugs that dot the polished floor. The Grecian vases, filled with wild flowers, which sit on top of every available surface. Every single item of furniture, from the wing-backed chairs to the perfectly placed buffet dressers, looks old. Old, but beautifully taken care of.
Rebel’s behind me, his hand in the small of my back. “Perhaps we could save the penny tour ’til later? We’re both kind of tired right now, Carl.”
“Of course. It’s a really long drive from New York. You both must be dead on your feet,” Carl says.
I squirrel away yet another scrap of information that I might need later. Rebel’s father and his employees think he calls New York home. They probably think he’s some big city hot shot, living it up in some high-rise penthouse apartment or something, when the ironic truth is that he lives in a secluded cabin in the middle of the desert. About as far from New York as you can get, really.
I still can’t get over the name. Jamie. He didn’t look surprised when Carl called him that—like he was expecting it to happen and couldn’t care less. I think I know him better than that now, though. He’s secretive. Every small fragment of information I know about him is hard won. And he still never told me how old he was. I have to be close with my guess of twenty-nine, though. He certainly doesn’t look much older than that.
Carl squeezes my hand again, smiling warmly. “Well, all right then. I’ll go and move that beast of a car before your daddy sees it, Jay. Your room is still where it’s always been, son.” He slips back outside, pulling the door closed behind him, leaving Jay and me behind. I curve an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to speak.
“Louis James Aubertin the third,” he says, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “My grandfather refused to call me Louis, though—hated my father—so he called me Jamie. Or Jay.” He reaches out absently, touching his fingertips to the petals of a bunch of flowers sitting on a small pedestal at the base of the stairs. “It kind of stuck,” he says. “My father refused to call me Louis anyway. Said I wasn’t strong enough to carry the name.”
I give him a small smile, not sure how I’m supposed to react. “Louis James Aubertin the third. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? I prefer Jamie.” I don’t know why I say this. It’s not my job to make him feel better. I owe him nothing, but…I don’t know. It’s so hard to explain. Every single hour I spend with him leads me away from hating him, and feeling…what? God, it’s too complicated to even try and put a name on it.
“Thank you,” he says, his eyes resting on me. They seem less hard. Less fierce, somehow. “I prefer Rebel, though.”
“Why Rebel?”
A small crease forms in between his brows. He stares at the flowers, stroking his fingers over their delicate petals, being so, so gentle. “Jamie was before. Jamie was an honorable man. Rebel…” He looks at me, wearing a small, almost sad smile. “Rebel does what he has to. Come on. We need to make ourselves scarce.”
“Why?”
“Because the very worst thing you can do to my father, besides be me, is interrupt him during dinner. Better we see him tomorrow than disturb him while he’s shoving food into his fucking face.” Rebel holds out his hand. Such a strange thing to do. It’s as though being here, around Carl and his impeccable manners, has changed him slightly. I take his hand, feeling conflicted. This situation is bizarre, to say the least. I don’t remember the last time I felt this confused. A part of me wants to go back on my word and tell anyone who will listen that I’m here against my will. But another part of me is beginning to…is beginning to trust the man now guiding me up the wide staircase, toward god knows what.
He hasn’t hurt me.
He hasn’t lied to me as far as I can tell.
He hasn’t abused me in any way, aside from being incomprehensibly annoying when the mood takes him.
For the time being, and for the sake of my sanity, I’m choosing to believe that he’s still an honorable man. That after all of this is over and we’ve driven back to New Mexico, he will let me go.
Rebel doesn’t let go of my hand when we reach the top of the stairs. He walks briskly down a long, well-lit hallway that branches off to the left, hurrying, as though he doesn’t want to linger. I realize why when I look at the walls.
Photos of him. Everywhere.
Photos of him in a football uniform. Much younger. Unsmiling. Photos of him in a graduation gown, cap perfectly straight on his head. Still unsmiling. Another picture, with another diploma in his hand—I see the name of the institute printed on the mounting of the picture, and my head starts spinning. “Massachusetts Institute of Technology? You went to MIT?”
“I did,” he says. He doesn’t stop walking. The muscles in his jaw are jumping like crazy.
“Wow.” We pass more and more photos. Images of Rebel, sans his tattoos, shirtless and holding trophies, swimming trophies, still unsmiling. As we near the end of the hallway, the photos on the wall change dramatically. They’re not of Rebel the over-achiever. Rebel the sporting hero. They’re of Rebel the soldier. I try to slow, to look properly, but he tightens his grip, walking faster. “Will you—will you just stop!” I rip my hand free, backing up a few paces so I can look at the walls properly.
For some reason, my heart is hammering in my chest as I take it all in. The first picture of him is in a dress uniform, buttons shining brightly, hat placed firmly on his head. Unlike in his other pictures, there’s a quiet sense of pride lurking in those cool blue eyes of his. He looks so young. Just a baby. “How old are you here?” I whisper.
Rebel sighs, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. His expression is tired as he joins me in front of the photograph, his chest so close to my back I can feel the heat of him radiating into me. “Fifteen,” he says. “I went to a military school.”
“And how was that?”
He laughs a hard laugh. “Like winning a five-year-long trip to motherfucking Disneyland. The fun just never ended. They called me Duke. Seems, when your name ends in ‘the third’, you can’t really avoid that shit.” His voice is full of sarcasm, but I can hear something else in there, too. Hatred. He hated it there. So why, then, does he look so proud in his uniform? I want to ask, but we’re not there yet. He probably wouldn’t tell me.
I walk along, looking at the rest of the pictures. In each shot, he gets older, bigger, taller, stronger. That hardness develops in his eyes—not cruelty, but strength. A challenge to the outside world. The photos show images of him with a bunch of other men, always surrounded by other guys in uniform. Even frozen this way, trapped in some millisecond of the past, it’s clear they respected him. Gravitated toward him. There’s always an arm thrown over his shoulder. Someone grinning or laughing, pleased to be the guy standing next to him. I see Cade in nearly every single shot, no matter what the landscape in the background—from what must be training grounds at his school to actual army bases. And then…then to the desert.
“You didn’t just go to military school,” I say. “You signed up afterwards. You were deployed.” I turn to look at him. He doesn’t return my gaze—just stands there, staring at the history of his life, framed and hung on the walls of his father’s home. “Where did they send you?” I whisper.
“Afghanistan.” The word comes out flat. Devoid of any and all emotion. Rebel blinks, a visible shiver running through his body.
“And?” I need to know more. I never would have guessed he was in the army, but it makes sense. His club might as well be a military organization, after all. A military organization at war.
“And what? There is nothing else. I did two tours. I left and I didn’t look back. The end.” He takes hold of my hand again, this time not pulling me quite so determinedly, but drawing me away all the same.
“There is no the end on something like that, Rebel. The story’s never over. It becomes a part of you. There’s just what comes after.”
He narrows his eyes at me, opening the final door in the corridor—a room all on its own, separated from the others. “You seem to know a lot about ex-servicemen, Miss Sophia Letitia Marne. Did a couple of tours yourself, did you?”
“No. I was studying psychology before all of…this. We studied the way people’s perspectives on the world change when they were thrown into tense, dangerous situations and expected to fight. To put the welfare of others in front of their own.”
“Are you about to start spouting PTSD shit at me right now? Because if you are, you can fucking forget it.” He storms into the room beyond, leaving me standing out in the hallway. Seems I touched a raw nerve. I follow after him, taking in the huge room—clearly his old bedroom—one detail at a time. The place is flooded with the bloody red light of the sunset, pouring in through two walls worth of massive windows. In the center of the room, a huge bed, already made up, dominates the space. There’s not much else in here. A small bookshelf, filled with books. A walk-in closet at the far end of the room. A couple of shelves—
My eyes freeze on the shelves. Three of them, one on top of the other, a foot in between, and evenly spaced on them sit about fifteen snow globes. They’re just like the one I found on the desk back in Rebel’s cabin. I walk straight to them, my eyes skating over each one—Detroit, New York, London, Paris, Vancouver, Calgary, Switzerland, Wyoming. Niagara. Places mostly within the states, but from cities all over the world, too.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“My mother collected them from all the places she went to. I should have boxed them up years ago.” Rebel turns his back on the shelves, crossing the room to look out of the window. Huge, ancient trees choked with Kudzu fill the view beyond.
“Chicago. You have one from Chicago back at your cabin. Was that one of hers as well?”
Rebel remains facing out of the window, but I see his shoulders tense. “Yes.” Doesn’t seem like he’s planning on divulging the significance of that particular snow globe—why Chicago was important enough to take with him, while the others remained behind. I don’t ask, either. His mood is spiraling. First me prying into the army stuff, and now this… If I get too nosy, he’s liable to shut down altogether. My motives for learning as much about him as possible have morphed over the past few days. Originally, I wanted to know so I could tell the police when I eventually manage to report all of this to them. But now, I’m just interested. There’s a drive inside me to break the code that is this complicated, hard-headed, kind-of-annoying man. After the photos on the wall and the obvious love Carl has for him, I’m beginning to see beyond his tattoos and the razor blade-sharp look he carries in his eyes. Could he actually be a good guy?
I need to change the subject. “Did you manage to figure out what you’re going to do about the shooting?” I ask. Probably not the best topic of conversation to put him in a better mood, but I’m curious. I woke up a couple of times after I passed out last night, already feeling shitty from the whiskey, and he was still scribbling away, trying to find a resolution to his problem. After that, I had nightmares that I was trapped inside that Trader Joe’s, scurrying from aisle to aisle, while men wearing Widow Makers cuts stalked me, calling out my name.
“No,” Rebel says, sighing. “Not a good solution, anyway. Not an easy one.”
Nothing about any of this seems easy to me. I hold my tongue, though. “So what are we doing right now? We’re just going to wait here until your father summons us?”
“Yep.”
“Perfect. Because we just love being cooped up in small, enclosed spaces with each other.” I press my fingers into my forehead, sighing heavily.
“I actually don’t mind being cooped up with you, sugar.”
I think he’s being sarcastic again, but when I look up at him, he’s not pulling faces. He looks…he looks like he means it. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I do nothing but complain. How the hell can you find that enjoyable to be around?”
“You’re feisty. I like that. And you give me shit. Not many people feel like they can do that.”
“Probably because they’re tied to a chair, scared for their lives, right?”
He gives that hard laugh again, though this time he actually smiles. Walking away from the window, he sits on the edge of his bed, tipping his head back, sighing. I watch the muscles in his throat work as he speaks. “Guess that all depends on the circumstances of the situation, doesn’t it?”
“So…you have hurt people?”
“Many people, sugar. Many, many people.” He looks at me, his eyes zeroing in on me, unblinking. It’s like he’s daring me to react. Daring me to look away. Daring me to do or say something.
“Was there a good reason for everything you’ve done?”
“I think there was a good reason. But would a judge? Or God? Or you?” He closes his eyes, and I feel it then, stronger than before. I want to do something crazy. I want to comfort him. I want to help him. I want to be closer to him. How is this possible? I feel like crying at my own stupidity. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “Maybe.”
I turn away from him, picking up a snow globe with shaky fingers. I suddenly don’t feel safe anymore, and it isn’t because of Rebel. It’s because of me. Because there must be something seriously wrong with me.
“Are you afraid of heights?” I didn’t hear him standing up. He’s right behind me, so close his breath brushes against the skin of my neck as he speaks. I break out in goosebumps, unable to control the reaction—half fear, half something far more worrying.
Matt. You’re in love with Matt. This man is a self-professed dangerous criminal. You are not attracted to him. You’re just not. “I’m all right with heights. Why do you ask?” Just like my hands, my voice shakes.
“Do you trust me enough to climb out of this window with me?”
I spin around, giving him a look I hope expresses how mad I think he is for even asking that. “Why are we climbing out of the window?”
He’s standing so close, looming over me. I’m not used to being around someone so tall. The Romera women are tall themselves, it’s in our genes; I’ve frequently found myself standing a clear few inches above most men. This is an unusual feeling. Anxious, but weirdly—and this is the strangest part—safe.
“We’re climbing out of the window because I want to show you something. What do you think?” Rebel’s eyes are crystal clear, so sharp and assertive. He stares at me, studying each aspect of my face individually—forehead, nose, cheekbones, jaw, mouth—before he looks up into my eyes. “You trust me not to let you fall to your death?” he asks, that odd, deep line forming in his cheek as he fights a smile.
“I suppose I’m no use to you if I’m dead,” I reply.
“Exactly.” He seems pleased that I’ve risen to this challenge. Returning to the window he was standing at a moment ago, he unlatches it and opens out the two panes, sticking his head out and looking up. Smirking, he glances back at me and nods. “All right, you have to follow me up. I’ll grab you and lift you.” With that, he pulls himself out of the window using the lintel to hold his body weight and then he’s gone.
“Oh, boy.” I stand by the window, flinching when I see how far the drop to the ground is.
“Just climb up onto the ledge. I’ll pull you up the rest of the way.”
I look up and Rebel’s already on the roof, half his body visible as he leans out into space, reaching down for me. “Is this going to be worth it?” I ask, wondering if I can back the hell out now without looking weak.
Rebel waggles his eyebrows at me, laughing. “I can make it worth your while.”
“Shut up.” I clamber up onto the windowsill, the soles of my Chucks not feeling all that grippy all of a sudden. I look for the handhold he must have used to pull himself up and I see it, a small length of iron piping protruding out of the house. Probably designed to drain excess water if it rains. I lean up, my heart in my throat, reaching for it. Adrenalin spears through me as I grab hold of it, and then my body is twisting, moving, leaning out into space.
I’d wanted to do it myself, to pull myself up without his help, but that’s not what happens. Instead, I’m left dangling out in the void, one hand holding onto the length of iron pipe, the other scrambling, reaching, grabbing upward for…nothing. There’s nothing there.
“Jesus Christ, Soph! What the fuck are you doing?” There’s grunting above me, and then hands, big and strong, locking around the wrist above my head. My shoulder sings out in pain as I’m wrenched up, knees, hips, ribcage scraping against the edge of the roof as I’m pulled over it. And then I’m safe. The whole thing takes place in the space of five or six seconds, but it feels as though it took a hell of a lot longer. I lie on my back, chest rising and falling at speed, barely able to think coherently through the roaring sound of my own blood in my ears.
“Well, that was fucking stupid.” Rebel slumps back next to me, lying on his back, too. Both our feet are hanging over the edge of the roof, our chests hitching up and down like crazy. “When I say I’m gonna lift you up, you’re supposed to fucking let me,” he pants.
“I’m sorry. I just…”
“Don’t trust me.”
I let my head loll to the side so I’m looking at his profile. His lips are parted. There’s an angry crease to his forehead, his eyes narrowed up at the sky. “I’m sorry,” I say. And I mean it. He wouldn’t have let me fall, and I was being my usual stubborn self. I could have fallen and died. Rebel sits up, the back of his suit jacket wrinkled now. He lets out a deep breath, shaking his head.
“This…this is all fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you. My uncle getting murdered. My entire club moments away from being fucking arrested for a crime they actually didn’t commit. Now that’s fucking irony, right there.” He gets to his feet, carefully standing on the slightly pitched roof, and then he turns to me and holds out his hand.
“I’m sorry, too, Soph. I should never have put you in this position.” I somehow don’t think he’s referring to the fact that we’re now trapped up on a rooftop and I have no clue how I’m going to get down. I take his hand, allowing him to help me to my feet. “My uncle would wanna kick my fucking ass right now,” he says. “This would not impress him at all.” He points between us, scowling. “Come on. Be careful where you’re putting your feet. I was eighteen the last time I came up here, and I weighed a hell of a lot less.”
I gingerly follow after him, watching where he steps so I can place my feet exactly where he places his. The roof is pitched on either side as we climb upward, but once we reach the ridge, the apex where the two sides meet, I see that there’s a flattened section to the right, a cutout of the roof panel. About twelve feet long and eight feet deep, the platform has been leveled for no apparent reason that I can tell. No air conditioning unit. No access back in through the roof. It’s just there. Rebel drops down onto the platform, reaching up and turning to face me. By the look on his face, it hits him at the same time as it hits me that what he’s doing—lifting me down beside him, like a lover would—is weird.
I tuck my hair behind my ears, clearing my throat. “What is this place? What is it for?”
Rebel places his hands on my shoulders and physically pivots me, pointing me in the direction of the sunset. I feel like I can’t breathe; the sight is the most formidable, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It looks like the sky is on fire. “I’m guessing it’s for this,” he says, removing his hands from my shoulders. He sinks down, sitting Indian style on the platform. I do the same, not daring to take my eyes off the horizon, not wanting to miss a single second of it.
“But how did people get out here? They can’t have been climbing out of windows. I think we’ve just proven that that’s not safe.”
Rebel snorts, clearly not over the fact that I didn’t just do as I was told and let him lift me. “There used to be a small doorway.” He jerks his head back, motioning behind him.
“But not anymore?” The wall behind us is smooth brick and render, no sign of a door in sight.
“Louis had it bricked up the day I was born. My mother apparently liked to come up here.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
We sit in silence for a while, until there’s nothing left of the sun, sunken beyond the distant fields, leaving behind nothing but the tiniest glimmer of light. “You can go. In the morning, I’ll drive you back to town,” Rebel says abruptly.
“What? You’re just gonna let me go?”
“Yeah. Why not? Everything else is fucked. Hector and Raphael would somehow find a way out of being arrested, anyway. They’d bribe the fucking judge. Or just kill him, too. Your testimony would be pointless. And after all those people in that grocery store…” Rebel leans back on his elbows, crossing his feet at his ankles. “After all of those random people being killed because of me, I don’t particularly want your family’s blood on my hands, too. You should just catch the Greyhound back to Seattle.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Somehow, it feels like this might be a trick. But then again, Rebel looks absolutely devastated. Why would he bother putting on such a convincing act, if he’s only just going to tell me he was joking in the morning? That doesn’t strike me as his style. Doesn’t strike me as the sort of head game he would play. “Do you mean it?”
“Sure. At least I’ll have a vaguely clear conscience where you’re concerned, if the five-o do come calling.”
I hug my knees up to my chin, tears stinging at my eyes. I can’t look at him. If I do, I’m gonna start sobbing and I won’t be able to stop. He’s letting me go. Tomorrow, I get to go home to my family. “Thank you, Jamie.”
He bristles at that, doesn’t like it, I can tell, but I’m thinking of what he said in the hallway before. Jamie was an honorable man. And him dropping this whole thing, setting me free like he said he would, is an honorable thing to do. Far more Jamie than Rebel.
We sit in silence for a long time, until we start to see stars peeking through the deepening blue of the night sky. “I used to bring all of my dates up here to see the stars,” he eventually says, pointing up at them. “Never brought anyone to see the sunset, though. That was always something I did alone.”
I can imagine him as a young teenager, scrambling up here, sitting and watching for hours. I can imagine him bringing girls up here, too. Making out with them under the blanket of stars. Doing much worse, no doubt. “I’m sure they were all incredibly beautiful. And incredibly grateful,” I say, allowing a hint of sarcasm to pepper my tone.
“So grateful,” he answers. “Can’t blame them, really. Being invited up here was like winning a golden ticket to the chocolate factory.” His face is deadpan, though I can tell he’s joking. “As far as them all being beautiful, you’re probably right there. But you, sugar…just so you know, you’d win the title for Most Beautiful Woman Louis James Aubertin Ever Snuck Up Onto The Roof hands down.”
I can feel two hot patches flaming on my cheeks—embarrassment. I hug my knees tighter to me, not sure if I want to look at him or not. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Flirt with me. Say stuff like that. Proposition me.”
Rebel laughs, unashamed and, unlike me, unembarrassed. “Because I told you, sugar. I like you. I’d definitely try and fuck you if we’d have met under any other circumstances.”
“You do that a lot? Try and fuck a lot of girls?”
“No. Never. Just the ones I think might make pliable bedmates.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I’d be pliable?”
“I think, despite how resilient you are when you need to be, you’d let the right person have control over you if the situation presented itself.”
“You mean that I’d let someone dominate me?”
“And you’d fucking love it.”
“And you assume that you’re the right person?”
“Oh, sugar. I’m the only person who could dominate you.”
I want to laugh. I want to laugh right in his face, but the arrogance that’s normally present when he says something sexual isn’t there right now. He’s being totally and utterly serious.
“I don’t understand you,” I whisper.
“Are you supposed to?” he whispers back.
“It’s how my brain works. I’m studying psychology so I can understand everyone I ever meet. I like knowing how people work. What makes them tick. But you…”
Rebel smiles. It’s a kick-you-in-the-guts kind of smile that I can imagine a boy from Alabama wearing. Slowly, he reaches over and pulls at the lace on my shoe. “Don’t bother trying to get inside my head, sugar. It’s a dark and fucking scary place. Even I don’t want to be here most of the time. You change your mind about the sex, though, and we can talk.”