“Did I interrupt your reading?” I casually pick up one of the books before she can grab it away, laughing aloud when I see the Harlequin-esque cover and the title. “The Pirate’s Maiden?Really, mom?”
“Don’t laugh at me!” She swipes it out of my hand, and I see my mom blush for what I’m pretty sure is the first time ever. “I told you I hadn’t had time to clean.”
“Oh. I see. The only thing filthy around here are your books.” I drop it on top of the pile, grinning at her. “I’m just teasing, mom. I’m glad you’ve got something fun to do in your off time. Although you know, I hearactualdating can be way better than books—”
“I amnotdiscussing my love life with you,” my mother says pointedly, sitting on the sofa next to me. “Although—I don’t think dating will ever really be in the cards for me again. Your father was it for me.” She sighs wistfully, glancing over at me with a rueful smile. “Fantasies in books are nice, and all. But I don’t think falling in love—or anything else—is ever going to be something I do again.”
I stare at her in mild shock for a long moment. My mother clammed up emotionally after my father’s death. She’d never talked about her grief, or about how she’d worked through it, or anything related to it, really. I’d always just kind of assumed that her lack of dating was because she was too busy, or too tired, or because of the lingering problems with the Devil’s Sons. I hadn’t really considered it because she’d loved my father so much she couldn’t fathom being with someone else.
It breaks my heart a little to think of my mom like that.
It also makes me feel worse about what I’m here to talk to her about.
“I’m so glad you’re here, though,” she says happily. “It gets lonely, you know, now that you’re off at college. And I don’t want you to be there worrying about me. I want you to live your life and have fun and not spend all your time thinking about me—or very much of it at all, really. I want you to have adventures of your own. But I do miss you, and this is a very welcome surprise.”
I’ve certainly been having some adventures, that’s for sure.I never, ever, want my mother to find out what happened to me the night of the party when I was kidnapped. It would break her heart, and I can’t stand the thought of her knowing those awful things happened, far from where she could protect me from them—as if she ever could have at all. I can’t help but wonder, though, what she’d think of the rest of it. The truth about how I ended up at Blackmoor, about the secret ritual, about Dean and Cayde and Jaxon. I wonder what she’d think about me being with three men instead of one, about their supposed ownership of me, their pleasures and punishments. So much of it, I could never talk to mymotherabout, obviously. But I wonder what she’d think of me being with the men who hold so much power in this town—or will, one day.
The bikers call their women “old ladies,” and there’s an element of ownership there, of possession. But I never saw a hint of what Dean and Cayde have with me between my mother and father. She deferred to him around the other club members, was submissive and quiet then, but I never saw that dynamic at home. They were what I assumed all married couples must be like—even better, maybe, because of how much they obviously loved one another.
“Let’s order a pizza,” she says, snapping me out of my thoughts. “That’ll be nice. We can eat and catch up, maybe watch a movie later? I want to hear all about your classes.”
“Sure.” I feel my breath hitch in my throat. I want the mood to be like this after I’ve talked to her about the article. But I have a feeling it won’t be. There won’t be a sweet, cozy mother/daughter night in once I’m done prying into the past that she’s surely never talked about for a reason.
But I have to know—for so many reasons of my own.
Still, it’s exactly because of how I know it’ll ruin the mood that I keep pushing it off. My mom orders our favorite pizza—half pepperoni, mushroom, and black olive for her, half Hawaiian for me—and we sit at the small table in the kitchen, eating it straight from the box with canned soda from the fridge as my mother peppers me with questions about school.
“How are classes?” She raises an eyebrow. “Good grades?”
I hate how many holes there are in my answers. “Yeah, sure,” I tell her noncommittally, taking a big bite out of my slice. “I’ve got A’s and B’s.” Which is true. I just leave out that those A’s and B’s are a little padded due to my position on campus as the heirs’ fucktoy. And that I’ve been scrambling to do my best to be worthy of those grades since I nearly died.
“Meet any nice boys?”
I feel far too close to a lie for my own comfort when I tell her no, but I rationalize that Dean, Cayde, and even Jaxon aren’t exactlyniceguys. In fact, they’re pretty fucking far from nice. Carnival dates and attentive sex aside, they’re still controlling and possessive deep down, and I don’t think anyone would call them nice on their best days.
“Well, it’s better for you to focus on your schoolwork for now, anyway.” She pats my hand. “I’m very proud of you, Athena, for making the best of that scholarship even though I know that school isn’t really very ‘you.’ I know you would rather have gone to the public college, maybe made more friends. But this will be good for you in the long run.”
“I know.” I swallow a bite of cheesy crust, suddenly feeling almost teary over fucking pizza. It’s just so nice to be sitting in the small, plain kitchen, shiny and smelling of my mom’s lemon cleaning products, and not in a grand dining room too big for even the four of us. The pizza tastes better than any of the five-star fucking cuisines I’ve been eating at the manor. After all, my mom ordered it, knowing exactly what I liked. To add jalapenos to my Hawaiian side, that I like cherry cola and not vanilla from the selection in her fridge because she knowsme. I feel warm and safe and loved here, and I suddenly desperately don’t want to go back. I want to stay here, or better yet, to take my mother and go somewhere completely different. Somewhere that we can find a tiny apartment to fill with lemon cleaning products and love and the warm cheesy, tomatoey smell of pizza, where we can keep each other safe, and my mom can read her smutty romance novels. I can find a job and I can try to forget about the wild and dangerous and dark world that the Blackmoor boys are dragging me deeper and deeper into by the day, like a tar pit I can’t seem to escape from.
But that’s not possible. They’ll always come after me, and they’ll always find me. There’s no escaping them that I know of, not unless I convince them to let me go. I’d thought that humiliating Dean by breaking the game and fucking Cayde would do it. Instead, they’ve just agreed to share, and somehow in the process, making it even harder for me to break myself free. I don’t know if adding Jaxon to the mix will fix it, but I have to try.
I don’t know anything anymore.
But I know that some answers are right here, in this house. Answers my mother holds.
I just can’t bring myself to ask the questions tonight.
It’s too good, too safe, too nostalgic. So instead, I push the article out of my head and instead enjoy curling up on the couch with brownies and spiked hot coffee and cheesy spooky movies, older ones like Beetlejuice and the Craft that my mom likes. Everything that happened after my dad died had seemed to age her terribly. Though tonight she seems younger again, more like the fun, youthful mom that I remember from when I was a child. The one who had never stopped me from being myself.
I go to bed in the room I spent my last years of high school in, and I sleep better than I have in a long time in the full-sized bed with the sheets that smell like fresh laundry. I’ll have to bring up the article in the morning, ask the questions I came here to ask. But just for tonight, I want to pretend that I’m “home” again, for no other reason than simply wanting to be here, and most of all, that I won’t have to leave.
The irony of feeling at home in the servant’s housing on the Blackmoor Estate doesn’t escape me. This isn’t our home—ourrealhome is just dust now, probably built over at this point by some new construction. But it’s the closest thing I have. And besides, my mom is here, and that’s made this place feel more like home than anything else.
Athena
Ican’t bring myself to say anything about it on Saturday either, though, because my mom wakes me up with the smells of a full breakfast wafting down the hall—bacon, eggs, pancakes, orange juice, the whole nine yards—and an announcement that we’re going antiquing in downtown Blackmoor. She looks so excited that once again, I can’t bring myself to kill the mood. She’s more dressed up and vibrant than I remember seeing her in a long time before I left, in jeans and a nice blousy floral top, her hair in a high girlish ponytail, and her makeup done. I hadn’t brought much with me in the way of nice clothes. Still, I manage jeans with only a few rips in them and a nice fitted blue t-shirt, and after breakfast, I do my makeup too before we head downtown.
This wasn’t what I had expected for the weekend—I’d imagined a tearful conversation followed by an awkward day and a half left at my mom’s house…or me going home early because it was too upsetting, and she’d ask me to leave. That still might happen—but not yet. I once again can’t ruin her excitement, not when she’s so genuinely happy to have me here.