4. Lia

4

LIA

As I watched Caleb's strong hands turn a piece of delicately decorated paper into a crane, crease by crease, I realized I wanted that for me. For someone to take the sad, flat creature I was now, and rebuild me utterly—to slowly give me wings.

—Sarah, from One of a Thousand Wishes by A. R. McGeorge

R haim's eyes looked over my shoulder at my father. "Everything I know?" he asked, one eyebrow high.

He was everything I'd hoped he'd be in real life again, and the lighting in his office was much better than the lighting in the club. He had dramatic features: a heavy brow, a square jaw, full lips very used to frowning, and a strong nose that might've been broken more than once before. His eyes were a deep, dark brown, and his hair was still thick and brown as well, with only the lightest smattering of gray at his temples.

And while his tone and expression with my father was perfectly calm and formal, I imagined I could see the rage at meeting me, seething underneath.

It was his own fool fault for being an asshole to me the other night.

I'd bribed my way into that sex club to warn him this was happening, kind-of-sort-of-mostly, then I'd gotten wrapped up in the moment, and frankly, in all the possibilities.

I'd started off scared that if I didn't occupy him, someone else would.

And then when he wanted to ignore me, I kept doubling down because part of me couldn't believe that he didn't remember me.

Which was stupid, right?

Because the last time I'd seen him, I'd been thirteen and—the less said about that night, the better.

But when he didn't and when the opportunity to live out my wildest dreams presented itself—how was I supposed to resist?

It was like getting up early to sneakily open presents on Christmas morning and meeting goddamned Santa Claus.

You wouldn't just go back to bed after that—no, any self-respecting girl would shake him down for a pony.

It wasn't until after I'd come that I realized the predicament I'd gotten myself into, and I was still going to try to talk to him, but then he'd been a complete asshat.

So whatever Rhaim was feeling now and thinking about me?

He deserved it.

Especially because he didn't remember me.

It didn't matter how hard he'd made me come—that hurt my feelings.

My father kept prattling on, talking me up—he warned me Rhaim'd be pissed—but he knew Rhaim would do as he was told, eventually. The man was my father's trained wolf—he'd been my father's "little beast" for as long as I could remember—and even if this situation made his loyalty waver, I still would bet he had too much pride to let Corvo fall.

"Well—I'll leave you two to get acquainted," my father said, giving Rhaim a be nice or else glare, and then he left the room, abandoning me.

Rhaim's gaze flicked to meet mine instantly. I inhaled to speak, but he made a silencing motion with his hand, rather like the slice of a knife through the air between us. "Not here. Never here," he said, emphasizing the never, and then went back into his office and behind his desk to pick up his coat. "We're getting coffee," he announced to Mrs. Armstrong, then left the room, certain that I would follow him.

He stood as far away from me as possible in the elevator—possibly so he wouldn't be tempted to strangle me—then led me to the public stairs in the center of the building when we got off. I practically had to chase him down them. But then rather than making another turn to take us below once we reached ground level, to where the cafeteria was, he took us both outside.

The sounds of the city enveloped us instantly—cars honking, people having conversations on phones with bad connections too loudly, a distant catcall, the sound of jackhammers running—while I'd been off at boarding school for a decade, I'd forgotten just how loud this place could be.

And Rhaim . . . didn't turn back once.

I could've fallen through an open manhole and he wouldn't have noticed.

In fact, I got the strong impression he would've found that preferrable—especially after we reached where we'd been headed, a coffee cart, and he looked back.

"Two coffees, black," he ordered, presumably also for me, and then made me follow him to sit beside a public fountain, handing me one, but setting his down, and snapping his fingers out.

"Your phone," he demanded.

"What?" I asked, rearing back a little. "Why?"

He did nothing but stare at me—with the same face I'd dreamed of at night, and that I'd lurked on my father's company's business pages to see.

Why didn't he remember me?

I sighed, pulled my phone out of my bag, and handed it over after a moment's hesitation—I could easily imagine him throwing it into the fountain—but instead I watched him turn it over and peel the case off, which was somehow more upsetting.

"What are you doing?" I demanded of him.

"Do you know the provenance of every app currently on your phone?" he asked me, without looking up. The case was off, and he was prying the sides of it apart now with his fingernails—and he didn't wait for me to speak. "You know how you'll be talking about patio furniture, and then that'll haunt you online for a week?"

It wasn't until he'd finished what he was doing—popping the battery out—that he looked up and spoke again. "Someone is always, always , listening—and I would prefer to yell at you in private."

He arranged the pieces of my phone between us in a neat row, like a little technological moat, and that seemed to calm him some, although his eyes were still flashing when he next looked up.

"How old are you?" he demanded.

"Why?" I asked back, still confused.

"Because I want to know how close I came to being on Dateline Friday night."

I dropped my shoulders and rocked my head back. "Oh my God." Of course that's why he was pissed—on top of the whole "my father just bequeathed me your legacy" thing.

"Answer the question," he snapped.

"Twenty-three," I confessed. But he should've been able to do the math himself, if he'd remembered.

Another nail in the coffin of my childhood fantasies.

He closed his eyes and I could almost hear him swearing internally. "And there weren't any other ways you could think of to blackmail me?" he asked, when he opened them again.

"Blackmail you?" I sputtered. "What?"

His eyes squinted venomously. "How'd you even know I was there?"

And if he already thought I wanted to blackmail him, the answer to that wasn't going to help me.

I paid someone their kid's first year of college tuition to help me stalk you.

When answers weren't forthcoming, he shook his head and growled, "No—you know what? Fuck you." He stood and started pacing off.

"Rhaim—wait," I said, jumping up to chase him down, running around in front of him quickly, leaving the pieces of my dismantled phone behind.

He didn't stop until I was standing right in front of him, physically blocking his path, and even then I didn't know if he was just going to sweep me aside.

"I really do want to learn. And Friday night was just an accident!"

"Keep your voice down," he snarled.

"Why? Because I'm embarrassing?" I said, pitching my voice even louder.

His obvious disgust, that drew his dramatic features into a sneer, grew deeper. "No. Because I'm embarrassed by me . That I fell for any of your fucking bullshit." He took a long moment to stare at me, breathing hard, and while it was frightening, I felt myself flourishing beneath his gaze, like a flower that'd been too long denied the sun.

"Can we just start over?" I pleaded.

His nostrils flared. "I'm going to ask you just one question—and you only get to give me just one answer, Lia: what is your fucking game?"

I inhaled deeply, longing to tell him the truth—that I'd been playing the same "game" almost half my life, just to get the two of us in the same room.

But I knew if I said anything foolish now, he'd methodically tear me to shreds, the same way he'd pieced out my phone.

"Just what my father told you—I'm here to learn how to run Corvo."

It was obvious from the way his eyes narrowed that he didn't believe me.

"I have fifteen percent of the shares!" I protested. I'd inherited them from my mother, when she'd passed. "And when— god forbid —my father dies, all of his are going to come to me." Faced with the icy wall of his disbelief, I kept talking. "I was going to tell you at that club the other night—that's the whole reason I was there, so this wouldn't be a surprise—and I was trying to get up the guts to talk to you that whole time." It wasn't quite a lie. I would've told him everything at the bar, if I could've—he just wouldn't give me half a chance. "But then you didn't recognize me?—"

"Recognize you?" His voice rose again. "Jesus Christ, Lia, I haven't seen you since—" he shouted, then paused, giving me a pocket to put all of my wishes in, before he finished with, "—since your father sent you off to boarding school."

I rose up on my toes, trying to make myself taller. And why do you think he sent me away? I wanted to shout back at him.

The answer was right there.

Rhaim should've been able to read it on my face.

But he didn't.

And I couldn't tell him.

I rocked back, utterly defeated, and put a hand up to my chest to where my heart was breaking. He looked at me strangely. "What happened to your father's Lamborghini? I remembered he shipped that stupid fucking thing over to Europe?—"

"Yeah. To me. I drove it around the Alps a lot. It's being shipped back now," I said very quietly, then glanced back at my abandoned phone and coffee, returning to it, and to my surprise he followed me, remaining standing while I tried to reassemble my phone without crying.

Then he sat on his heels beside me, like he was speaking to a child. "Your father doesn't want to actually run his own company—why the fuck should you? And what makes you think that you're in any way qualified?"

My cheeks pinked beneath his clear condescension. "I got good grades."

"So did everyone on the third floor of our whole building. Corvo Enterprises is full of assholes who look good on paper," he said with a dismissive snort. "But what do you even mean when you say you want to take over his ‘business'?" Rhaim said, while making air quotes around the word. I frowned, wondering if he was implying the sordid things my father did that I wasn't allowed to know about—the causes of all the fights my dad had had at the dinner table with my dearly departed mother.

"Do you mean his casinos?" he went on. "His hotels? Or the distillery he bought just so he'd have something to talk about at the Hamptons next summer?"

I frowned. "Somehow you manage to do all of that," I said with spite.

"Yes, but you are not me ," he said, and started shaking his head ruefully. "I wouldn't even trust you to oversee janitorial at any of his facilities, and you know why? Because those people actually do important jobs, and you're unqualified."

"How would you know?" I snapped.

He reached forward and plucked at the sleeve of my blouse. "What's this cost, eh? Or this? Or those?" His hand brushed across my skirt and then stroked along the instep of the four-inch high heels I'd had to practically chase him here in, in turns.

I gasped in surprise rather than answer him, as parts of my heart flared in what I realized now was absurd hope—and the truth was my father's shopper had picked out the silky cream-colored, pussy-bowed blouse for me. The outfit had been delivered to my apartment that morning, I only knew it was Balenciaga.

He took my moment of stunned silence after his touches for defeat. "You don't know what things cost, because money's literally never mattered to you. And I'm supposed to teach you to be in charge of everything?" This last sentence was said to himself, as he stood again. His temper was back under control, but only barely. "Tell your father I fucked you for all I care—but I won't be helping."