ARC: Feather Bound Page 10

  Anton was right. Hyde did want me. But Hyde also had no one. I was probably the only person left in the world who could betray him.

  “Hyde,” I whispered into his ear after forcing us apart. “Owning the company. Is it that important to you?” I tried hard not to let any of my desperation slip into my voice. The question was strange enough as it was. I didn’t want to give myself away.

  “What?”

  “I just need to know because I don’t understand.” I let my finger play over the wetness of his lips. His eyes lost focus. “Why is the company that important to you? All those people hating you, waiting for you to screw up. Why put yourself through it?”

  Hyde’s hands slipped all the way down to the small of my back. I almost flinched. Why didn’t I? His hands should have terrified me. Actually, they did a little, but my body just didn’t react the way I thought it would. I’d authorized his touch, after all. Me. I’d sanctioned it. That alone loosened the knots in my chest.

  “If the company isn’t mine, then it’s his.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “I can’t let that happen.”

  “Why?” I let my hands rest on his shoulders, feeling the muscles tense beneath my fingers. “What does it matter if he’s in control or not?”

  “He wants it. I won’t let him have it. I won’t let him have anything.”

  Hyde said nothing else. I knew he wouldn’t. His face had hardened with resolve. He was serious. He’d never give the company over to Anton’s dad. Not if I asked him to. But maybe he didn’t have to.

  Just tell him, I told myself. Tell him what happened. Telling him would solve everything.

  I opened my mouth. My hands shook against his shoulders.

  It’s not like anyone was watching us. It’s not like Anton had eyes everywhere. He wasn’t a god. He wasn’t Big Brother or whatever the hell.

  “Hyde,” I said, and stopped, because I remembered the way Anton’s lips had twitched as he casually threatened my life.

  Do what I say and don’t you dare tell anyone about this or I will have you on the first boat to Russia. And maybe I’ll destroy your family too. If I’m bored.

  The whole thing was a scare tactic. I couldn’t let myself fall for it. I had to be brave. Anton couldn’t do anything to me. Nothing.

  Hyde was staring at me. “Deanna? Are you shaking?”

  No. I couldn’t be scared. I couldn’t let some jackass waltz into my life and scare me into doing whatever he wanted. Then when would it end? Anton couldn’t do anything to me.

  But what if he could?

  No. Telling Hyde would solve everything.

  But what if it didn’t?

  What was I willing to risk to find out?

  I’d never been the bravest of girls. My mom had three daughters, and among the three, I was the one most likely to chafe at the thought of taking a risk. But I wasn’t a coward. I could stand up for myself, if I needed to. It was what my mom had taught me. I didn’t want to let her down.

  I didn’t want to.

  And yet, when I closed my eyes, flocks of swangirls smiled vacantly back at me.

  “Deanna?”

  “It’s OK,” I whispered. “It’s OK.” And I kissed him again.

  He buried his secrets as if it was a learned skill, but Ralph Hedley’s son couldn’t quite hide how desperate he was for love. And maybe he mattered to me. But my life mattered more. So I decided: I would give Hyde exactly what he needed. I’d take his heart and then everything else until he had nothing left. I’d give him love. And then I’d ruin him with it.

  There was no other way out.

  A TALE

  I am to be your bride, she says, the beautiful woman with hair that shines like the moon.

  He is an honest boy, a son of the countryside. He tills in the paddy field day and night, hands calloused with the scars of his labor. And when she takes his broken hands in hers, how can he know, the young man, that he’d glimpsed her beauty once before? That where there is a girl at nightfall was once a crane he’d saved at midday?

  He sees her skin, fresh with youth, and her eyes, large and gray. He sees the cloth she drapes over his arms, weaved in secret in the silence of the night. He sees the sum it gives him. A high sum, for a son of the countryside.

  He didn’t see the feathers. He didn’t see her pluck them from her back, one by one, and weave them into the garment. He didn’t see the flesh in his arms when he traded it for gold at the marketplace.

  He never heard her cries.

  12

  MARK

  Before Ralph Hedley’s funeral, Hyde was my dead childhood friend. Before Stylo, Hyde was my dead childhood friend who was actually quite alive enough to annoy me.

  Now he was my mark.

  I’d resolved to take him down. Anton’s brilliant idea depended on the media’s insatiable appetite for public humiliation – and of course, you can’t suffer public humiliation unless you’re in the public eye. So the next day, I called Hyde and asked him out.

  “A date?” he’d said with an eagerness that was almost heartbreakingly cute.

  Yes, a date. I had a job to do after all. If I was going to get out of this mess, I’d have to do it right.

  Coney Island in the summertime was packed. Lots of witnesses. Plenty of opportunities for a scandal. Except I still couldn’t figure out how to hurt him. And the more Hyde tried to dazzle me with his proficiency at super lame carnival games, the less I wanted to.

  “Wow, thanks,” I said when Hyde dumped a giant panda in my arms. “I’m in awe of your skill, but now I can’t help but feel slightly inadequate. I need to get in on this – oh, how about that?”

  I slinked up behind a pair of tweens trying to bludgeon the Whack-a-Mole booth, chuckling giddily because the kid playing sucked, and was clearly starting to lose the last vestiges of his sanity as clowns, cartoon cavemen, and I think a former president ducked out of harm’s way, always at the very last second.

  It took a good clean look at the “moles”, though, for the grin to fall off my face. My hand almost snatched the mallet out of the kid’s hand about a second after he hit a beaked girl on the head. But Hyde was right next to me. I couldn’t give myself away. Not to him.

  “Actually, let’s just keep moving,” I muttered.

  I remember learning about it in school last term: in Early Modern Europe, a woman with a beak was a literary and visual emblem of swans – but it was more than that. It was a metaphor. As far as they were concerned, the swan, with her feathers, stood in that liminal space between human and animal.

  I learned a lot that term. I learned that feathers made good dowries. I learned that in pre-colonial Upstate New York, swans were respected as counsels and mothers of generations. I learned that up until the eighteenth century, English families would rather smother their sons than admit that they were the parents of a boy with feathers. Half a year of historical facts that never seemed to matter, never seemed to have anything to do with my life…

  Hyde took the abandoned mallet and swung it around. “You sure you wanna go?”

  “Yeah,” I said softly.

  “All right…” I could have applauded him for keeping that smile plastered on his face. Couldn’t have been easy. “Let’s try the rides instead. The Cyclone looks pretty bad ass.”

  We were keeping secrets from each other, Hyde and I. It didn’t stop him from trying to get close to me. Buying me funnel cake, telling me bad jokes to subtly distract me from his hand brushing mine. But when he finally grabbed my hand, my breath hitched nonetheless.

  It’s 3 o’clock. I should probably get around to ruining his life.

  The thought was sobering.

  We walked to the aquarium. As we stood on the crowded walkway cocooned by a glass dome separating us from coral reefs and homeless fish, I watched Hyde. He was silent for a long time, the movements of jelly fish casting shadows over his face. Silent. Eerily so. What was he searching for, I wondered, behind the glass?

  “
It’s kind of terrifying, isn’t it?” I sat down on the bench next to a little girl with a dripping ice cream cone. “That glass is the one thing keeping us from being crushed under metric tons of water and sting rays.”

  “Must be more terrifying for them.” I could see Hyde’s eyes following a jelly fish until it disappeared behind a forest of reefs. “Trapped like animals up there.”

  “They are animals.”

  That made Hyde smile. “Guess so. Still sucks, I bet.”

  I remembered Stylo’s cage, remembered Anton’s threat, remembered why I was sitting here beneath a ceiling of sea, and nodded in agreement. Then, I buried my face in the fat, fluffy neck of my giant panda.

  “Come on. You said you wanted to see the whales, right?” Hyde extended a hand to me with an inviting smile, wordlessly enticing, waiting for mine, itching for touch. I finally had to admit to myself that this had long stopped being an “operation”. It was a date. A regular date. A nice one.

  I took his hand and wondered what it would cost me.

  That evening, after Hyde had dropped me off, I resolved to do better. I resolved to do whatever it took. But Sunday passed. Then Monday.

  Hyde didn’t have a lot of free time, but when he did, he tried to spend it with me. Movie on Friday. Karaoke on Saturday. He was partial to Sinatra. He had a real taste for jazz. He had Charlie Parker albums on his iPod, and the purest of hatred for sea food.

  I started to notice things about him; things I hadn’t before. I was getting to know him. I was dating him.

  I was screwing up.

  Tuesday evening, Hyde took me out. I’d left my house while Ade and Dad were watching some gross-out comedy on TV, Chinese take-out strewn about the coffee table. He’d come right after the dinner he’d had with one of his lawyers – John Roan, the man who’d been with him at Hedley’s funeral reception – so he was still in a suit when he met me at Grand Army Plaza.

  My heart was pounding as we walked into the woods, but not because of Hyde – though admittedly he did look quite good in a three-piece suit. Anton hadn’t contacted me at all since that night at Stylo, but I was sure that he was keeping tabs on me. The thought alone was enough to give me what I hoped wasn’t a permanent twitch.

  But getting close to Hyde was part of the plan, wasn’t it? I was still on track. I had to believe it.

  “Tell me what happened to you, Deanna,” Hyde asked.

  I knew what he wanted: the life I’d lived during the years he’d been away.

  It wasn’t something I liked to open up about. Or maybe I just never really had an opportunity to. I looked up at Hyde, at his gentle gaze. I couldn’t help it. “Dad fell off the wagon hard after Mom died. Ericka was too busy dreaming of freedom and Ade too busy avoiding responsibility, so I was the one stuck trying to keep everything from falling apart.”

  Hyde listened intently.

  “I kept writing for a while,” I told him. “You know, like those little stories I used to let you read when we were kids. But eventually I just... stopped. It didn’t seem like it really mattered anymore, you know? But I dealt with everything anyway. By myself. It’s just what I do.”

  His eyes lost focus, dimmed. It was as if he were seeing something other than me, as if the reality around him ceased to exist, abandoning him to a different place and time entirely. He didn’t even realize when I’d stopped talking until I nudged him – almost half a minute later.

  “Sorry,” he said in a tone so quiet and pained it stilled my pulse. It wasn’t the kind of apology one gave when spacing out was the only crime committed. “I’m really sorry. If only I’d…”

  “If only you’d what?”

  Silence. “If only I’d been there.” He left it at that.

  “Hey,” I said, as I stepped out of his limo in front of his townhouse – a century old neoclassical beauty on 74th.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you OK?”

  “What?” Narrowing his eyes, he shrugged. “No less than usual. Why do you ask?”

  My feet were killing me. I should have known not to take out my old, barely-cushioned sneakers for a walk through a public park. Since we started “dating”, I’d resolved not to accept any more gifts from Hyde, which meant rejecting the several pairs of three hundred dollar shoes he’d offered.

  Smoothing my skirt against my legs from behind, I sat down on the steps. “I just noticed tonight you were a bit…” I thought of a good word to use, but the only one I could think of was “off”, which sounded both vague and insulting at the same time.

  “Sorry,” he said, sitting next to me. “If I seemed off at all tonight, it definitely has nothing to do with you.” I nodded. “A lot on my mind is all.”

  “Company stuff, right?” I rubbed my ankles. “How does that work, anyway? I mean what exactly do you do all day?”

  My heart skipped a beat when Hyde swiveled me to him. For a second, I thought he’d kiss me. Instead he bent down, lifted my feet and put them on his knees. “Lots of boring stuff, really.” He slipped off my shoes, the first and then the second. “I’m still young, so it’s not like I control the show or whatever the case may be. There are other executives. But Dad’s will gave me the majority share of the company and authority as a senior executive. That means I show up to a lot of meetings.”

  Of course he started to rub my feet. Of course he did. My base instinct told me to yank them out of his hands before he could get a whiff of something less than pleasant because, you know, old sneakers and all. But once those thumbs started working their magic, it was all I could do to stay upright. As a compromise, I kept my feet where they were but squeezed my eyes shut out of embarrassment. A flush of heat positively burned my face from the inside.

  “And n-none of it fazes you?” I stuttered out the question with my eyelids still pinned shut. “I mean you’re what, twenty? How can you handle all of it?”

  “Nineteen,” Hyde corrected and the little laugh that shook the word from his lips told me he could probably see me not seeing him. “I’ve always had something of an affinity for this kind of thing. When I was away, I studied. That’s practically all I did for a while. I’m also pretty smart, or don’t you remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He could help, a voice kept hissing in the back of my mind. He’s smart, right? He could help you. Just tell him about Anton. I tried. Every time I saw Hyde, the urge to spill everything would kick in so strongly, it was as if I could feel the words forming on my tongue. But every time, I’d think back to the cage. I’d picture Anton leering at me. Then I’d just clamp my mouth shut and hope my lips weren’t trembling as I smiled instead.

  Hyde was smart, yes, and he was obviously cool-headed when he needed to be. But how could I forget how frantic he was after I’d hurt myself at Anton’s birthday party? He was the kind of guy who’d call fifty times a day when he was worried about someone, send Mariachi Bands to cheer them up, run out in the middle of the night to meet them when they asked. If I told him what Anton had done to me, what he was doing to me, how could I be perfectly sure that he wouldn’t freak out and try to beat him ragged? And then what would happen to me? To my family? Could I count on Hyde to fix this? Could I trust him?

  I shivered and slipped my feet out of his grip. “Still, I assume it takes more than that to head a company.”

  “Technically a person just needs to be the biggest asshole possible. There’s no faster path to success.”

  “Asshole, huh?” Putting my shoes back on, I stared at the pavement. “Like firing someone’s dad?” When Hyde didn’t answer, I shoved his knees. “Honestly, Hyde, I know Edmund Rey obviously wanted the majority share of the company. But you have it now. Doesn’t that solve the problem? Did you really need to fire him?”

  It was a tough card to play; how could I forget that night on my front steps – the way Hyde’s eyes had frozen solid the moment I’d brought it up?

  I waited for Hyde’s answer regardless, watched his expression, only half-surprised whe
n it turned to stone.

  “Edmund Rey’s been involved in criminal activity,” said Hyde in a frigid voice. “Firing him was kind.”

  “That makes sense but…” I thought hard, trying to ignore the sound of Anton’s voice shuddering through my head. “I mean he’s your uncle. Right? He was your mom’s brother?” A sentiment that probably meant nothing to him, but if I could just get him to lay off Anton’s dad, I could end this whole nightmare – for both our sakes.

  “My uncle’s done more to ruin lives than you think, Deanna.”

  He didn’t look at me as he said it. His eyes were glued resolutely to the gates surrounding the townhouse, his hand clenching and unclenching the fabric around his knees. It didn’t look as if he’d even noticed.

  “Like what?” I clasped his hand in mine, but the moment I touched his skin, he shot to his feet. My heart leapt into my throat. For a second, we stared at each other, both of us too disoriented to speak.

  Finally, Hyde cleared his throat. “Well. This isn’t exactly how I like to end my dates,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I guess I’m a little jumpy tonight.You won’t hold it against me, will you?”

  “No.” From throat to stomach. Watching Hyde struggle to keep a smile on his face even while his hands were trembling sent my heart plummeting. He reminded me so much of myself sometimes. It made it harder to hurt him to know he was already hurting.

  “Hey,” I said, standing. “Look, I know it’s been a few years. But we’re still friends.” With as gentle a touch as I could manage, I placed my hands on his arms. “If there’s anything wrong with you… I mean, if you’ve got anything on your mind, I really hope you’ll be able to trust me enough to tell me–”

  The next words caught in my throat. Pursing my lips I lowered my head. Asking Hyde to trust me. How much of that was genuine and how much of it was the mission that fear had hardwired into me?