after
“You’re not doing enough.”
Ash turns to face me on his way over to his desk. “Enough is exactly what I’m doing, and frankly, exactly what you’ve already done.”
We’re in the Oval Office after a long morning in the Residence hammering out our media defense for the video. The defense was easy enough to plan—deny, deny, deny—although we all knew that denial would only get us so far. It was too good of a story, too salacious a video. With all the eagerness that the nation had welcomed Greer as its queen, they had already started eviscerating her. Online, on television, in the papers and soon in the magazines too. Trieste begged Greer not to go anywhere near the Internet until it blew over; Merlin already had Linette blocking off chunks of Greer’s schedule so that she’d be less visible for the next two weeks.
Greer took it all in stride, looking composed and contained in a knee-length skirt and boat-neck top, crossing her oxford-clad feet at the ankles as she listened to a room of people discuss a video of her fucking a man who wasn’t her husband. She calmly voiced her opinions, calmly responded to questions, calmly made it clear what she would and wouldn’t do to pander to the press.
She was born for it, I remembered after the second grueling hour talking over strategy and implications for the re-election campaign. She knew better than anyone else how the game was played, and she was playing it now. With cool dignity and impressive reserve.
And she commanded respect for it. Kay, Belvedere, Merlin, and Trieste all knew—and surely Linette could guess—that the video was real, but one cold look from Greer at the opening of the meeting when Trieste started to ask if it really was us in the video had silenced the room on the subject. Trieste had flushed and mumbled an apology and quickly moved on to the topic of defense, and no one else had dared to voice the obvious truth.
And if her eyes were slightly red-rimmed, if her concealer didn’t completely cover the bite mark on her neck, if she winced whenever she adjusted herself on the love seat she shared with Ash, then the room pretended not to notice. For his part, Ash sat back and mostly let the room talk around him, rubbing Greer’s hand with his thumb and occasionally leaning in to whisper in her ear.
It wasn’t fair that it was Greer’s reputation that would need the most defending; I would have chained myself to a rock and had my liver pecked out if it meant I could bear the brunt of this. It was my fault this video even existed—I should have known there would be cameras, I shouldn’t have fucked her there at all, I should have known Melwas wouldn’t have given up so easily. It wasn’t fair that the people in the room barely glanced at me as they stared hard at her; it wasn’t fair that she was already being excoriated publicly as a faithless whore when next to nothing was being said about me.
But as hard as it was, it was easy enough. The issue was that I’d flown to D.C. with a different problem than Melwas’s video.
A problem I needed to talk to Ash about as soon as possible, except we also had to deal with this video and then the topic of Melwas in general. And by the time the meeting about the video had ended and we were walking into the Oval Office, I was distracted.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask him now in the office. “That I’m fucking sorry? I am, Ash, truly fucking sorry. I would do anything for this not to be happening right now.”
Ash moves past me to shut the door and to tell Belvedere outside that he isn’t to be disturbed. Then, door closed, he walks over to a chair by the fireplace and throws himself into it, his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs still dominating the space despite his tired posture.
“I don’t know what I want you to say,” he replies heavily. “You couldn’t have known there would be cameras. You couldn’t have guessed Melwas would have done this. But it’s happened, and once again the people I’m supposed to protect are being exposed to harm.”
I sit in the chair across from him. “We can weather this, Ash. It’s awful, but Greer is strong and perfect, and she’ll survive this. And I don’t give a shit about myself. But I told you that this wasn’t over for him.”
“I know you did.”
“It’s still not over. There will be more.”
Ash pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “So what then? What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t care, but do something. Assassinate him, sanction him—anything.”
“You think that any of those things won’t lead to war?” Ash drops his hand to gaze at me. “You think it’s moral to provoke a man who is desperate for any reason to fight us?”
“It’s not provocation,” I say as I lean forward. “It’s holding your ground. It’s keeping your wife safe.”
“I have duties to more people than my wife, Embry. Three hundred and twenty million more people, actually. I can’t drag a country into war to keep one person safe. It’s not right.”
“No one is safe while Melwas is free to do whatever he pleases!”
Ash stares hard at me. “Do you remember Glein? Caledonia? Badon, where Dag died and there was so much blood it turned the ground into a muddy swamp?”
Memories of Badon—the last battle of the war—flicker before my eyes and I wince. “Stop.”
“I won’t. You held Dag as he died, remember? He asked you to call his sister and there was no reception but you kept trying until he couldn’t hear you anymore.”
“Stop.”
“How many men did you lose at Badon? Seventeen out of seventy-one? Two of them had babies about to be born at home, remember? Eight of them were fresh out of basic training. How many flags did you fold after? How many widows did you hug? How many children did you kneel down and look into their eyes and say, your papa died a hero when you knew their papa died in screaming agony without anyone to so much as hold his hand while he—”
I’m on my feet now, furious. “Fuck you,” I spit.
“I’m sorry if reminding you of war made you lose your taste for making it,” Ash says mildly. “I had no idea you would react so strongly.”
We stare at each other for a few long moments.
Ash is the first to speak. “You saw what I saw. Embry, they may have elected us because they think we’re heroes, but I swore the day I took office that I would never let those things happen again. The brutalized women, the orphaned children, the dead children. The hungry and homeless, all those bombed out houses and bags full of dried rice…if the only thing I accomplish in my life is stopping that from happening again, then I can look God in the face when I die. I’m not attacking Melwas, and that’s fucking final.”
I turn away and then back towards him, running my hands through my hair. “I don’t agree with you.”
“Good thing I’m the President then and not you.”
I start pacing. “Tell me she’s safe. Tell me he can’t hurt her any more.”
“You know I can’t promise that.” Ash’s voice is calm from behind me, but when I turn, I see the pained pleading in his eyes. “She’s as safe as I can make her. As safe as she can be.”
“I want her even safer than that.”
Ash sighs, smoothing his tie. “Embry.”
“Do you trust all her Secret Service agents? All her friends?”
“I don’t trust her cousin.”
And there it is. The problem I flew to Washington with, the blistering riddle I’ve been carrying in my hands since that I day I walked into my mother’s library and saw my sister crying. I stop pacing, and Ash notices.
“Embry?”
I sit down. I don’t look at him. I think of Morgan’s red eyes, of Abilene’s sharp smile. Let’s start with why you’re going to do exactly as I say from now on.
God, of all the things…
I clear my throat. “I think Abilene was involved with Greer’s kidnapping.”
“As do I. But I don’t have proof. Do you?”
I shake my head. “No, she hasn’t—no. I don’t. But she hates Greer, and she’s dangerous. That’s proof enough.”
Ash doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, just watches me. I think of all the things Abilene wanted me to do, all the lies she wanted me to tell, and I think about my sister hunched and defeated.
Morgan Leffey, defeated. The memory turns my stomach. I suppose I never knew how much I loved my sister until that moment, how much I loved—well… Perhaps I always knew how much I loved him.
“Abilene and I…” I trail off, not knowing where to start. I’m quite a good liar, but I’m struggling. “In Seattle. We connected.”
Ash raises his eyebrows. “Connected?”
I’m about to do it, about to delve into the lie, but then something rolls through Ash and he points to the space in front of his shoes. “I want you here when you tell me this.”
“I don’t kneel for you,” I say irritably. “Not like this.”
Ash unbuttons his suit jacket. “Would you like me to make you? I would like to make you. Just say the word.”
Glaring at him, I get up and sit on the coffee table in front of his chair. “Here. I’m in front of you. Good enough?”
He gives me a slight frown, but he nods after a minute. “Yes. I can see your eyes this way.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because you were about to lie to me.”
I can’t bear his gaze right now, and I look away.
“Go ahead, Embry. This time without the lie.”
I consider. Abilene wanted me to tell a certain kind of story to Greer, and to do that, she thought I’d have to convince Ash as well. But Ash is exactly the person who would suffer the most if he knew the truth. I have to walk a narrow path between two sets of lies, and I’m not sure that I can.
“Abilene approached me in Seattle,” I say, trying to forge a thin wire of truth. “She wants us to be in a relationship. I agreed.”
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
“Why?” His voice is dispassionate but his eyes burn. “Why did you agree?”
Here the lie is also not a lie. “To protect Greer.”
“Did you fuck her?” More burning eyes.
“No.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
He relaxes. “So this arrangement—to protect Greer—is purely a public one?”
I let out a breath. “Partially private too. Greer has to believe it. That’s what Abilene wants. For Greer to believe it and be hurt by it.”
Ash regards me. “This will hurt our princess a lot, Embry. Maybe irreparably. Is this ‘protection’ worth that?”
I think of all the sacrifices I’ve made to protect the ones I love. What’s one more at this point?
“You don’t know what I’m protecting us against, Ash.”
“Can I know?”
God, above all things, Ash can’t know.
“No.”
“No what?”
Greer appears in the office, sweet and self-possessed, looking for all the world like she’s spent the morning reading T.H. White and not listening to strangers talk about her public cuckolding of Ash. I feel a spike of panic, and I look over to him, but he shakes his head as if to say don’t expect any help from me.
Belvedere pokes his head in through the door with an apology ready on his lips and Ash holds up a hand to forestall him. “It’s fine, Ryan,” he says. Belvedere disappears, looking relieved, and closes the door behind him as he does.
Greer settles onto Ash’s lap—only inches away from me perched on the coffee table—and reaches for my hand. “You told me to come find you if I felt strange after this morning,” she says quietly to Ash, pulling my hand into her lap. Despite everything, the brush of my knuckles against her thighs sends blood pumping to my groin. “Belvedere said it was only the two of you in here, so I thought…”
“You didn’t interrupt anything state related,” he assures her. “But Embry has something he needs to talk to us about.”
She turns those huge silver eyes on me, and I think of all the times I’ve already let her down. How she must have felt after Chicago, all those times I met her and Ash still smelling like whoever I’d just fucked. The moment I let my inner monster take her in Carpathia and let our twisted connection be captured on film.
Shame fills me, but no shame is enough to outweigh the fear of Abilene right now. So I just say it. The lie that will tear her apart and hopefully save us all.
“Your cousin and I started dating. I thought you should know.”
When I get to Number One Observatory Circle, I already know who’ll be waiting for me there. My security team radioed while I was in the car, and I gave them permission to let her through the gates, but it’s still jarring to see Abilene Corbenic perched on my veranda swing as I walk up the steps.
“Hello, loverboy,” she purrs teasingly—and convincingly—as she stands up to greet me. “How’d it go? What was her face like?”
I think of the way Greer’s shoulders had stiffened, her fast blinks as she let go of my hand. But I thought it was just the three of us now. Are Ash and I not enough for you?
“Fuck you,” I tell Abilene in a pleasant voice. I stick my house key in the lock and realize the door isn’t locked; I must have forgotten to lock it up last time I was here.
She follows me inside after I open the door. “But really—her face, Embry. Did she look angry? Hurt? Confused?”
You’re more than enough, but Abilene is special, Greer. I can’t help it.
You have to help it. My wedding night—you promised to cherish me—we all promised to try to make this work!
And then the lie that stung the most of all because it confirmed her worst fears about me. You know how I am, princess. I like to fuck lots of people. I don’t like to stay in one place too long, and Abilene is my new place.
She bit that plump lower lip, her composure struggling. Is it because I’m not as pretty as her? As fun? The words rushed out, like they were against her will, like she couldn’t bear to say them and yet they couldn’t bear not to be said.
And I couldn’t bear driving in the knife that deeply…but I knew it was what Abilene wanted. You have to admit, princess, she is very pretty.
“She was all three,” I tell Abilene, tossing my keys in a dish on the table and going for the bar in the living room. I’m pretty much out of everything except Macallan 12, but it’s my favorite, so I don’t mind. “Angry and hurt and confused. You got your wish. So you can leave now.”
Abilene settles herself in the best chair by the window. “I’d rather not. I want to hear more about Greer.”
I slam back a glass of the warm single malt, wipe my mouth and pour another. I am distantly cognizant that it’s not even three in the afternoon yet. “Why are you doing this? Greer hasn’t done shit to you.”
Something crackles in the air around Abilene. “Hasn’t she, though?” she asks in a low voice. “Because I very much think she has.”
Second glass of Macallan down the hatch, I pour a third and flop onto the sofa. “What did she do, Abilene? Get better grades than you? Get cast for a better part in the school play? Grandpa loved her better? And you’ve just been biding your time all these years?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says coldly.
“I figured that wasn’t it. She told me that she was unpopular in school, always in your shadow, that you were the one everyone liked.”
The air crackles even more, and Abilene’s eyes flash the kind of blue that makes me think of veins…or a corpse’s lips.
“Is that what she told you?” Her voice is still low. “She was lying to you then, just like she lied to me.”
“She lied to you?”
Abilene keeps talking, as if she hasn’t heard me. “Everyone adored Greer. Every boy wanted to kiss her, every girl wanted to be her. The teachers petted her, Grandpa always liked her more, even my parents wished I could be as smart and polite as she was. But she was so aloof—so quiet—she didn’t even realize. She didn’t get it. She could have been the queen of that school if she’d even once looked up from her books, and that’s what infuriates me. She could have had everything and she didn’t even know. Didn’t care.”
I drink. “I don’t see how all that equals her lying to you.”
She takes a breath, as if she can’t believe what an idiot I am. “She didn’t lie about anything to do with school, dumbass. I meant she lied about him. She lied and she took him from me.”
I intended on facing away from her, but this makes me turn my head to get a good look at her expression. “Him? Ash, you mean?”
“She knew I loved him. He was all I wanted, and she took him away from me before I ever even had the chance.” Her voice is bitter, but when she sees me staring at her, she unfolds from her chair with a small smile on her face. She walks towards me, slowly, deliberately, the elegant lines of her body captivating. I suddenly feel very aware of the two and half glasses of scotch warming up my stomach, very aware of the fight I just had with Greer.
“Somehow, somehow, she got to him first. It should’ve been me kissing him at that party, it should have been me as his bride, and when I tried to tell him that in Geneva, he pushed me away. Told me he loved her.”
Abilene makes the word loved sound sordid, obscene, as if loving Greer is some sort of aberrant act that is beyond the edge of taboo.
She arranges herself on my lap, naturally, like it’s a habit of ours. “She took everything I wanted away from me, just like she took everyone’s affection and love when we were growing up. And if I can’t have Maxen, then she can’t have you. In fact, I don’t want her to have anything.” She places her hand along my jaw and tilts her head prettily at me.
When I was a boy, my grandmother used to have a mechanical bird with gold-filigree wings and ruby eyes. It was beautiful and delicate and when you wound up the key between its wings, it would cock its head and open its beak and flutter its sharp, metal wings. And as Abilene tilts her head at me, I think of that bird. Calculated and beautiful and utterly, utterly un-alive.
Mistaking my examination of her for something else, she leans in and presses her lips against mine. I don’t return the kiss, I don’t close my eyes. I stare at her wondering—how did that impetuous, passionate girl Greer told me about turn into this spiteful automaton? The girl Greer told me was the first to party, the first to fight, the first to laugh. What happened to her? Was it really losing the chance to be loved by Ash that turned her sour?
Abilene opens her eyes too, and pulls back ever so slightly. “This can be fun for us,” she says, again in that convincing purr. “We can both get something out of this.”
Fuck, that scotch is hitting me hard. I want her off my lap, out of my house and my life, but I’m almost too drunk to make my limbs work, to make my mouth say the words. But I finally manage, standing up with her in my arms and setting her down on her feet, not as gently as I could have. “If you were the last person on Earth, Abilene, then I would learn to love sheep instead. Get the fuck out of my house.”
Again she tilts her head, the gesture no longer coquettish but shrewd. “Be careful with me, Embry. It’s not fair that she has both of you, and I plan on fixing that for once and for all.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do as long as you keep your word about Morgan,” I say, walking over to the door and opening it. The scotch is making everything so fuzzy, so watery, and it takes me a couple tries with the doorknob to make it work.
“You might regret those words, loverboy,” she croons in a singsong voice, and then she steps out onto the veranda, and I slam the door shut behind her.
I grind the heels of my palms into my eyes, barely able to stand I’m so drunk and tired. How the fuck do I get into these messes? Why is it always me who’s asked to give give give until I have nothing left?
Never one to turn back on a bad decision, I go into the living room and polish off the last glass of scotch, and then wander upstairs to tumble into bed. I don’t even take off my shoes. My last thought before I slip under the dark, drunk waves is of Greer and the way the light glinted off her white-gold hair as I broke her heart in the Oval Office.
I dream then. I dream dark, sweaty dreams of Greer and Ash, Ash holding Greer open for me, the wet welcome of her as she hugs me tight to her body. In my dream, she murmurs that she loves me, that she forgives me, that she’ll let me inside her whenever I need it. Please, I beg dream-Greer, please make it feel better. Let me come inside you.
The dream grinds on, flesh and fucking and the kinds of things one doesn’t admit to in their right mind, and in my dream, I come over and over and over again as Greer cries out my name, Embry, Embry, Embry…
“Embry,” a female voice coaxes. “Embry, wake up. Your alarm.”
I open my eyes to powerful morning sunlight slanting through the room and sheets tangled around my body. I’m clammy and dehydrated and naked and—
Quills of panic pierce my awakening brain.
Abilene is next to me. Also naked.
I reach over and turn off my alarm and then look at her. Really look at her.
“We didn’t.” But my voice is as uncertain as my mind right now. Those dreams were so vivid and I was so fucked up from the scotch, although three glasses isn’t actually that much for me…
I look at her some more. The tousled red hair, her pale, freckled skin.
“What do you think we did?” she asks coyly.
“I told you to leave. I watched you leave.”
“And maybe I was worried about you after you drank that much. Maybe I wanted to come back in and make sure you got to bed safely. And then you were so needy, Embry, so desperate. ‘Please make it feel better,’ you said. ‘Let me come inside you.’”
The clamminess has turned into real chills. My dream—my drunken dream—could I have really fucked Abilene and not known it? I’m frozen with disgust at the idea, it crawls all over me like bugs on a coffin lid. I want to scratch my skin off, I want to burn every thought out of my brain, I want—
“You spiked my scotch bottle,” I realize, another part of my mind shoving the shame and guilt aside to tell me what I should have seen. “My door was unlocked when I got home. I never get that messed up after only a few glasses. Christ, Abilene. What the fuck?”
She’s already sliding out of bed, not bothering to cover herself up. “Well, it would be impossible to prove now that the bottle is gone. A blood test might show the presence of GHB, along with a few other choice drugs—just the kind of thing to make a man semi-conscious but still able to achieve a—” she gives me a grin that makes me want to tear down the walls with my bare hands “—very impressive erection. But would you look at this?” She wanders over to the mantel of the small fireplace in my bedroom. A few orange bottles are lined up neatly along the edge. “It looks like you have prescriptions for all of them.”
She tosses a bottle to me. GHB, for night terrors related to PTSD, the label says. I’ve never been prescribed this drug and yet it has my name on it, my doctor’s name on it, and I bet if I pushed even deeper, there would be records of that prescription everywhere.
“You got to the White House doctor?”
“Let’s just say that event planning allows me to meet a broad range of people.”
“Just—” I look down at the bottle, at my hands, at my bare thighs. “Tell me the truth. Did we fuck last night?”
“I’ve been dying to fuck you since I started this. Use your head, loverboy. Why would I go to all this trouble if I wasn’t going to fuck you?”
I suppose she had a point. This required a level of forethought and blackmailing above and beyond a simple lie.
“I hate you,” I say, and my voice is calmer now, settled. “For blackmailing all of us, for tricking me, for hurting Greer. It’s unforgivable.”
“Forgiveness is overrated. Satisfaction is where it’s at.” Abilene pulls her dress over her head and slips into her heels, looking fresh and pert and not at all like the clicking metal beast she is. She pauses at the door on her way out. “And Embry, one thing I forgot to mention. I’m not on birth control.”
I let out a long breath. Of course she isn’t. Of course.
She blows me a kiss. “I’ll be in touch.”
