I leave my lights off, locking my door before I close it. It’s got one of those little knobs with a hole in it that you can pick from the outside. Once again, I feel a pang of guilt at sneaking out on Tess, and her distraught face flashes in my memory again, but I push it aside. I feel trapped here, suffocated. And there’s always a chance I might see Danyella or Lumen at the party. It’d be nice to have friends here considering my own friends from back home have hardly bothered responding to my texts.
Parrish’s father is in his own office downstairs, while the youngest kids are already asleep. Kimber emerges from the living room as we pause in the entryway, her eyes lifting from her phone to stare at us. As soon as she sees me, her entire demeanor changes.
“You’ll take her to the party, but not me?” she hisses, giving Parrish a dirty look. “Are you insane? I should go ask Mom what she thinks about that.”
“If you rat me out, I will drown you in the pool,” Parrish snaps right back, doing that eye-narrowing thing he likes so much. It’s nice to see it directed at someone who isn’t me. “You’re fucking fourteen. Nobody wants a fourteen-year-old at a party. Go upstairs and play with your dolls.”
“Eat shit, Parrish,” Kimber whispers back at him, her eyes flashing over to me. She almost immediately turns her attention back to her brother, picking up a handful of gold-foil candies from a decorative bowl nearby and chucking them our way. They scatter to the floor, but Parrish ignores them. Of course, he does: because Delphine will likely be the person who has to pick them up.
I pause briefly to bend down and gather the candies up, dumping them back in the bowl while Parrish and Kimber stare at me like I’ve lost my mind and X gives me that mysterious but charming smile of his.
“Come on, Kota,” he says, clearly borrowing my nickname from my sister’s vocabulary. “You can ride shotgun. Parrish, you get the back,” he says, jerking his thumb toward the backseat after kicking the door to the garage open. He gives his friend a meaningful look as I scramble into the front seat of the Jeep Gladiator, gloating and smirking and watching Parrish’s glare follow along for the ride. “Come on, don’t piss me off tonight. I’m your only chance to get out of here without having to walk.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Parrish murmurs back, but he takes the backseat without further complaint.
With a grin, I close the door behind me, the expression fading away as the garage door begins to open behind us and I tense for the crush of reporters. Only … there’s nobody there. I let out a sigh of relief. People move on quick, right? I mean, my kidnapping should be old news already.
“You really don’t like the attention, do you?” X asks, turning the truck around and then heading down the driveway as the gate slides open into blissful darkness. No flashing cameras, no recording phones, no shouting people. I let out a sigh of relief.
“Not at all. Who wants to be famous for being kidnapped?” I ask, leaning back in the quiet shadows of the cab. It’s almost like Parrish isn’t there at all. Except … I can almost feel him behind me, pretending to be engrossed in his phone when he’s actually listening to every word. Probably filing them away to use against me later, no doubt.
“Fair point,” X agrees, glancing my way again. He quickly turns his attention back to the road, but not before my mind flickers with his words from the coffee shop. “I’ve got a girlfriend, and she’s pretty awesome so …” Ugh. I ignore that, burying it deep down where it belongs, locked away tight. My sister is the single most important person in the world to me, and I won’t compromise that relationship for anything.
Instead, I turn around so I can look at Parrish.
“Why did you tell me that stuff about Saffron?” I ask, my heart aching for the woman I grew up believing to be my mother. She lost her baby? How? When? Was the child a similar age to me? I never really liked Saffron—Maxine never liked her either for that matter and she really is her kid—but I also felt empathy toward her. She just seemed so fucking sad every time we saw her.
“Because keeping the truth from you is only making things worse,” Parrish snaps back, like I’ve supremely annoyed the shit out of him. He turns away from me toward the window, shutting off his phone and slipping it into his pocket.
“Just ignore him,” Maxx offers, his words dragging a scoff from Parrish’s perfect lips. “The fact that you were kidnapped as a baby shouldn’t affect your OnlyFans subscriber count.”
