Page 4 of Wicked Vile King
I thought it was a joke at first, which was stupid because Papa isn't exactly known for his jokes. I'm not even sure I've ever heard him tell one. It was like he was born without a sense of humor.
But it wasn't a joke at all. It was a prison sentence that I begged him to overturn, not that my pleading helped. My suitcases—two of them in matching black Louis Vuitton, a gift from Mama last Christmas—sat on the veined marble next to the strange men. My fate had been decided long before I ever stepped foot into the room, and everyone knew it but me.
Thirteen hours feels like a lifetime ago.
When I was a different person.
When I was naïve.
When I thought Papa still cared.
Papa.
He doesn't like it when I call him that. He says I'm too old to use such childish nicknames. It should be Father or Mr. Cadelle now. But that's what Mama called him, and if he's not Papa, then what is she anymore? Just another body feeding the worms, I suppose.
My fingers tremble at the thought, and my thumbs latch onto the insides of my sweater sleeves, curling the soft fabric down toward my palms and stretching it taut against my shoulders.
Do not cry, Willow.
Do. Not. Cry.
Even if it is just a nightmare.
My father would be ashamed of me if I did. He prides himself on his ability to arrange his life into neat little boxes. At one time, Mama and I used to fit into one of those boxes. Our entire existence was tidy, orderly,precise.
But then she killed herself, and it was no longer tidy or orderly or precise anymore. My mother ceased to exist to my father the moment it happened—maybe even in the weeks and months before, when she paced the house in the dead of night and cried when she thought no one was looking; when she broke and he couldn't fit all her pieces into one of his boxes anymore.
Papa doesn't tolerate disorder of any kind. He prides himself on keeping everything in its place, the only son of a career military man and a housewife. Even his career is a testament to the only god he worships—precision. He built his fortune in mergers and acquisitions, the ultimate compartmentalization of the good and the bad.
But I did what I did, and now I don't fit into his orderly life anymore.
I have been discarded, sent away and abandoned, to the backseat of this car.
No, no, that can't be right. Papa wouldn't do that to me.
This must be a nightmare.
It has to be.
I blink away the tears that gather in my eyes and shift, scooting on the leather seat but not really going anywhere. My butt went numb hours ago, and the backs of my thighs are next.
The strange men won't tell me where we're going. For the first hour after they pushed me into the car and locked me in, I pleaded for answers. By the second, I bartered, promising money to learn where I was being taken, and I gave up by the third. If the strangers didn't occasionally speak with each other—terse comments about directions and traffic—I would have thought they were deaf.
A sheet of thick plexiglass separates us, as though I am a prisoner in the back of a police car. It makes me wonder if others have been here before and threatened the men for answers or resorted to throwing a punch or trying to wreck the car. That's not me though.
The Cadelles aren't violent.
Don't stoop when you can stand, Papa always says.
Like what he would say matters anymore.
He abandoned me. I shouldn't care what he thinks. I shouldn't let the last words he spoke to me simmer in my brain.
That he thought it was for the best.
That this place would help me.
That helovedme.
