Fracture

15. Dylan

CHAPTER 15

DYLAN

“I’ve asked myself so many times what I did to deserve what happened.” Stella pulls a leg up onto the chair, resting her chin on her knee as she watches me make orange juice. “I’d sit there and think, why did I deserve a father like that? Why couldn’t I have a dad like yours?”

“That’s not how life works.” I discard one spent orange half into the trash can at my feet and push the next one into the press. “Your father was a fucking monster with the perfect public image.” I raise my eyes to her. “You have to know that, guera . None of this was your fault. None of it.”

“I guess.” She rolls her head back and forth, her eyes fixed on my task. She’s still pale, but thank fuck she’s finally stopped shaking. It felt like forever until she was warm again, until her body stopped quaking as the bad memories clawed their way to the forefront of her mind.

“So, this reporter, where does she come into it?” I pour the juice into a tall frosted glass, and carry it over to where Stella sits at the table. Stella takes the glass from me with a sigh, and shrugs as I sit down beside her.

“She sniffed me out at Zee’s salon a couple weeks ago. Told me that Gloria’s giving Channel Four an interview, some tell-all thing. She wanted to give me the chance to tell my side of the story.”

“And I guess you said no?”

Stella tosses back half the glass of juice, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth as she sniffles. “I sure did. I was hounded by reporters for years after you two went to prison, and I’ve never spoken to them. Not once.”

I want to ask her why, but it feels like a stupid question. What would she have to tell them? Why would they even listen? They’d turn her pain into some fantastical story about the almost-President’s daughter, and it would bring her nothing.

“What happened after we went inside?” I ask the question slowly, not sure if I’m ready to hear it or for her to tell it, but with everything that’s happening around us, I need to understand.

Stella drinks down the rest of the juice, placing the glass on the table and rolling it back and forth between her fingers as she stares at it intently. “I don’t know much you heard in court, I never knew how aware you two were of what was happening, but… when they read the verdict out and took you both away, I fainted. They called an ambulance, it was on the front page of every newspaper. It started all these dirty rumors, that I was in on it, that I’d secretly married you, that I was pregnant, you name it.”

I can’t even name the emotion that tears through me hearing this, knowing that while Levi and I were escorted out of that courtroom, my girl was lying helpless on the floor. It’s beyond grief, beyond anger and rage, and so much of it is once again directed at me. I left her alone in every way.

“I’m so sorry.”

Stella reaches over and takes my hand. “I need you to stop apologizing for that time. Please. I don’t need your apologies, I really don’t. Please stop giving them to me. It won’t change what happened.”

“I know, but I let you down.”

“Stop it.” She leans closer and lays her head against my shoulder. “You’re here now, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah.” I run my hand over her head before she raises it to look out the window at the sunshine.

“After that, it was a weird time. I finally managed to contact my mom, and told her that I wanted to come live with her. She was in France, living with some baron who had an estate in the Loire Valley, husband number 7 I think.” She swallows, her lashes fluttering. “She told me that it was a bad time. As though there was ever a good time when it came to my mother.” She inhales sharply, and her head drops. “Then my mom told me she'd signed my guardianship over to Gloria. For stability . That’s the word she used. Stability . I needed it, she said. At least she was self-aware enough to know that I’d never find that with her.” Her face crumples, her lip trembling as she presses her hands to her face. “It still hurts, to this fucking day. It still breaks my fucking heart that even then, when I had no one else, even then she didn’t want me.”

I pull Stella into my lap and draw her close to me, wrapping my arms around her and wishing I could make it stop hurting. I wish I had the power to say something, or do something, anything, to take away all the cuts and bruises Stella’s parents left behind on her heart. Instead I just hold her silently, not knowing what else to do but just let her know I’m right here, and that I’m not going anywhere.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and wipes her face with her hands.

“I’m alright. Sometimes I just, I don’t know, it just comes out.” She gazes up at me, her amber eyes still shining with tears. “I trained myself not to cry, you know that? Because it was always worse when I cried.”

I swear to god, I’m going to throw up. I clutch her to me tighter, because those words shatter my soul. “You cry all you want with me, I don’t care. Flood the house. You don’t hold back with us.”

“Thank you.” She wraps an arm around my neck and buries her face against my shoulder. “You have no idea what that means to me.”

We sit like that for a while, until she takes a deep breath and sits up. “I only had 8 months until I turned 18, but I think Gloria had her plan. She wanted a conservatorship put in place so she’d be able to control my father’s money. Because the old bastard had never named her in his will.” Stella laughs scornfully. “That bitch really thought my dad loved her. You should have seen the look on her face that day.”

“The only person who didn’t know that marriage was a sham was Gloria.” I run my hand down Stella’s back. “How was she going to get a conservatorship?”

Stella’s eyes meet mine. “By trying to make me go insane.”

My lungs contract almost painfully, and the pit of my stomach is icy. “And how was she going to do that?”

She gazes at me pensively, her eyes dropping to my neck. She reaches out and traces a finger along one of the snakes etched into my skin, a sad smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

“I like these. I always wanted a tattoo, I just never knew what to get.” She climbs out of my lap and goes to the kitchen counter, pulling open a drawer. She withdraws an orange vial, a pill bottle, and brings it over to me. “I found these. Gloria got careless one afternoon when she went to visit Levi, and they were just perched right there in the kitchen, next to the blender.”

“Zyprexa?” I read the name off the vial with Gloria’s name printed on the label. “What is this?”

“Olanzapine.” Stella’s gaze wanders to the ceiling, then back out the window. “It causes hallucinations. Gloria ground that up in my smoothies, I’m guessing with the assistance of the ever-present Valerie.” She scoffs. “It didn’t have the intended effect, but it fucked me up. Took me years to feel normal again.” She looks down at me, her beautiful face twisted with pain, and suddenly she straddles me, taking my face in her hands. “I did things to hurt myself. I did things so I would feel something again. I did dangerous, stupid things. I let men…”

She trails off, and my heart stops for a moment. I grip her thighs, pulling her closer to me.

“If anyone hurt you, I will fucking hunt them down.”

She shakes her head, dropping her gaze. “Don’t say things like that. I let those things happen.”

I grip her chin in my jaw, forcing her eyes back up to mine. “No. You were used, and no one looked after you. That stops now. Me and Levi, we’ll look after you. And anyone who hurt you, their days are numbered.”

“Dylan-”

“Tell me about Stanley Iverson.”

She inhales sharply, and clenches her eyes shut. I hope to god I haven’t lost her again, I hope I haven’t pushed her back into that dark place she just escaped from. But she takes several deep breaths, leaning into me and wrapping her arms around my neck, her fingers tracing gently over the back of my head.

“You remember my sixteenth birthday?” Before I can answer, she laughs softly. “Of course you do. You bought me all the flowers. I remembered, after you told me. I don’t think I ever even thanked you properly, but that was the most beautiful gift anyone ever gave me. So, thank you.”

My nose brushes along her collarbone, her sweet vanilla scent intoxicating. “Any time.”

“My dad let me have red wine that night, which was weird. He said it was family tradition. Wasn’t one I’d ever heard of.” Her fingers continue their slow circles, and she sighs softly. “I hated how it tasted, but I didn’t want to disappoint him. I didn’t want to be the one to break tradition, and let him down.” She shrugs. “So I drank half of it, and then poured the rest into one of the plants, so he didn’t see. So he’d think I’d drunk all of it. Within a few minutes, the room was spinning. I could barely hear anything, I couldn’t talk properly. My dad, I remember him carrying me out of the room, telling everyone the day had been too much for me.”

“He drugged that wine.” It’s a pointless statement to make. But I’m finally putting it all together, finally asking Stella about everything instead of charging into the night like a raging bull. My anger is so sharp, I can feel its red-hot needles prickling down my spine and at the base of my skull. I close my eyes and remember the look in her father’s eyes the second before I pulled the trigger and blew his brains out all over his leather armchair. The fear and disbelief.

And I hate myself because that death was too good for a fucking animal like him. I should have made him suffer.

“Yes, he did.” Stella starts talking again, and I focus on her voice, on the slow breaths she takes as she tries to remain calm and not get swallowed up by the pain of her memories. “As he carried me out, he told me that tonight was going to be extra special. Everything we’d been doing til now, led to this moment. Because I was a woman now.” Her voice falters into a whisper on the last sentence.

“You don’t need to tell me more.” I try to pull back from her, but her arms lock around me and hold me in place.

“He put me in a car.” Her voice doesn’t rise above that whisper, and I hold on to her, my hands splayed on her back, trying to make her know with every part of me that I’m here, here . “I don’t know how long we drove, but then I was in a room I’d never seen before, some fancy hotel. I remember thinking how soft the sheets were, and then this sort of panic started, because if I could feel the sheets on my back, I wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

She takes two small, shuddering breaths and her fingers cease their gentle circles on my skin. Now she’s just holding on to me. Just anchoring herself. I don’t know if she’s ever told anyone this before. I still don’t know if I’m ready to hear it. But I steel myself for it.

In an eerily hollow voice, Stella goes on. “I knew Stanley Iverson, he was a good friend of my dad’s. I’d seen him before, always in suits and ties. So when he walked in, just in a robe, you know, one of those big fluffy hotel robes, I didn’t recognise him at first. Then he said something about Uncle Stanley looking after me, and I realized who he was. Then he took off his robe, and I wanted to get away, I wanted to crawl off the bed and run out of the room, but I couldn’t move. He… He asked me if it was my first time, and I couldn’t say anything. Then he walked over, and he crawled over me and he smelled so bad, and he was so heavy, this big round gut, pressing me into the bed.”

I’m anchoring myself to Stella now too, the two of us just holding each other as she relives what was one of the worst nights of her life and I fight the rage and sorrow and howling grief that won't stop echoing through my skull.

“He hurt me.” Her voice drops lower again, so it’s barely audible. “It was so… So uncomfortable, it didn’t hurt exactly, but… I felt disgusting. He told me he’d paid my father extra to let him do it without a condom. I was lying there, in pain and terrified that he’d get me pregnant. But then he didn’t finish. He rolled me over and… There was something cold, between my legs, cold and slippery, and then he… It hurt so bad, and I couldn’t even scream.”

When she stops talking, neither of us do anything but hold each other. Stella goes limp and soft in my arms, her arms dropping from around my neck so she can curl herself up into a ball on my lap.

I don’t tell her that Stanley Iverson is as good as dead. I don’t tell her that I’ll put a tracker on his phone after I run her a bath. I don’t tell her that Levi and I will hunt him down while she has dinner with Zee later this week. I don’t tell her that Stanley Iverson will die slowly, and in pain.

I don’t tell her any of that.

I simply hold her as the grief and sorrow wash off her, as her breathing normalizes. When she finally stands and stretches her back, I take her upstairs and run her a bath. She kisses me and thanks me, and lowers herself into the water. I tell her I’ll be right back, and head into my room just as the front door slams shut and Levi comes up the stairs. He follows me into my room and closes the door behind him.

“Gun’s coming.” He says, toeing off his shoes.

“Good.” I pick up my phone and send off a text. “I’ll have the tracker on him by this afternoon.”

“How’s she doing?”

“I don’t even know how she’s functioning. Our girl’s a fucking fighter.” I meet his eyes, and he frowns. “Iverson gets a bad death. Painful, slow as fuck. I want that bastard to suffer til his last breath.”

Levi’s gaze turns steely as he nods. “She told you what happened?”

“What she remembers. Her dad drugged her.”

Levi hisses in a breath, leaning heavily against the door as his head drops to his chest. “Fucking son of a bitch.”

I open my mouth to tell him what his mother did, but decide that’s a conversation for another time, and one he should have with Stella. But not now, not today. Stella has been through enough for one day.

“This reporter going to be a problem?” Levi asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I doubt it, Stella won’t talk to anyone.”

Levi rubs his neck, hissing in a breath through his clenched teeth. “My goddamn mother, and her fucking interview. What the hell is she thinking?”

The room feels too small, all the hurt and misery and what lies ahead of us weighing down the air and threatening to choke me. This day has been too much already, for all of us.

“Hey.” I walk toward Levi, who eyes me warily. “Let it go for today. No more thinking about it.”

Levi’s mouth quirks into a smile, and his eyes scan me up and down. “You plan on distracting me?”

“I plan on distracting both of you.” I put my hands either side of him against the door, and kiss the corner of his mouth softly. His eyes flutter closed, and his shoulders drop. “Now, no more heavy shit today. You and our girl are going to let me look after you both.”

“Sounds good.” Levi turns his face to brush a kiss on my lips.

“Dylan?” Stella’s voice wafts softly through the air, and Levi moves so I can pull the door open.

“I’m here, guera .”

I walk into the bathroom to be met with Stella standing on the mat in a towel, her hair up in a messy bun on her head, a soft smile on her face. Her eyes move over my shoulder to Levi, then back to me, and she sighs happily.

“You’re both here,” she says,

“We sure are, baby girl.” Levi moves around me and towards Stella. “We’re not going anywhere.” He puts his arms around her, and Stella leans into his chest, the smile growing.

This is right. How it’ll work, that will come later. For today, it’s us, just us. Exactly how it’s meant to be.