Solstice (Midsummer #3)

22. Lex

22

Lex

S omething about this story, in particular, made it blow up. The Puck had written millions of debatably inaccurate things about us over the years—that I’d fucked my way through the entire royal family before settling down with Ivy, that I’d cleaned up my image in an attempt to be with her, that we broke up and fucked around and got back together every other week, that we’d been in love since we were children.

Most of the time, the public barely batted an eye. But the affair between Ivy and Miri caught the world’s attention, and it became fucking ravenous for information about where I fit into things.

Did I know? Did I care? Was I a part of it?

I ignored the shame in my mother’s eyes when a conservative news network spent forty-five minutes arguing if we participated in a satanic sex cult. Though that wasn’t too far-fetched considering how fucked-up the truth actually was. Ivy and I sat through it, fingers intertwined, hands pressed firmly against each other. A united front.

We took the next week to hide out in our house while the media eviscerated us in public. Comedians and late-night talk show hosts poked fun at the situation—me for being the stereotypical douche whose girlfriends went to town while I gawked in the corner like a perv, Ivy and Miri, for being clichéd brainless party girls, willing to do whatever for attention.

From an outside perspective, it must have looked that way. The scrutiny focused solely on Ivy and Miri, but if someone paid enough attention, they would have remembered I hadn’t been shy about my sexuality when I was a teenager, and we’d been transparent about being close in college. I didn’t care if the public knew I once fucked anything with a pulse. Even if I wasn’t openly pansexual, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that gawking had not been what I was doing in the corner.

The injustice infuriated me.

Did they not know the impact of what Ivy had already accomplished? Did they not know we were trying to save the world?

But that’s not what got the masses fired up. That’s not what sold magazines and clicks on the internet.

No.

All they cared about, all they ever cared about, was drama, real or imagined.

Giana delivered the public statement announcing the photos were fake, the work of someone set on damaging our reputations ahead of the upcoming legislation and wedding. Kit had found digital footprint experts to corroborate the story. Princess Miriam and Representative Washington continued to be good friends, and the wedding would proceed as planned. We would answer no questions and provide no further comment on the matter.

Ivy went back to work. So did I. Aside from a few brief stares from colleagues and muffled whispers in coffee rooms, no one mentioned anything to me.

Life went on. But something had been fractured. I sensed it on an instinctual level. Miri hadn’t returned any of our calls or texts. We had stopped trying.

“She’s scared,” Carter told me once I finally got ahold of him. He and Miri had been in touch a few times since then, but even he wasn’t safe for her to contact. The royal household monitored her conversations to make sure they were civil and clean. Two old friends and nothing more. “The British press is turning her into a whore, dredging up anyone she’s ever slept with. The royal family can’t put a lid on it fast enough.”

I’d seen the filth they’d been writing, making her out to be a home-wrecker or a seductress. Like me, Miri hadn’t been shy about sleeping around when she was younger. It had been easier to conceal in the days before smartphones and social media. Now, everyone was part-time paparazzi.

“Are you going to see her?”

If she wouldn’t see Ivy or me, at least Carter could be there.

“I still plan to stop by Danae Enterprises the day she’ll be there,” Carter said. “She doesn’t know, or else she would refuse.”

Goddamn stubborn princess.

“Come home.”

“Lex.” He blew out a desperate breath. “I don’t think I can. The media is watching you like a hawk. There’s no way I can get in.”

“She needs you.” I cleared my throat, murmuring the next bit. “I need you.”

“I know.” The yearning in his voice reached down inside of me, yanking something so hard, I nearly got on a plane to Romania. “Do you know who it was yet?”

“No. We don’t even know when the pictures were stolen. We’ve been combing through security footage from the last four months, but nothing is out of the ordinary.”

Carter hummed. “Which means it was someone close. ”

“Exactly.”

How could someone have gotten in and out without being seen? Had they tampered with the cameras? Had they hacked the system? Kit didn’t find evidence of that, but that didn’t mean shit. Whoever had fucked with us four years ago hadn’t left any breadcrumbs, either.

“How’s she doing?” Carter took a sip of something, likely whiskey.

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. The separation had not been good for Ivy the first time around. This was way fucking worse. “She’s existing.”

To say the least. She went to work and put on the good show, her fake politician’s mask barely having a crack despite the damage to our brand. I saw through it. Maybe it was because I’d spent so much time in her head, but I understood those forlorn looks and that grim set to her mouth.

She missed our wife, and so did I. For eight years, Miri and I had fought and fucked and made up. She always came around. Always. But it had been over two weeks with no word, on top of the sporadic contact the weeks before that. Not a call. Not a text. Nothing. She’d never made me wait this long before.

“I’ll see her in a few days,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you.” We ended the call, but the hole in my heart did not heal the way it normally did after a conversation with him. I stood and walked to the end of the hall, poking into Ivy’s room. She wasn’t there, so I went downstairs to the basement gym, where I found her on the elliptical, sweating and talking on the phone through her earbuds.

“Senator Waters, you know very well why we can’t give in to this brazen attempt to distract us from impacting real change.” Ivy pushed herself harder, wiping at her brow with the back of her arm. “We need this bill to get through the Senate. It’s the right thing for the country.”

I raised an eyebrow and circled around to the front of the machine, putting my arms over the display, leaning my head to the side while she talked. I focused on the X across her neck, now brilliant against her pale throat. A bead of sweat trickled down the column of her windpipe, over her sternum, disappearing in between her breasts.

I tracked it, licking my lips, wondering if she’d let me get close enough to taste her. Call me a sick son of a bitch, but I loved a good fuck after a workout. She pushed herself harder, going faster, taking deep, slow breaths so she could keep up with the conversation.

Since Miri had broken things off, Ivy had pushed herself to the breaking point. She’d lost at least fifteen pounds, saying she needed to fit into the wedding dress, but Ivy didn’t have the weight to lose to begin with. She’d always been long and lean, and in the past few years, toned from working out every day.

Now she looked tired and wrung out. She barely slept, and when she did, it was for an hour or two at a time. If we were normal humans, I’d say she was depressed. But we weren’t normal, and such a finite word didn’t begin to describe what was going on with her.

Ivy always hated the anticipation of things to come, but I’d been planning and scheming, biding my time for the prick to show himself. I worked with Poppy to get her ready for the showdown. She needed to be strong. We all did.

“Think about it.” Ivy shook her head and grabbed her water bottle, taking a deep sip. “Call me once you’ve reconsidered.” She hung up the phone and pressed stop on the machine, sinking down to the ground. “What?”

I pursed my lips. “You’ve been down here for over an hour.”

“I’m busy.” She hopped off the elliptical and bent over to stretch, my eyes catching on the curves of her ass, sloping down into her thighs. Such a great ass.

“Carter sends his love.”

“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows. “I’ll give him a call tonight.”

I furrowed my brows. Usually, the mention of her beloved Mister Scott sent Ivy’s heart all a pitter patter. No reaction raised my hackles higher. She went to the treadmill and pressed start, pushing the incline up to 5 percent before cranking the speed into a jog. With the thwack thwack thwack of her feet hitting the machine and the swoosh swoosh swoosh of the belt, she’d barely be able to hear me.

Which had been the fucking point. Ivy didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to be around me. Couldn’t she see I was heartbroken, too? Couldn’t she tell that our love was the only thing keeping me together? She’d once said what we had was real, and I believed her. But at the first sign of trouble, she pulled away.

No.

I didn’t like that shit one fucking bit. I’d let her have her space for now, but we had a week until the wedding. Her heart might be breaking, but if the king was planning what I thought he might be, she needed to get her head in the game. I couldn’t do this alone.

I turned and walked out of the gym, dialing Miri like some pathetic stalker that couldn’t take a restraining order for an answer. I got her voicemail.

Well, at least I hadn’t been blocked yet.

“Miri, I know you’re scared. I know you think you can’t survive this.” I looked over my shoulder at my disintegrating fiancée. “But staying away will be worse. Don’t make me get on a fucking plane and hunt you down.” A long pause where I sucked back on my cigarette, hating the desperation in my voice. “I love you.”

I hung up knowing, like I did the thousand times before, she wouldn’t return my call.

* * *

Whoever said “Any press is good press” never survived a sex scandal. The paparazzi hounded us, more than they ever had before. They waited outside my work, shouting questions as my bodyguards tried to get me to and from the door. I ignored them.

Sixteen-year-old Lex would have given them the finger and shown them exactly where to fuck off. A decade later, I had an image to keep. We told the world there was nothing to see, and lately, there hadn’t been. Ivy sublimated, I searched for the truth, and somewhere in the middle, we got ready for the wedding event of the season.

“We’ve always been friends, but not best man sort of friends.” Jon narrowed his gaze as he adjusted his tie in the mirror.

“Well, it’s a small wedding party, and I didn’t have many options.”

Jon turned his ginger head toward me. “Not Carter Scott or the commander of the fairy army?” I snapped my gaze to his, but he smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Relax. I’m only fucking with you.”

At first, I’d balked about Ivy telling her siblings what happened to us. But now, I was unusually grateful to have someone else to rely on. The three of them were close. As they’d gotten older, Jon had moved to New England, trying to put some separation between himself and his mother. That had only worked for so long. Now graduated from law school, he’d been dragged back to DC, back into the fray, and, fortunately for me, back into my inner circle.

“What about your bachelor party?” Done with his suit, he came to me and grabbed the lapels of my jacket, giving them a good yank so the fabric lay flat over my body.

“No bachelor party.”

“What?” Jon’s eyes crinkled. “Why not?”

“Because.” I shook my head. “Neither of us wanted this. It’s not something I’m celebrating.”

Jon sighed. “You might not have wanted it at the beginning, but there are some curtains on the fourth floor of the Contemporary Art Museum that say otherwise.”

“Fuck off.” I shoved his arms away and turned to check myself out in the three mirrors ahead of me. I owned suits at home almost as expensive as this, but when I looked up, I didn’t recognize the man staring back.

I had the same eyes, the same cheekbones, the same lips, but Christ. I looked like Marcus. I looked like my Uncle Dmitri when he was young. I was a fucking man. I saw it in the set of my shoulders, the square of my jaw, the haunting expression behind my eyes.

“Look at this fucking asshole,” the younger version of myself said from the depths of my subconscious. “Giving up and giving in, huh? At least you’ll look fine as fuck doing it.”

Four years ago, I never thought I’d be standing here. I never thought we’d be seeing this through to the end. My gaze caught on the scars on my hand. Until the end. I missed them. I missed Miri. The longer her silence went on, the more I realized this might not be like the last time. This might not blow over.

“Just wait until Evelyn does this to you.” I shucked the jacket down my arms and gently laid it on the chair, yanking at the tie to pull it over my head.

“Oh, she’ll try.” Jon smiled. “And she’ll fail.”

I pursed my lips, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You sound confident.”

“There’s no one left to run for office.” Jon shrugged. “Your dad is done. Ivy’s a long way out from the White House.”

“No one except you.”

Jon shook his head and let out a sad laugh. “I’m not interested in politics.”

“And yet, here you stand at the heart of it all.”

“Well, yeah.” He nodded. “My family’s here. My siblings need me.”

“I fought for months to change my father’s mind.” I unbuttoned the shirt and whipped it off my arms next. “If Kellan couldn’t be swayed, Evelyn definitely won’t. I guarantee she already has her eye on someone for you.”

“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “Probably half of DC. But if she thinks she’s good at this game, I assure you, I’m better.”

That piqued my interest. “How so?”

“I’m twenty-four.” He put his hands in his pockets, giving me a nonchalant shrug. “You were engaged by my age. I’ve been putting her off this long.”

I admired his tenacity even if it was stupid as hell. Evelyn had been playing before any of us had been alive. His arrogance and cockiness may have made me love him even more, if only because it reminded me so damn much of his sister.

“Good luck, brother.” I clapped his shoulder.

His grin widened, and it wasn’t until he said it back, “Yeah, thanks, brother,” that I realized the words I’d used.

In a way, Jon had always been family, the same as Ivy. Where she had always been mine, he had been a sibling, a constant presence that didn’t grate as much as X’s. In fact, of his siblings, Jon might be the most normal. He always had a grounded, even-keeled approach to life.

“I’m worried about Ivy.” He cleared his throat and ran a hand over the back of his head. “She’s acting like it doesn’t matter, but she’s a good liar.”

She was an okay liar, even before I could magically sniff her out. I pursed my lips, considering how to answer.

“She’s fucked-up about it.” I sighed. “She and Miri were soul mates. Now, Miri won’t even talk to her.”

Jon’s eyes widened. “Why not?”

“The royal family is trying to do damage control. You see what they write about her in the press.” Miri had taken the publicity hit over there. They’d dug up old photos of her from her wild teenage years, calling her a disgrace to her lineage. This time, her gran had taken it seriously.

“They write a lot of garbage in the press.” Jon scratched the back of his head. He’d also been the subject of The Puck ’s rumor mill in his youth.

“Yeah, but not everyone believes it. The world’s eating this shit up, no matter how hard we try to force feed them Ivy and me.”

I still didn’t understand why the focus had been on Ivy and Miri; it just didn’t make any sense, and the more I spun it, the more pissed off I became. Certainly, the Washingtons had an enemy list a mile long. But who would have access to our house… without using the door? Only one person that I could think of, one person who would know we’d taken photographs at Solstice and where I’d hid them.

No . She’d made me a promise. She’d sworn an oath of loyalty, and even if she’d been raised around the fucking fairies, I had to believe she loved Carter and Ivy enough not to fuck us over. Our relationship had gotten stronger in the weeks since I’d been training with her, and I didn’t think she’d be capable of something so sinister.

But…what if she had done this before we came to terms?

“It’ll blow over.” Jon patted my shoulder, giving it a fraternal squeeze. “It always does.” He took a step back and assessed his jacket one more time. “Remember when my father got caught in the Oval Office with his pants down and an intern on her knees in front of him?”

I snorted and then sighed. “It’s not sex if it’s not in the vagina.” That had been George’s excuse, but everyone knew, even Evelyn. They were too big and too rich to divorce, so they suffered through the agony of marital counseling and public evisceration.

“In six months, it’ll be some other idiot with his dick shoved somewhere it shouldn’t be, and they’ll forget about my sister.”

Yeah, but it would never go away, not really. Anytime Ivy and Miri were in the same room together, people would speculate. Every time I was with Miri, people would gossip. It would be passed around on hushed whispers in dark corners of any event we attended, the sycophants thriving on draining the life out of us.

We should just tell everyone. That way, they couldn’t use it against us.

I sighed, knowing we’d never be able to do that.

Jon nodded. “What about Finn and Siobhan? Any word from them?”

“Sadly, no,” I said, my anxiety causing a storm in my chest. We were running out of time, and without them, I had no plan to defeat the king. Poppy had gone mysteriously silent, too. “Just be prepared for anything on the day, all right? Whatever happens, I’m thankful we’re in it together.”

“Yeah, you got it.” Jon smiled and turned back to the mirror to readjust his tux.