The Sound of Us

Chapter Thirty-Two. “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac

Dante

I hadn’t been at the station for over two weeks when Siobhan finally tracked me down outside one of the lecture halls. I’d cut everything out of my life except class and visits to the hospital. Somehow, over the last few months, I’d lost sight of my goal and the lessons I’d learned over the years—that the people you love will abandon you, and if you let them in, they will hurt you in ways you could never imagine.

I couldn’t get over how Skye and Noah had both betrayed me by keeping secrets. I couldn’t stay angry with a dying man, but Skye had broken me. How could she be angry with me for not having faith in her when she’d done the exact same thing to me?

And yet I missed her. Her scent lingered on my pillow. Her laughter echoed in my ears. My arms ached with emptiness. I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my body and replaced it with lead.

“Where have you been?” Siobhan accosted me in the hallway as Nick and I walked out of class. She’d clearly been waiting for me, and one glance at Nick’s guilty face told me how she’d found me. Nick shot me an apologetic look and made a quick escape. “You’ve left me unread for two weeks.”

“I’m done with the station. I need to focus on my grades.”

“I’m running the station by myself ,” she spat out. “I got the board to agree to make you and me joint interim managers until Noah is back, and you haven’t even bothered to show up.”

“I’ve got a meeting with my father’s lawyer in an hour, Shiv. I can’t do this right now.” Bob had left me a message about some paperwork that needed to be signed to close out my grandmother’s estate and had insisted it couldn’t be handled by the lawyer I’d hired to manage the scholarship.

I brushed past her and made my way toward the exit, but she quickly caught up to me and continued her tirade. “We all have stuff to do. This is my last year, too, and on top of keeping up with my coursework, I’m trying to run an entire radio station so they don’t shut us down.”

I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Siobhan had always wanted to be in charge. She wasn’t a music person like Noah, but she loved the station. I loved it, too, but there was no way I could even walk through the door knowing Noah wasn’t at his desk. “This is your dream come true,” I said. “You’ve always wanted to run things. You’re more than capable—”

“Shut it,” she said, cutting me off. “I get that you’re upset about Noah. We’re all upset about Noah. But you don’t get to hide away and pretend the station can run itself in his absence. Things are falling apart. There are thousands of emails in his inbox. I’m in engineering, not finance. I can fix a sound board but I can’t tell the difference between a financial statement and a balance sheet.”

I pushed open the door, hoping she’d take the hint, but she followed me outside into the cold. “Our ratings are falling,” she continued. “Your show was our biggest draw, and now we’re sinking in the charts. People are complaining about a lack of programming, the sound boards need to be replaced in both studios, and as far as I can tell there isn’t enough money. It’s a shitshow, Dante. I need you. The station needs you.”

“I’ve never been a team player. You know that. If you need help, ask someone else.”

Siobhan zipped up her jacket and pulled on her gloves. It was gray and bitterly cold outside, the ground covered in snow and ice, a cold wind blowing in from the lake making the minus-fifteen-degree temperature feel like minus-twenty-five.

“I thought you’d put your lonely vampire ways behind you after you started hanging out with everyone,” she said. “You were helping with the interns. You took on a new show and even started a new band. I even saw you smile a few times. It scared me.”

“It was all a big mistake. I lost focus, but it won’t happen again.” The icy wind blew through my shirt, making the hair on my arms stand up on end, but I didn’t bother with my jacket. After feeling numb for the last few weeks, I welcomed the pain.

“You’ve got friends at the station who care, Dante. Even me.” Siobhan’s voice softened. “If you want a shoulder to cry on or you want to go for a drink and talk about how Noah is stuck in the eighties and how he needs to realize no one wants to see a fifty-five-year-old man in skintight black jeans, I’ll be there, albeit with a string of garlic around my neck. You don’t have to deal with this alone.”

I couldn’t imagine wanting to open up and spill out my secrets to Siobhan, but I appreciated the offer, and I gave her a nod. “Thanks, Shiv, but I don’t need anyone.”

“But we need you,” she continued, raising her voice over the crunch of our boots on the half-shoveled pavement. “You’ve been at the station longer than anyone else. You understand Noah’s crazy library system and why his programming choices include medieval tavern music and folktronica. WJPK is his life, Dante.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “And now he’s dying. Are you really going to let his dream die, too?”

Of all the people I expected to see at Bob’s office when I walked into the boardroom later that afternoon, my father wasn’t one of them.

“I wasn’t expecting an ambush.” I paused on the threshold, torn between walking away and finally putting the whole estate business to bed.

“Your father was here on another matter and when I mentioned you were coming in, he asked to see you.” Bob made his way to the door. “I’ll get the documents and give you two some privacy.”

I hadn’t seen my father since Sasha’s funeral six years ago. He even hadn’t bothered to pay his respects to my grandmother—his own mother. If Noah hadn’t insisted I go to her funeral, she would have had no family to say goodbye.

Age hadn’t been kind to my father. His thick, dark hair was almost gone, save for a smattering of gray around his temples. He’d gained weight, too, his once athletic build now overtaken by a bloated stomach. We shared no common traits except for the streak of anger that underpinned his violence and that I had channeled into revenge.

“What do you want?” I said into silence.

“We have things to discuss.”

“If you’re after Grandma’s inheritance, I gave it all away.” It felt good to stick it to the old man, to finally have hurt him in a way that I knew would matter.

“You gave some of it away for that stupid scholarship,” he said. “Your lawyer hasn’t had a chance yet to arrange the charitable donations you asked him to make. I asked him to hold back until after we’d had a chance to talk. He was very helpful after I paid him a visit. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” He smiled, like it was a good thing that his success had come from threatening people and making them fear for their lives.

Damn. I should have known transferring the money out of Bob’s firm wouldn’t be enough. My father could get to anyone.

“Of course you did, because that’s all you know. Fear and pain. If it wasn’t for Mom, who taught me about love and sacrifice, trust and loyalty, I might have turned out like you.”

“Jesus Christ,” he spluttered. “You think you had it so bad? My father broke my arm, my nose, even my fucking leg. He beat me with a cane, strangled me unconscious, and held my head underwater until I almost drowned. But he made me a man—a man strong enough to run a multimillion-dollar business in a sea full of sharks.”

“He never hit his wife.” I desperately wanted to let him know I knew what he’d done to my mother, but I wasn’t an idiot. She’d found out about his criminal operation and planned to leave him and go to the police, and he’d killed her for it. I had no doubt he would do the same to me if I wasn’t careful. “He didn’t abandon his children. He didn’t drive his daughter to suicide. He may have been abusive to you, but he was a better man because in his own twisted way, he had honor. You have nothing.”

“You’re a whiny bastard.” He raised his hand for the dispassionate slap he’d often meted out to anyone who displeased him.

Adrenaline surged through my veins—not the fear I’d felt as a child, but the anger of a man who was more than capable of taking him down. I caught his wrist and held his hand aloft. “Don’t even try it.”

He wrenched his hand away, his lips twisting in a snarl. “You talk about honor, but I’ve had my people do some digging. I know you set up that scholarship for your girlfriend. I know the station manager was involved. I can make their lives very difficult—admissions, career, job, freedom, and finances all at risk. I don’t have to tell you about the legal ramifications of what they’ve helped you do. I’m sure you know from your stint last summer in the DA’s office.” He snorted a laugh. “One word from me and your whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Your woman, that long-haired hippie you live with… I’ll make sure they pay the price.”

I was about to tell him that I’d lost Skye, I was about to lose Noah, and I didn’t give a damn about what happened to me when something niggled at the back of my brain. He had threatened Noah and Skye, but he hadn’t threatened me, and if anyone was going down, I was the obvious choice.

Why?

“What do you want?” My father always wanted something, and I had a feeling what he wanted was me.

“I want to know when you’re going to get your damn act together and come and help me run the family business,” he growled. “It’s been handed down from father to son for generations. There is more money in it than you could ever spend in a lifetime. You did something right getting a finance degree, but after you graduate, you need to come the fuck home.”

I almost laughed at the irony. He needed me. Despite four marriages and countless mistresses, he had no other children. I was his only heir. And damned if I wasn’t going to use it against him. “I’m going to law school. I’ve never been interested in real estate, and it sounds like your business isn’t doing so well if you’re trying to get money from me.”

A wary tension thickened the air as his posture shifted, turning defensive, but his shoulders retained their hostile slant. “We’ve expanded from real estate into the waste management business,” he said. “We’ve won bids for commercial and residential recycling and refuse collection and processing contracts across the city. We’ve secured four of six residential zones, as well as the universities and colleges, and now we’re looking at O’Hare Airport. Most of the contracts are only three years, so money must constantly change hands to keep us in the game, and it has to be clean.”

“You need Grandma’s money for bribes.” A statement. Not a question. I was more surprised that he was being honest about it than that he was doing it at all.

“That’s how the world works,” he said. “There are a lot of palms to grease: the city’s chief procurement officer, cops, on-site security, state and local officials, and now the Alpha Institute that is preparing a report on long-term city waste and recycling policy. Our competitors are complaining that we’ve almost got a monopoly on waste hauling in the city. We need a clean source of funding that can’t be traced back to me.”

“So, really, this isn’t about reconciling and bringing me into the family business. You just want my money.” My hand curled into a fist at my side, and I cursed in silent self-reproach. Despite everything he had done, despite my hatred of him and my determination to see him punished for his crimes, some small part of me had nurtured a tiny hope that he still wanted to be my dad.

“I need my fucking son by my side while I take the business to the next level,” he shouted, spittle bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “You belong with me, not in some rundown radio station playing stupid songs. I’m done talking. You will come back and work in the business. You will transfer that money to me. If you don’t, I will fucking destroy you and everything you love.” He spoke with cold indifference, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or another whether he ended the family bloodline in a sheer act of revenge.

I didn’t even take a beat before I pulled open the door.

“Not if I destroy you first.”