Vigil (28 page)

He grunted.

“Fuck me,” I said. “Fuck me forever.”

“Until the end of time,” he assured me, pumping his hips and thrusting deep.

* * *

Vigil was sitting propped up against one of the large vents on the roof, and I was curled up in his lap. We were kissing.

Perhaps there had been a bit of hyperbole in saying we were going to have sex until the end of time, but it had been quite a deliciously prolonged encounter, spanning half of the roof, several different positions, and so many mind-shattering orgasms that I had lost count of them.

At the moment, I felt pleasantly exhausted and a little sore.

I lay my head on his chest. “You lost my shirt.”

“Your shirt?”

“Mmm hmm,” I told him. “It fell when we were coming out the window.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I don’t see how I’m going to get home now,” I said.

“You’ll have to go topless,” he said, lazily touching one of my nipples. I wasn’t dressed yet.

I sighed as a sleepy pleasure drifted through me. “For that matter, I don’t even know where the rest of my clothes are. They could have all blown off the roof.”

“Well, that would be a tragedy.” But it sounded as if he thought it would be anything but.

I punched him playfully. “Shut up. I need clothes to get home.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “I will swing you home from roof to roof. We’ll go so fast that no one will see your lack of clothing.”

I arched an eyebrow, not quite believing him.

“Hell, I’d swing you home with my cock buried inside you if I thought it wouldn’t be slightly distracting.”

“Right, you’d get distracted and we’d die,” I said.

“But what a way to go, right?” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes. “Let me go. I need to find my clothes.”

He tightened his grip on me. “I like you right where you are.”

“Seriously,” I said. “You have no idea what this is like. Every time we do it, you’re fully clothed except for your dick. You don’t have to worry about
your
clothes.”

He let go of me. “Go find your clothes.” He sounded defeated.

“Hey,” I said, my brow furrowing. “What’d I say?”

He shook his head. “I know this is a less-than-perfect way to conduct a relationship, Cecily.”

“Well…” I chewed on my lip. “It’s not like people don’t sometimes dress up in masks and costumes to have sex. They wear those leather things. I don’t remember what they’re called.”

He flinched.

“What?” I said. “I just meant that it’s not
that
weird.”

He got up and started over the roof, kneeling to pick up articles of my clothing.

I watched him. “Vigil?”

He came back to me, handing me my pants, shoes, underwear, and bra. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You know, there are a lot of things you don’t want to talk about.” I started to get dressed.

He sighed. “I’m sorry.”

I buttoned my slacks. “You say this is a relationship. But if we’re together like that, you have to be honest with me. I need to know.”

His jaw twitched. He looked down at his feet. “I… I can’t. I can’t talk about it. It’s too hard.”

“Tell me the connection between you and The Phantom then.” I pulled my bra back on. “Tell me something.”

He didn’t speak. He folded his arms over his chest.

“I looked and looked, trying to find something—anything—that would tell me what you two have in common. But as far as I can tell, you’ve never interacted before. So, how could you be the only person that understands him? And how do you guys know each other’s identities? And why would exposing why you wear this costume also expose The Phantom?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “I don’t even know how I could possibly explain it.”

“You know, the only time I could even find a Rutherford and Barclay together was this picture of your mother and his father together somewhere. Some charity thing or something. It’s funny because I didn’t even know that Frank Barclay, crime kingpin, went to charity events, but I guess he was trying to put on a good face for the public. And it’s weird that they would be talking. I mean, it’s not like they traveled in the same circles.”

He swallowed hard and looked at me.

And suddenly, it clicked.

“Oh,” I said. “They were together, because…”

“Cecily, Hayden Barclay is my—”

“Brother,” I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was dark, and I lay in the circle of Callum’s arms, in his bed. He said this was the only place he could talk about it.

His voice was only a ragged whisper, coming to me through the darkness.

“He’s my half-brother,” he said. “We have different fathers. But Veronica Waite gave birth to both of us.”

“Veronica ‘Legs’ Waite,” I whispered in horror. “That’s the reason he cuts off their legs, isn’t it? It’s about your mother.”

“We never knew her,” he said. “You have to understand that. We only knew her through those video recordings of her on Broadway in
The Phantom of the Opera
. We used to watch her play Christine over and over. She was so pretty, in her white dresses that fluttered around her long, long bare legs. And we’d watch as a man in a mask came up from underground to steal her away.”

I felt the knowledge settle over me. “It’s all connected to your mother. It’s why he dresses that way.” I paused and my voice dropped another horrified octave. “It’s why
you
dress…”

Callum’s voice was strangled. “It’s part of it. It’s not… all of it.”

“There’s more to it than this?”

“My mother apparently started to have an affair with Frank Barclay when I was pretty young,” said Callum. “I don’t remember. I don’t know. But at any rate, she got pregnant, and when my father found out, he was furious. He kicked her out, but he wouldn’t let her take me with her. So, I was here with my father, and she was off with Frank.”

“Oh,” I said. “But that’s not public knowledge?”

“It scandalous,” said Callum. “According to Nolan, my father paid a great deal of money to shut up the press about it. He didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Wow,” I said. “Why would she have an affair with Frank Barclay?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “No one knows. She didn’t survive long enough for me to ask her. Nolan always says nice things about my mother. I don’t know if that’s because they’re true, or because he wants me to think that she was a good woman. Anyway, he says that he doesn’t think that she knew he was involved in organized crime. It wasn’t something that he advertised, after all. Maybe that’s the truth, maybe not.” He paused. “There aren’t very many people that I can talk to who actually knew my mother. My father’s dead too, you know.”

I did know. I wrapped my arms around him in the darkness. “They were killed at the same time, I thought. But how is that possible if she wasn’t even living with your father anymore?”

“She called him. That’s what Nolan says. They were in the middle of this big custody battle over me, and she’d just given birth to Hayden, and she called my father in a panic. According to Nolan, she’d just realized that Frank was part of the mob and that he was a murderer. She was trying to leave, but she feared for her life.”

His voice was rough and quiet. “My father called the police and rushed out to meet her. But by the time the police got there, both of my parents were dead.”

Right. I knew this story. I’d read about it. “All the news stories say that the killer was a thief and that he got spooked and killed them. Do you agree with that? Do you think that’s what happened? Or do you think it was Frank?”

“I don’t know,” said Callum. “Nolan doesn’t suspect Frank. It seems like the obvious answer, doesn’t it? But they had a lot of evidence on the other guy. They found him not too far from the scene, still carting along the weapon he used to shoot them.”

“Maybe he was hired by Frank,” I said.

“I’ve wondered it too,” said Callum. “But I don’t think Frank wanted my mother dead. Or—at least—I don’t think that’s the way he would have killed her if he was going to do it.”

I had a hard time wrapping my head around all of it. Why had I never questioned who Hayden Barclay’s mother was? I supposed it had never seemed important to me.

“Nolan thought Frank was okay,” Callum continued. “But he was wrong. Frank was not okay, not in the slightest.”

“What do you mean?”

He took a long, slow breath. “At first, Nolan only let Hayden come visit me here at the mansion. He knew that we were brothers, and he wanted me to have a relationship with a member of my family. Hayden was the only person related to me that was still alive. I think he would have liked to bring Hayden to live with us there, but Frank wasn’t having any of that.

“After a while,” he continued, “Hayden wanted me to come to his house. I begged Nolan to let me go. Hayden told me all about the cool toys he had and about the stuff we could do. It was only natural for me to want that and for or Hayden to want me to come over. We were kids after all.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You and Hayden played together when you were little boys?”

“All the time. We spent time together all the way into our adolescence, but then we drifted apart. He’s my brother, and we may not have grown up under the same roof, but we grew up close.”

I shook my head. It was hard for me to wrap my head around that. “But you’re nothing like him.”

He laughed bitterly in the darkness. “We’re more alike than you think.”

A shiver went through me. I didn’t want to believe that.

“Should I go on?” he said.

I hesitated. But I needed to know this. “Yes.”

“Uh…” His grip tightened on me, as if he was trying to reassure himself that I was really there with him. “Well, eventually, Nolan let me go to play at Hayden’s house. I suppose that he figured that even if I were visiting the house of a criminal kingpin, it was safe enough for his own children, and it would be safe enough for me. At first, it was. Nothing bad happened. Hayden’s stepmother fed us lots of food. She doted on Hayden, like he was her own kid.

“But.” His breath hitched. “One day, Hayden and I were playing this elaborate game of chase, and we were running all through his house. No place was off limits. Anyway, we happened to run into Frank’s study.”

I held my breath, afraid to ask what it was he’d seen there.

“Frank was, um, watching something.” He swallowed. “It was a porno. I didn’t know what they were at the time. I must have been about… five or six. Hayden was younger. Four, maybe. Anyway, uh, it was pretty low budget. I still don’t know if it was something scripted and staged or if it was… real. There was a man in it. He was wearing this outfit.”

I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“He had on a mask. Black. And he was wearing a black suit that covered him from head to toe. All you could see were his eyes. His mouth. And his… dick. It was sticking out.”

Oh god. He was describing the Vigil costume. He’d stolen it from pornography? A… “Callum, did you watch a girl get killed on film?”

He was rigid next to me. “I don’t know if she was dead.”

“Oh god.”

“It might have been fake,” he said in a rush of words. “It was probably fake. I’ve looked into snuff films, and they don’t really exist. There are people who want to watch something like that happen on film. A disturbing number of them. But there are very few people who would actually… do it. And of those people, it seems very unlikely that enough of them could band together and actually make a movie and package it and sell it. It was probably fake.”

Did that make me feel better? Maybe a little bit. But he was still telling me something so horrific that I didn’t know if I could stand it. I hugged him tightly. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Frank saw us.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah,” he said in an uneven voice. “He, uh, thought it was kind of funny the way the both of us were gazing slack jawed at the screen like that. He rewound it, and he made us sit down and watch.”

“He didn’t,” I said.

“He did,” said Callum. “And that wasn’t the first time. He had a lot of movies like that, with the same guy. Different girls. I kept always wishing it would be the same girl, because if it was the same girl, I’d know for sure it was fake. I’d know for sure that that guy wasn’t carving up all those naked girls for real.”

I felt sick. Waves of revulsion went through me.

“Frank made us watch them. Not every time I went over there. But sometimes. Lots of times. I don’t know how many times.”

“Shit,” I said. “That’s so…” There weren’t words for what it was. “Fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

I burrowed my face against his shoulder.

He rubbed my back.

It seemed incongruous to me that he was the one comforting me.

“I didn’t really know what was going on in those movies, Cecily,” he said. “I was really young, and I only had Nolan. There weren’t even any women that lived in our house. Sometimes Nolan hired extra help, but that wasn’t often. It was the first time I’d ever seen a woman naked. It was the first time I’d ever really contemplated sex. And… the thing is… it excited me. I was a little kid, but you know, even when you’re that young, you can still feel
something
about that kind of stuff, and I don’t know. It seemed to me that whatever sex was, it was this thing that hurt women. Hurt them a lot. And even if I… even if I wanted to want it, I, you know, shouldn’t.

“And I grew up, and I got older, and eventually, Frank stopped dragging us in there to watch those fucking movies. And I started to figure stuff out. And I knew that what I’d been watching was deviant and out there, and that sex didn’t have to be like that. But… I don’t know.”

He took a tattered breath. “I started dating Blake when we were both teenagers, and she didn’t want to go too fast, which was fine with me, because the thought of sex made me feel uncomfortable and weird. Anyway, I just… I could never get past the idea that if I was doing it, it had be, like not good for a girl. Even if she wasn’t hurt exactly. It just seemed… So, even when I was, like, alone, I always just tried to get it over with as quickly as possible. And by the time I figured out that wasn’t really the way you were supposed to do it, it was just too late. I couldn’t…”