The Proviso (66 page)

“I don’t want to see that. Every time I do, I feel
pain, but that sounds stupid when I say it out loud because I
didn’t go through it. You did.”

She said nothing for a while as she looked,
inspected, touched. He tensed everywhere she put her hands, and she
knew he held himself together only by the barest of threads. She
wasn’t doing much better.

“When I look at your body,” she whispered, “I see
strength, protection, safety. I see a man who nearly died to save
his family, who not only survived that but took on and conquered
everyone who was responsible for it. This,” she said as she wrapped
both hands around his upper arm where muscles lay underneath the
scars and her fingers didn’t wrap but halfway around. “I see the
beautiful stonework outside, the flower beds you’ve built for me,
the fountain you put in one of those beds just because I fell in
love with it—the one that took
two
men to put in the truck
when you bought it for me.”

She walked around his body and ran a finger down his
spine, then splayed her hands out along his lower back, and he
dropped his head back as he released a pent-up breath.

“So what else, what else.” She slid her hands around
his body until she felt his cock and cradled it. “There’s this,”
she whispered, massaging him, but he stepped out of her arms and
turned.

“Okay, no. Keep talking.”

“Why?” she asked, bemused. “What happened?”

He took a deep breath. “A man came to see me today.
He’d been burned in a flash fire. He came to me
because
of
my fire, not in spite of it or coincidentally. He had the same
medical team I’d had and they insisted he contact me. I looked at
him and I— I didn’t
want
to look at him,” he said low. “And
I’m ashamed of my reaction to him; how could I, of all people, want
to look away?”

Giselle thought about that while she studied him and
felt his urgent distress. “Okay. You know when I said that I don’t
want to see your scars because I feel pain?”

“Yes.”

“I really do. That’s why I want to not see. It hurts
to see someone else in pain, especially someone you love. But for
you, it’s worse. You already know what that’s like and you reacted
to him more strongly than you would have if you had not gone
through that yourself. I’ll bet what you actually felt was physical
pain and you wanted to look away so your body would stop hurting.
It’s not revulsion; it’s
empathy
. What do I see when I look
at you? I see a warrior god.”

He grasped her upper arms and looked at her for a
long time, searching her face for—what? She didn’t know. Then he
gathered her to him, wrapped his arms around her as if he would
never let go, and rasped, “Thank you, Wife.”

She snuggled into his embrace, so glad he had
trusted her with that, and said, “You talk about your dad, about
how his kindness and gentleness was the first thing people felt,
how you think you don’t do that. You don’t. You make people feel
safe. Cared for. Protected.

“The day I sought you out at the courthouse, I heard
the pain in your voice when you gave your closing; it was your
client’s pain. It was genuine. I remember how you held her while
she cried into your chest. You weren’t her lawyer; you were her
rock, her strength. She felt safe and comfortable. Protected. Was
she ever afraid of you?”

He swallowed. “No,” he admitted after a moment. “She
looked straight at me when I first met with her and she never
flinched.”

“Don’t think that just because your kindness doesn’t
manifest the way your dad’s did that you aren’t just as kind.
Bryce,” she murmured, “could your father have pulled three children
out of a burning house while being on fire?”

His eyes widened and he stared at her. “No,” he
whispered. “He would have figured the odds and accepted it as the
Lord’s will and died, let them die.”

“And you chose to fight the odds because of who
you
are. I wish you could see how people react to you.
Nobody else sees or feels your anger; they only feel peace and
warmth. Either you hide your anger for others’ benefit or you
aren’t angry at all when you’re with other people.”

“What does that say about how I am with you and the
pack, the tribe?”

“We’re your kindred spirits, Bryce.
We
are
savages. We know you for who you are and we love you
for
it,
not in spite of it and you embrace us and our savagery.” She
paused, then said slowly, “You came home to us.”

He swallowed and his face tightened with emotion,
tears he didn’t want to shed, wouldn’t shed.

“I think it’s time to start drawing up plans for
that foundation of yours.”

“Ours,” he rumbled. Giselle smiled at the immediacy
of his response, for it must have weighed heavy on his mind for
some time.

“Ours.”

* * * * *

58:
RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES

Knox dropped a thick file on the documents that
littered the conference room table, right in front of Sebastian’s
face. Then he dropped a banker’s box full of more files a little
farther down the table.

“I don’t know what kind of a link between OKH and
HRP you’re looking for, but in all of this, there is no link that
can be found. It’s, ah,
interesting
, but nothing to do with
OKH.”

Vaguely disappointed, Sebastian drew a deep breath
and opened the file. “I know there’s something going on there,” he
muttered. “I can feel it in my gut.” Then he looked up at Knox. “Do
you know that CEOland thinks you and I are at war over OKH?”

“Well. We are. Kinda.”

“Yeah, pushing it off on the other doesn’t count.
Eilis told me that’s the impression everyone’s got. She was
surprised when I told her it was us versus Fen.”

Knox pulled out a chair and sat. “I find that odd.
Why would she think that when I gave her to you?”

“She had to rearrange her assumptions PDQ, but then
she didn’t know where to put them. The minute I told her that you
and I are allied against Fen, it was like the sun came up. She
couldn’t wait to agree to the IPO.”

Knox didn’t respond and Sebastian began to read the
information in front of him. Pages and pages of social services
reports documenting a life of foster care. “Interesting indeed,”
Sebastian murmured before he got into the meat of it.

*

The child continues to display an unwillingness to
cooperate with current family; suspect abuse. Spot check 4/13.

Child taken to ER for spiral fracture of ulna.
Placed with different family.

*

Sebastian sat, his mind numbed with the very first
two paragraphs he’d read. He wiped his mouth, wondering if he
wanted to continue reading.

*

Child bonding with foster mother and father but
application for adoption denied at child’s request.

Application for emancipation of a minor
approved.

*

“She was an emancipated minor at fifteen,” Sebastian
murmured.

“Yes. Did you notice what’s redacted?”

No, he hadn’t noticed and he flipped through the
pages. “She had her last name changed when she was
emancipated.”

“Yes, and I can’t find out what it was.”

Sebastian pursed his lips and went back to
reading.

*

Child placed with Klewezewski family 6/30. Child
requests transfer to Reyes family. Transfer 7/4.

Child taken to ER, spontaneous abortion.

*

Sebastian checked the date, her recorded birth date,
and sucked in a breath. He felt a pain behind his sternum that he
didn’t recognize. “Eleven years old,” he whispered. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t do this,” Sebastian said and began to close
the file, but Knox’s fist slammed down onto the pile of paper and
he rose up over the table.

“You will,” he snarled, and Sebastian pulled away
from him. “Don’t make her tell you this. You
will
read it
and I’ll stay here until you do. Reading it can in no way compare
to the fact that Eilis Whoever-Logan has suffered through it. Read
it, feel whatever pain you’re capable of feeling, then maybe you
can begin to understand what the rest of the population feels.”

“What the
fuck
does that mean?!”

“You avoid pain like the plague, that’s what the
fuck
that means. You take shots at me for going off the
rails, always doing things the hard way. You take shots at Giselle
for shit-canning a temple marriage after waiting so long. You take
shots at Bryce for shit-canning his entire life to fuck a woman he
knew less than a day, poking at us because we’re hypocrites and
you’re not. Shit, no, you’re not a hypocrite. You decided you
didn’t believe anything so you could go do whatever the fuck you
wanted to do without being accountable to anybody.”

Sebastian just stared at Knox, wondering where the
Chouteau County prosecutor had suddenly come from. “Where is this
coming from?” Sebastian asked. “What have I done?”

“How long has it been since you talked to
Eilis?”

“March, but I’ve emailed—”

“No. The beginning of February, when you got pissed
at her and ditched her in New York in an auction house where you’d
just made her sell off all her most prized possessions.”

Sebastian swallowed.

“And then you cooked up that bullshit Ford stunt and
humiliated
her.
Ford
saw her in March. Giselle told
you what to do, told you to go back to being who you were before
you took
your
issues with Ford out on Eilis. And did you do
what she told you to do? No. Eilis hasn’t seen you
once
in
five months and she’s sitting up there at HRP soldiering on alone
with a weekly email that’s copied to me. What she really needs is
the same coddling you give everybody you fix. But no. You
must
love her, because you’re treating her like shit.”

Sebastian stared at him in pained wonder. “You think
I’m a complete bastard.”

“Yes, I do.” He waved a hand toward the documents
he’d brought. “I did what you asked, got these records. So I finish
reading all this bullshit this morning and go see her, take her to
lunch, maybe talk to her about it if she wants, ask her her birth
name, see how she’s doing, if there’s anything I can do for her,
and I find what? The trustee I assigned has all but abandoned her
and mind you,
she
didn’t tell me this. Her new CFO—”

“Conrad Fessy,” Sebastian whispered.

“Yeah, him. He asks me when you’re coming back
because you haven’t been there since Eilis got back from her
vacation. And she was as calm, cool, and collected as she always
is. Shit, she could give
Epictetus
lessons.”

Sebastian blanched.

“And you know what? Before today, I never really
noticed that you haven’t had a whole lot of pain or failure in your
life.”

He opened his mouth.

“If you say your mission, I’ll put your head through
the fucking table.”

He snapped it shut again and watched Knox, his
cousin, his brother, in a rage Sebastian had never seen directed
toward family.

“Giselle’s already gone through this with you, but
apparently you didn’t get it, so here I am after I had to threaten
her with a subpoena to get a full accounting of what went down with
Ford
. You’re a fucking
coward
, Sebastian. You’ve
always been a coward, starting when you bailed on your mission
because it was
hard
and you had
no
control and you
had to follow someone else’s rules and you were
afraid
of
failure.”

“But Mitch—”

“Yeah. Mitch Hollander. Couldn’t hack the mission
because it was full of stupid pricks who shouldn’t have been there.
Not his fault. Came home early. Got mocked, laughed at, called
weak. Accused of fucking around. Couldn’t get a date for shit
because he wasn’t a ‘returned missionary.’ Lucky to find a girl to
marry him at all. I went to BYU so I could find a wife. Ask me how
many nice LDS girls ever went out with me—a guy who didn’t go on a
mission at all. That would be a big fat
zero
and I came home
single when I thought I’d be coming home married with kid.

“So Mitch did what? Went back to Pennsylvania and
built the country’s biggest fucking steel mill and put the
entire fucking industry
back on its feet
single-handedly
.
Then
he absorbed Jep Industries to
save the industry all over again.
While
his wife was dying,
while
his kids were little,
while
he’s a bishop.
Pain, Sebastian. Pain and adversity and failure build people. You
have
never
known that and you have no patience with or
empathy for people who have—
especially
the people you
love.”

Sebastian didn’t know if he would be able to catch
his next breath. Knox stared at him with a mixture of rage, deep
hurt, and contempt.

“You didn’t paint Giselle to help her when she
thought she had no hope with Bryce. You painted her to make your
name rise another notch—‘going into his symbolic period,’ my
ass—and she doesn’t know that. She thinks you were being sensitive
and altruistic to
her
pain. Not only that, but you don’t
even know
why
she consented to be painted nude in the first
place.

“There is no honor in remaining detached from life,
from its hardships and its pain. The only reason you’ve been able
to do it is because you’ve always had money, always had power,
always had leverage. I want you to understand pain and failure—even
if it’s vicarious. Eilis has spilled her soul to Giselle and don’t
you dare make her do it again. If you love this woman, and you
might, insofar as you are capable of feeling that kind of love,
read it. If you don’t love her, then okay, just say so and I’ll
release you from her receivership and appoint Blackwood because she
trusts him.”