After Prison, I Became the Apex of the Stars

CHAPTER 3

 

Arya stood by the car door, watching Eddard walk away with his bag slung over one shoulder like a man leaving a hotel instead of a prison, and something about the way he moved bothered her in a place she couldn't name.

"Eddard, wait."

He stopped but didn't turn around.

"You're being impulsive," she called out, and even as the words left her mouth she could hear how small they sounded against the vastness of what had just happened between them. "Tearing up that check, walking away with nothing, you're going to regret this when the reality sets in and you realize you have no money, no job, no connections."

Eddard turned just enough to look at her over his shoulder, and the calm in his face was so complete it made her stomach tighten because it wasn't the calm of a man who had given up. It was something else entirely.

"Just don't regret it in the future, Arya."

Martha let out a laugh that cut through the afternoon air like glass breaking. "Regret? Regret divorcing you? That's the funniest thing I've heard all year, and I attend comedy shows every weeMarcusd." She leaned against the car with her arms crossed, shaking her head with the kind of theatrical pity that was designed to wound. "Only a brain-dead fool would regret throwing out the trash, Eddard, and that's all you've ever been to this family. Trash. The kind of garbage that sits at the curb so long the Kurtneighbors start complaining about the smell."

"Martha, stop." Arya's voice was tired, genuinely tired, not the rehearsed kind she'd used during the divorce conversation but the real exhaustion of a woman standing between two people she couldn't control. She turned back to Eddard and her expression softened into something that almost resembled the woman he'd married, though it disappeared as quickly as it came. "Take care of yourself, Eddard."

Then she got into the car, and Martha followed, and the black sedan pulled away from the curb and merged into traffic and was gone.

Eddard stood alone in the prison parking lot for exactly three seconds before he pulled out a phone that Kurt Davis had slipped into his bag and dialed a number.

"Come pick me up."

Sixty seconds later, a fleet of seven black luxury cars turned the corner and rolled to a stop in front of him like a private army arriving for its general. Kurt Davis scrambled out of the lead vehicle so fast he nearly caught his foot on the door frame, straightening his tie and smoothing his jacket as he hurried toward Eddard with a bow that bent him nearly in half.

"Sir, everything is ready. Where would you like to go?"

"The old villa," Eddard said, climbing into the back seat of the lead car, where the leather was soft enough to remind him what comfort felt like after three years of sleeping on a concrete slab. "My parents' house."

"Right away, sir, right away."

The fleet pulled away in formation, and Eddard leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes and let the silence fill the spaces where Arya's voice had been.

Across town, Martha burst through the front door of the Lewis family home with the energy of someone delivering the best news of her life.

"It's done," she announced, dropping her purse on the hallway table and walking into the living room where Arya's mother Gwen and her brother Luigi were waiting on the sofa like two dogs who'd heard a treat bag opening. "The divorce went through perfectly, smooth as silk, not a single complication."

Gwen clapped her hands together, and the smile that spread across her face was the kind of smile that makes children cry in grocery stores. "Finally. Finally that useless parasite is out of my daughter's life."

"About time," Luigi added from the couch where he sat with his legs spread wide and a drink already sweating in his hand despite it being barely three in the afternoon. "Three years we had to pretend that criminal was part of this family, three years of watching him sit at our dinner table like a stray dog someone forgot to chase off the porch."

Arya came through the door behind Martha, and the exhaustion on her face was so heavy it seemed to pull her features downward like gravity had decided to work harder on her than on everyone else in the room.

"Arya, darling, you did the right thing," Gwen said, standing to take her daughter's hands. "That man was an anchor around your neck, dragging you down to his level, and now you're free to be with someone who actually deserves you. Fred Gordon has been so good to you, so generous, and his family has the kind of influence that could take your company beyond anything you've imagined."

"I know, Mother."

"And the best part," Martha added, settling into the armchair with the self-satisfaction of a cat who'd knocked something expensive off a shelf, "is that I made sure he understood exactly how worthless he is before he signed. You should have seen his face when I told him about Fred, it was like watching a cockroach realize someone's about to step on it."

"Tell me about the terms," Gwen said, turning to Martha with sharp eyes. "What did he walk away with?"

"Well." Martha crossed her legs and tilted her head. "Arya offered him ten million dollars and the old villa, which honestly was far more than that insect deserved, but you know Arya, always trying to be fair to people who don't warrant an ounce of fairness."

The reaction was immediate and violent in the way that only family greed can be.

"Ten million dollars?" Gwen's voice went up two full octaves, and the warmth she'd been directing at Arya evaporated so fast it left frost behind. "You gave that worthless criminal ten million dollars of our money?"

"And the villa?" Luigi sat forward so quickly his drink sloshed onto the carpet, but he didn't notice because his face had turned a shade of red that suggested his blood pressure was doing things his doctor would not approve of. "You gave him the villa? That villa? I've been asking you for that property for two years, Arya, two years I've been telling you I need a proper place to entertain, a place where I can host parties and bring people who matter, and you kept telling me it wasn't available, and now I find out you just handed it to that piece of garbage like it was nothing?"

"Luigi, calm down and listen to me," Arya said, pressing her fingers against her temple where a headache had started building the moment she walked through the door. "Eddard didn't take the money. He tore up the check right in front of us."

"He what?" Gwen looked at Martha for confirmation, and Martha nodded reluctantly.

"He ripped it into pieces like some kind of dramatic gesture, which honestly just proves how stupid he is because who in their right mind tears up ten million dollars?"

"And the villa was never mine to give," Arya continued, her voice flat with the kind of patience that comes from having this exact conversation too many times. "That house belonged to Eddard's parents. It was left to him in their will. It was always his property, it was never ours, and I had no legal right to offer it in the first place."

Luigi slammed his glass down on the coffee table hard enough to crack the coaster beneath it. "I don't care whose name is on the deed, Arya. That villa is in our city, in our territory, and that worm has no business living in a house that nice when he can barely afford to feed himself. Do you know what I could do with that place? The parties I could throw, the women who would come, the connections I could make?"

"I'm tired," Arya said, and her voice had the finality of a door closing. "I've had a very long day and I don't want to talk about Eddard or the villa or the money anymore. I'm going to my room."

She turned and walked up the stairs without waiting for permission, and the sound of her bedroom door closing was the only goodbye she offered.

Luigi watched her go, then turned to his mother with his jaw tight and his nostrils flared. "She had no right to let him keep that villa. None. If I had that house I could finally live like someone worth knowing instead of being stuffed in this place like a rat in a shoebox. I could have friends over, real friends, and women who actually want to be around me instead of running away the moment they see where I live."

Gwen leaned back on the sofa and crossed her arms, and the look on her face shifted from anger into something calculated and cold, the kind of expression that comes right before someone decides to do something cruel and convinces themselves it's reasonable.

"It doesn't matter what Arya says. That cockroach spent three years in a cell and came out with nothing, no money, no connections, no power, and you think he's going to fight back when we show up at his door?" She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that had nothing warm behind it, just teeth. "We'll go there ourselves and drive that trash out, and once he's gone, the villa is yours."

Luigi's face split into a grin that made him look exactly like his mother.

"When do we leave?"

Gwen picked up her phone and checked the time, already calculating the drive across town.

"Tomorrow morning, first thing, before that insect has time to settle in."