Maybe you should go back to him.
Ah, but she couldn’t do that. She’d left it too long. And besides, she couldn’t tie herself to yet another needy person. She had nothing left to give, not that she’d ever made a difference to him anyway.
Yet another week passed and she began the process of packing away her New York existence. Putting her stuff into storage and giving up the lease on her apartment. It was all so depressingly easy, as if the life she’d had here was merely a picture drawn in chalk on the sidewalk and a shower of rain had washed it away, leaving the sidewalk clean. As if she had never been.
Nero stopped sending her texts, and he didn’t call. Part of her was relieved that he’d stopped, and part of her wasn’t. Part of her wanted that contact from him, was desperate for it, and because that part of herself reminded her too much of her mother, she ignored it.
But after another couple of days had passed, she realized that going to see Nero was something she was going to have to do. She couldn’t leave the city without at least seeing him and telling him her plans. It didn’t feel right. Besides, she still had a lot of her belongings at his place she needed to collect, plus she hadn’t formally handed in her resignation as his assistant. True, she could do all of that over the phone or via email, but that felt too much like a coward’s way out, and she wasn’t a coward.
Or maybe you just want to see him one last time?
No, of course that wasn’t it. Of course, it wasn’t.
She texted him, a formal little note telling him she needed to see him to hand in her notice and asking when it would be convenient. Uncharacteristically he didn’t reply for at least a few hours, and when he did, his text in return was terse and to the point, giving her a date and a time only.
He was angry with her, probably, and fair enough. Even though there had been extenuating circumstances, she had walked out on him and never came back, and that must have been difficult, especially considering she’d left only after he’d finally revealed the extent of his own damage.
The memory of that afternoon still made her heart hurt, and she didn’t need that right now, not on top of everything else, so she tried not to think about it.
She tried not to think about it when the day she was due to visit him came around either. Instead, she dressed carefully in her usual professional outfit—pale gray pencil skirt and a crisp white blouse—and made sure her hair was carefully pinned. She took more time with her makeup, hiding the tell-tale dark circles of her sleepless nights with lots of concealer, and going for a brighter-than-normal lipstick.
She pushed aside the churning nervousness as the taxi picked her up from her apartment, distracting herself by looking up Nepal on a few travel websites.
As the cab pulled up outside Nero’s house, Phoebe had to take a moment to get her breathing under control before she paid the driver and got out. She also tried not to take any notice of the other feeling that was quivering there under the nervousness. Longing. She hadn’t thought she’d miss him, but she did.
Phoebe shook away the thought, clutching her handbag as she pushed open the iron gate and walked slowly up the front stairs. All she was coming here to do was to let Nero know that she was leaving the city and that she was resigning as his assistant. That was all. She wasn’t going to stay. She couldn’t. She had nothing to give him, and, besides, she needed to go and find out who she was.
Taking a breath, Phoebe knocked on the front door.
It swung open, revealing James’s familiar face. “Come in, Miss Taylor,” the butler said. “Mr. de Santis is waiting for you.”
Her throat constricted, and she couldn’t speak, could only nod and tighten her grip on her handbag even more as she stepped inside.
James closed the door behind her and gestured for her to follow him. As he led her down the hallway toward Nero’s office, she couldn’t help noticing something. All the walls were bare. There had been a huge painting of a mountain on the wall near the front door, and now it was gone. They all were.
Foreboding began to wind through her nervousness, because there was something heavy hanging in the atmosphere of the house. A kind of emptiness that hadn’t been there before. It reminded her of the apartment after she’d cleared it out of all Charles’s stuff, as if no one lived there anymore.
James stopped outside Nero’s office and held the door open for her, his expression blank.
Phoebe took a breath and stepped inside. And everything inside her drew tight.
Nero was standing beside the windows.
Had it been two weeks? Or was it three? She couldn’t remember, but whatever. It felt like months. Like years. Eons even.
His arms were folded over his massive chest and once again she was struck by his height, by the broad width of his shoulders, the sheer power of his physical presence. He was in his normal business clothes—a perfectly tailored suit—and yet . . . something was different about him. There was a stillness to him that hadn’t been there before, his raw energy muted somehow.
The harsh lines of his face were absolutely unreadable, but his eyes . . . They were so dark, the glittering brightness that had once lit the depths, vanished. Black holes with no bottom, no end.
Her heart contracted, and it was difficult to breathe. What had happened to him over the past couple of weeks? What had he done once she’d gone?
“Hello, Phoebe,” he said, his voice harsh and deep in the silence of the room and absolutely devoid of expression. “You wanted to see me?”
* * *
She looked tired. That was the first thing he noticed. She had dark circles under her eyes that she’d obviously tried to hide with makeup, but he could see them all the same. She hadn’t been sleeping, clearly. Her skin was pale, too, the white blouse making her look like a ghost. Her beautiful hair, though, that was the same, all coiled up and neat on the top her head. It made his hands ache to reach out for it, to touch it, pull out all the pins and feel the silky warmth of it on his skin. He ached to hold her, to feel her, period.
But he wasn’t going to do that.
Over the past two weeks since she’d gone, since he’d destroyed his paintings and all the screens in his control room, he’d retreated from the rooms he’d shared with her, returning to the safety of his office and his gym. He’d initially spent most of his time running endlessly on the treadmill or lifting weights, doing anything he could to ease the fury and the pain that ate away at him.
But it hadn’t worked. So he’d paced in his office, going around and around like a tiger in a cage, while his mind did the same thing within the confines of his skull. Unable to accept the reality of his situation, wanting to return to the same old familiar lies that he could go out at any time.
He kept thinking about pursuing that last lead he had—his mother. But something in him kept shying away from the idea. The same protective instinct that had kept him from stepping outside his front door protected him again.
It made him angry. What was it about his mother that he needed protecting from?
That evening when he had destroyed his art and his security monitors, he found a laptop he hadn’t destroyed and sat in the library, calling up the file he had on his mother, but there wasn’t anything about it that set off alarm bells. Except her address, which was a hospital.
He knew that, of course, he knew that. She was in hospital because . . .
“Your mother’s not well,” one of the social workers told him gently, a week or so after he’d been found and was asking for her. “She’s in hospital.”
“Why?” he asked, starting to feel desperate. “Was it my stepfather?”
The social worker’s face had been full of pity. “No. Your mother was very unwell. She had delusions. She kept you in the room because she thought she was keeping you safe from harm.” The woman had reached out to touch him. “There is no stepfather, Nero. There never was. Your mother wasn’t with anyone.”
No. No, that couldn’t be right. There was a reason he’d been kept in that room all that time, and it wasn’t because his mother was delusional. He had to have been in danger, right? Because what parent would do that to their child? What parent would lock their son in a room for ten years, depriving him of everything, simply because they were sick?
He wanted to hurl away the laptop, break that, too. Instead he got up and reached for his phone, calling the hospital no matter that his instinct was telling him to ignore it, demanding that he speak to his mother.
She cried when the staff put her on the line, and when he demanded the truth from her, she gave it to him. No, there hadn’t been a stepfather and she hadn’t been in debt. She hadn’t needed to keep his existence secret from anyone. But didn’t he understand that he was better off inside that room than out in the world? It was dangerous out there, didn’t he know that? She’d only wanted him to be safe, to be protected.
Instinctively he didn’t want to believe her, but he could hear the madness in her voice and that drove the truth home in a way that nothing else could.
He hadn’t been kept hidden from an abusive man.
He’d been kept a prisoner by a very sick woman, for absolutely no reason at all.
No wonder he hadn’t wanted to think about it. No wonder he’d tried to deny it. His childhood had been held hostage in that room, and now ten years of his life as an adult were also being held hostage. To his past.