“Daisy,” I whisper, but I grab her arms before she hurts herself with the sharp debris.
She drops the remains of the broken camera and slowly sits, shivering in my arms. It wasn’t her boyfriend in her room, I realize now. It had to have been the paparazzi—what looks to be a stupid one, a loser who obviously has no concept of the law. I glance over my shoulder at Connor and Ryke.
Connor has his phone pressed to his ear while he grips the man’s shirt. Every time he struggles, Connor throttles him with one hand. Composed, tall and strong. He speaks quietly to someone on the other line.
I make out Connor’s words, “We need to keep this out of the tabloids…Lily and Lo don’t need to know. They feel guilty enough for the media attention…”
“What happened?” I ask Ryke who nears the bed. Scott continues to just stand by the fucking door, watching. It’s not as though this is being filmed. We’re in a bedroom, which means there aren’t cameras here.
“Daisy called me on her cell,” he says.
She stares at the ground, her face as pale as a sheet.
I shake her arms, not very maternal or soft, and she almost blows over with my force. “Daisy? Talk to me.”
“He barged in my room,” she says under her breath.
I collect her waist-length hair out of her face, trying not to freak out. “And?” I say, clenching my teeth. If he put a finger on her…
Her gorgeous face contorts in a series of violent emotions. “…he started taking pictures of me…I didn’t know what to do, so I called Ryke…” She shakes her head and tears splash onto the floorboards. “…I’m so tired…” I hold her to my chest while she begins to cry.
I look up at Ryke, and he stares at her with that same look I saw during the screening party. Concern. Dark empathy.
“Shh,” I whisper to her, combing my fingers through her hair. I rest my chin on her head and keep her close.
“…I’m so tired,” she says again, her voice trembling. When our mother’s not preoccupied with Lily’s wedding, she pulls Daisy in five different directions. She makes sure she’s booked for photo shoots, and for the past three weeks, Daisy has been working tirelessly. If she’s not at school, then our mom carts her to New York to visit her new modeling agency. I’ve hardly seen her at all this month.
I even had to convince our mother to let me throw Daisy a birthday party. She would’ve had to cancel one of her shoots so she could celebrate. It took four screaming matches over the phone before I won out. But that was just one free day I gained for her.
“What’s going on at school, Dais?” Ryke asks.
I glance over my shoulder to make sure Lily and Lo aren’t here. At least they’re still sleeping.
Daisy chokes on a sporadic breath. “I…I’m fine…really.”
I exchange a worried look with Ryke.
He mouths, It’s not fucking good.
I know, I mouth back.
But what can we do? She has to finish prep school, and I can only guess the kind of ridicule kids are casting on her. She’s famous now. Her sister is a sex addict, and she’s been painted as a sex-addict-to-be. Her photographs are everywhere—sometimes deliberately from modeling, other times not consented from paparazzi. It’s an abrupt change from her old life, and none of us can relate to her current situation. We’re all in our twenties, out of prep school by now. We don’t have to worry about bullying like that.
“We’re going to take care of this,” I tell her. I’m going to surround the fucking townhouse with security. We had iron fences and a guarded gate at our home in Princeton. We should have had better things in place here. “How’d he break through the front door?” I ask Ryke.
He glares. “I didn’t have time to fucking ask.”
My lips tighten. “Did he touch her?”
Ryke stares back down at Daisy. “Did he fucking touch you, Daisy?”
She shakes her head repeatedly. “No…I’m sorry…” She wipes her eyes quickly and tries to bottle her emotions.
“Don’t you ever fucking apologize for another guy’s offense,” he growls. He layers on a few more curse words as he glares at the ceiling.
Wow. Ryke jumped up twenty points in my book. Not for the swearing, to be clear. “When did you become such a feminist?” I ask him.
“Since I learned my alcoholic father cheated on my mother. Then he fucking left her so he could raise his bastard son.” The bitterness and resentment pours from his harsh words.
“I shouldn’t have asked.” His family tree is fucked up. I smooth Daisy’s hair.
Connor pads over to us, pocketing his phone. He no longer has the guy by the shirt. In fact, the man is gone. “Your father’s security came and took him,” he tells me. “He broke through the front door with a bump key.”
“We need—”
“Your father already hired extra security to stand outside. He’s taking care of the incident quietly. No one will know about this unless Scott decides to air it. He has footage of the man coming up the stairs and through the hallway.”
I look for Scott, but he’s gone too.
“Lily and Lo…” Daisy murmurs, rubbing her eyes.
“They won’t ever find out,” Ryke says. “This stays between the four of us.”
And Scott. But no one adds him or my father’s name to the mix.
And we don’t ask why Lily and Lo can’t know. It’s what Connor had told my father on the phone. The guilt would hurt them so much. The crazed media was spawned from Lily’s addiction being publicized. But I bear some of the guilt myself—for putting my sisters through a reality show with awful security, for ditching their bodyguards. But I can withstand that guilt and come out strong.
Lily and Lo can’t. They’re addicts. This is naturally going to tear them apart, and they could turn to their vices to numb the feelings. And none of us want that. We’ll be the walls that shield these terrible events from them. We can endure the pain for however long they need to heal.
It’s what the four of us agreed to the moment Lily was afraid to step out of the house and meet the world. The moment Lo looked sick each time he tried to convince her to go outside and face the coldhearted media.
There was a very dark point where we all believed they’d die together. Where they’d call it quits. There were moments where I wondered how any girl could endure what she was going through. And I think the only reason they both didn’t leave the world was because they refused to leave it together.
Leaving separately—causing the other to suffer that horrific loss—I doubt that was even an option in their minds.
CHAPTER 22
CONNOR COBALT
“What is it?” I ask Rose while I pay for the check at the crowded restaurant. The seven of us—Scott included, who feels more and more like a tagalong as Rose and I grow closer—ate out at Valentino’s for dinner.