Broken Prince: A New Adult Romance Novel Page 15

  There was nothing here. No sound save for the slow drip of condensation from the ceiling. No light. He might have been dead.

  He lay back and let his body float in the hot water, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. Was this how death was? The heat soothed his pains, and he thought that perhaps death would do the same thing, only more permanently. Standing up, he moved toward the deeper part of the baths, one foot in front of another.

  A sharp pain shot up through his leg, and he recoiled from it. Something had bitten his foot, the bottom of it. No, there was nothing in the baths, he was being silly. Perhaps he had a splinter of glass in his foot that he hadn't noticed until just now. He touched his foot but felt no cut or glass, only a small welt of pain on his heel. He frowned and slid his other foot forward, sweeping it from side to side. If there was something on the bottom of the baths—

  There.

  He felt the sharpness with his toes. Taking a breath, he submerged himself into the dark water and felt around for it with his fingers. If it was glass, he couldn't very well leave it here for someone else to be hurt. His fingers scrabbled on the tile underwater, searching. Finally they caught onto the tiny sharp object, and he pulled it up, a chain coming with it.

  It was a necklace. His fingerpads moved along the sharp part, and although he was in complete darkness, he closed his eyes as though it would help him visualize the piece of jewelry. Then, all at once, the shape came together under his hands and he remembered. The silver heart, the two diamonds set into the center...

  It was Brynn's necklace, the one he had given her to celebrate her nameday. Her Hungarian nameday, that is—Brynn was not a common name in Hungarian, but she'd wanted to join in the fun after one of her friends at the Academy celebrated theirs. She'd lost the necklace somehow, and didn't remember how. Eliot had been a mite irritated at her losing it so quickly, but he never said anything. But she must have lost it after the attack.

  "Brynn." Eliot murmured her name, and the whisper floated through the dark air. All at once he felt an overwhelming wave of love and protectiveness, mixed with an undercurrent of anger. Brynn had been the only thing that gave Eliot's life meaning and brightness, and he had let her slip away without even trying. Clasping the necklace in his hand, he moved back through the water and to the steps, leaving his wet clothes behind. He went up the stairs two at a time and flinched only at the brightness of the light.

  Naked and dripping, the chain of the necklace dangling from his fingers, he strode across the tile floor to the kitchen. The hot baths had warmed him enough that he didn't even mind the chilly tile under his feet. Still clutching Brynn's necklace with one hand, his other hand scrambled for his phone on the counter. He turned it on and called Brynn. To his surprise, she answered after the first ring.

  "Eliot?" Her voice was scratchy.

  "Brynn? Where are you? Are you in California?"

  "Yes." There was a pause on the phone, and then Brynn broke into sobs.

  "Brynn? Brynn, are you okay?" Eliot felt helpless. He wanted to put his arms around her, to cradle her against him.

  "She's dead," Brynn said finally, through her tears. "My Nagyi. She had a stroke overnight. She...she..."

  "Brynn, I'm so sorry," Eliot said.

  "The funeral is this Sunday," Brynn said. "They said she went in her sleep. They said...they said it was painless."

  Eliot waited for Brynn to swallow her sobs. Before he could say anything, though, she spoke again.

  "Is there anything on the news about the murderer?" Brynn asked.

  "The murderer?"

  "I can't find any coverage that isn't in Hungarian, and I don't know what's going on. They found the killer? I saw a video of a man—"

  "They found him," Eliot said. "It's him. He's being held in jail now."

  Brynn exhaled, the relief palpable over the phone.

  "I can make it to the funeral," Eliot said, probing tentatively. Brynn said nothing, and he continued, his heart falling into disappointment. "If you want me there."

  "Please no," Brynn said. "No, don't. You have so much work to do at the Academy."

  "But I—"

  "Don't. Eliot, it's already...it's already too hard for me."

  "I understand," Eliot said, even though he didn't.

  "I have to go," Brynn said. "I have an appointment with the funeral director. My dad hasn't even called back, so I'm the one in charge."

  "Brynn—"

  "I have to go," Brynn said again, her voice firmer. "I'm sorry."

  "I love you," Eliot said. There was a pause during which Eliot's heart threatened to break. Perhaps it had all been a mistake, this relationship with a girl so much younger than him. Perhaps she wanted to be with someone her own age. Perhaps... perhaps...

  "I love you too," Brynn said. "Goodbye."

  She hung up before he could say another word. Eliot dialed another number, and soon he was in a cab on the way to the airport, to America. She loved him, or said she did. And if there was a fraction of a chance that following her would save the beautiful connection they shared, it would be worth any effort it took. He only hoped that she felt the same way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Brynn

  It was hot and sunny the day my Nagyi was buried. One of her friends from a knitting circle drove me from her house to the cemetery. On the way to the funeral we passed by a park where families were all having play dates and barbecues. Kids ran across the lawn and dogs ran with them, the laughter and barking rising over the music being blasted from a single boombox on a picnic table. I rolled up the car window and closed my eyes.

  "She was a wonderful woman, your grandmother," her friend said. I could only nod, my eyes burning. I was all alone in the world now, and in the past day I had spent my waking hours trying not to break down into tears. My father had replied to me with a message saying that he was traveling with his wife on a movie shoot and would not be able to come to the funeral. I hadn't expected him to come, but knowing that the one family member I had left would be absent made me worried. I thought that perhaps it would just be me and the funeral director at the funeral. But the day she died, two of her knitting friends had come over with food for me. At least there would be another person there, I thought.

  As we walked toward the place where my grandmother was to be buried, I gasped.

  There were hundreds of people milling around the grave. The men were dressed in suits, the women in black dresses with black shawls, despite the heat. So many people. Throngs of people, families with their children. Older couples and small clusters of women who spoke solemnly to each other.

  "A wonderful woman," the friend repeated to me. I walked forward. Although I did not know anyone there, everybody seemed to know me. Women came forward to press my hand or kiss me on both cheeks, a gesture that reminded me of Hungary.

  "You are Katalin's granddaughter? She took me in when I left my husband," one middle-aged woman said. "If you need anything, anything at all—"

  "Katalin was such a large part of the church," another man said. "We will miss her dearly."

  I nodded dumbly, moving through the crowd and accepting consolations and offers of help. Katalin. That had been my mother's name. My grandmother I had always known as Nagyi, but here she was Katalin too. I wondered if her name had given her grief after my mother had died, if it had been a reminder of her sorrow.

  Some of the people there came up to me and took my hands in theirs, speaking in Hungarian. I answered as best as I could in my halting Hungarian words, and was greeted with happy surprise that I knew their language, even if only in part.

  A noise behind me made me turn. Six men were carrying the coffin to the gravesite across the cemetery lawn. Following them was a group of women, their voices raised in song. I could not understand the words, but the music flowed over me and I closed my eyes, tears running freely down my face. The song was dark, the melody as dissonant as the Gymnopedie that Eliot and I had played together. Hearing the women sing all together, t
hough, I felt a strength pass through me and buoy my heart upwards. It was a song of grief, but also a song of hope.

  The procession paced slowly towards the grave and placed the coffin down at its side.

  I looked at the coffin where it lay. It seemed too big for my grandmother's body, my grandmother whom I could pick up in a hug if I wanted to. It wasn't a fancy coffin—my Nagyi had never liked ornamentation for its own sake—but the wood was stained her favorite cherry color and it had been polished until it shone brightly in the daylight.

  It was too beautiful a day for a funeral. California mocked my grief with the blinding daylight, and my tears dried quickly on my cheeks.

  The pastor from Nagyi's church rose to speak. He'd warned me that his sermon would be in Hungarian, but that he'd find a translator. The woman standing beside him spoke after each of his sentences. At first the translation was halting, but as they went on the sentences began to flow from one to the next and the two languages cleaved together.

  "We gather here to honor the life of Katalin Tomlin. She was a good woman, and more than that, a good person who helped anyone who needed help, who lent a hand to anyone in trouble, who gave until she could not give anymore. Each of us here today has a piece of her in their hearts, and we will not ever let her go."

  A stream of people came forward as the pastor spoke, laying flowers on top of my Nagyi's coffin. Most of them were roses, but some people brought bouquets of other flowers, silken orchids and white lilies with their flat round petals. A little girl came forward and lay a handmade bouquet of daisies at the foot of the coffin, stepping shyly away to her mother after glancing up at me.

  The flowers piled up as the pastor went on speaking, and soon there was no room left on top of the coffin. I watched as people leaned their bouquets against the sides of the coffin. Petals tumbled down into the grave, and some whole flowers. Soon the coffin was nearly unrecognizable as such; it seemed like a pile of flowers and nothing else. I stepped forward and lay my bouquet on top the rest, balancing the white roses precariously on the other bouquets. The pastor went on, and the sun shone down hard. Drops of sweat beaded on my temples.

  "None of us will stay on this earth forever, and Katalin has begun her journey now toward heaven. All of us here grieve at our loss when she steps away from us, as though she has climbed aboard a boat whose final destination is somewhere not of this world but of God's. The white sails rise in the wind, and He is the one who sends the wind. It is his breath who speaks the Word of life and of death, and who takes Katalin away from port now, finally, at the end of her time here on earth."

  "We stand on the shore now, waving goodbye, and the boat drifts on, being blown ever farther from our eyes. The sails disappear below the horizon, and then finally even the last glimpse is lost to us. But we must remember that somewhere, on another shore, there is a crowd of people waving at the boat which has just come into sight."

  A sob rose in my throat as I thought of my mother waiting for Nagyi, embracing her once again. I wanted them both back so badly that my whole body ached. All of the hugs that I would never be able to give them. All of the love that I had for them wasted, left behind to turn sour in my heart.

  "It is important to remember this in our sorrow. For all our loss, Katalin has not left us. She has just gone home. And one day we will see her again, after our own long journeys, and she will be standing on that distant shore, waiting for us, waving hello."

  Tears streamed down my face silently. I would hold in my sobs now, in front of everyone. Perhaps later I would be able to grieve, but I had always been a private person and all of this was too much for me to handle.

  "We say goodbye to Katalin now, knowing that we will see her later if God's grace permits. Nobody can replace her, and nobody here will forget her. Clamate ter. Kyrie Eleison!"

  "Kyrie Eleison!" the crowd repeated, and my lips moved although I could not speak. Lord have mercy.

  The sermon was over, but I stayed behind for a while as the men lowered the coffin into the ground and began to shovel dirt in on top. Then I turned to leave.

  "Shall we go back now?" It was the woman from the knitting circle whose name I could not remember.

  "I'll walk home," I said. "Thank you."

  "It's over two miles."

  "I'll be fine," I lied.

  The pastor came to me as I was leaving the cemetery.

  "She spoke very highly of you," he said. "She called you her little math genius."

  "I'm not a genius," I said.

  "She seemed to think you were."

  "I'm an impostor." I spat the words out quietly, but the pastor heard. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  "We all feel that way," he said. "Especially in hard times. Be true to yourself and things will turn out alright."

  I nodded and smiled wanly. Nothing had turned out alright.

  Peering back at the cemetery, I was struck by how empty it seemed without the crowd of people inside. I had kept looking around during the ceremony, expecting Eliot to show up even though I had told him not to. I supposed that it was only in stories that men ran after you. And even in stories, they didn't run after you a second time. I walked down the road towards my grandmother's house, not wanting to arrive to the empty rooms that awaited me.

  It was another hour or so before I reached her neighborhood, but even still, I did not want to go inside the house where she would never exist again. I looked up at the dingy rafters of the house. This had been her home. She had left Hungary to come here so that she could take care of me, but then she had stayed.

  Walking around the side of the house, I went to the cypress tree in the backyard. In Hungary, I had been able to visit my mother's grave, but it was here, next to the tree my Nagyi and I had planted for her, that I felt her soul. I fell to my knees at the base of the tree and leaned against the trunk. The rough bark scratched my cheek, but I didn't care. I was back home, and there was nothing here left for me. Under this tree, at least, I could grieve properly. I let myself cry, my lips pressed against the tree, hugging the hard wood tightly. My chest heaved with my cries against the cypress.

  "Take care of her, mom," I said, my words inaudible through my sobs. "Take care of each other until I get there."

  I'd lost everyone I'd ever loved, everyone I'd ever cared about. Eliot had fallen out of love with me, too. I cried until there was no more left inside of me, until my body was wracked with empty sobs that scratched my throat dryly.

  I had known it all along - I was no princess. There would be no happiness at the end of my story. The pages had all been torn out and scattered, and I was scattered too, like Humpty Dumpty in the poem, and nobody could put me back together again.

  At first when I heard the music I thought I was dreaming. I blinked and wiped my eyes and stood warily, listening to the faint notes of a piano. My Nagyi's piano. It was coming from the house, the piano music growing louder as I stepped slowly toward the back door. It took me a moment to recognize the song, but when I did the air rushed out of my lungs and I could no longer breathe. Could it be?

  At the door, I hesitated for only a second. And then my Nagyi spoke to me. I am not a superstitious person, and I do not believe in ghosts. But whether or not the spirit of my Nagyi was inside of me, my thoughts of her were so intense that I heard her speak just as clearly as if she had been standing beside me.

  Take a chance on love.

  I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Eliot

  Eliot arrived in California with a headache intensified by the horrific coffee he'd gulped down on the airplane. The child sitting next to him had spent half of the flight picking his nose and the other half trying to grab Eliot's hand, with the end result being that Eliot more often than not had to retrace his line of thought after avoiding an attack from the small boy. It was a harsh reminder that Otto's private jet had been a real loss to him; the plane had been in Prague when Eliot had called for it.

  Whe
n the child had fallen asleep, he'd written furiously, scratching out half of the page as he went, going back and reworking the parts that didn't work, that weren't perfect. It had to be perfect. Had to be. He bit his lip as he wrote, discovering sometimes the perfect solution to a problem, sometimes having to push through his own blocked mind.

  He took another cab from the airport to the address the dean had given to him after he'd explained about the death in the family and the need to deliver the documents to Brynn himself.

  "You understand these rules with all the transferring credits and whatnot," he said. "These weren't filled out correctly and she'll need to have them in order before graduation."

  Graduation—the magic word. The dean immediately agreed that it was in Brynn's interest that he go.

  The cab left Eliot at the end of the dirt street.

  "Not unless you're paying for my new tires," the cabbie said.

  "This is fine," Eliot said, more relieved than irritated to be treated so...well, so normally.

  He walked down the street to the driveway marked with the right number. The place seemed almost deserted. None of the houses on the street were visible; all of the roofs were obscured by dense brush and avocado trees. The homes themselves blended right into the hillside, with wood-shingled sides and softly slanting roofs.

  Eliot's phone didn't work out here, and so he walked down the driveway to the house. As soon as he saw the house, he knew it had belonged to Brynn's grandmother. The home was tucked away into the greenery, the brush cleared out responsibly around the house. The nearest tree was a cypress poking its head out from over the roof.

  "Brynn?"

  He called out in a normal voice at first, then a bit louder. The car in the driveway looked as though it had stopped working five years ago, so rusted was its sides. He walked up to the front door and knocked. To his surprise, the door swung ajar, the unlocked handle making a soft click as it opened.