Page 2 of Beauty and the Billionaire

“How can I know they won’t just take it?”

Blackthorne chuckled.Is that a chuckle?I wondered. “If that was your only concern, Amar, we could have solved it a year ago. As it stands, I am afraid it’s too late to change our agreement.”

“I have children,” Father said in a last, desperate effort. “You wouldn’t…”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Blackthorne said coolly. “You had children when we made the agreement. How does that affect the terms, Amar?”

Father’s silence was not a show of weakness. I had heard this silence once before. When I was very little, and my careless play knocked over an entire shelf of items, damaging much of the inventory, Father had appeared, and the silence that followed was like a distant storm on its way toward me.

“Do you have no heart?” he hissed.

“As a matter of fact, I do, but not the kind you imagine,” Blackthorne said. He let his own angry silence take over, then spoke again. “I will be in the city until Saturday. You better have the money, Amar, or we will have serious problems.”

In the next instant, I started to turn away from the office, but Blackthorne was out before I could get away. He stood in the hallway in front of me, pressed his lips into a tight line, stared at me for a long moment, then walked past me. “Goodbye, Zain.” He was out in the shop in two long paces and on the other side of it in four. The black car with tinted windows waited in front of our door when I followed Blackthorne to the front of the store, and then it drove off.

I didn’t see Father that day. Much later, when I grew too worried, I snuck to the back to see if he was in the office, but the office was empty. Mother was upstairs, and all three of my siblings were poring over their schoolwork. Yara was showing Karim how to multiply and divide, and Rami, in the middle of the three of them, read.

“Have you seen Father?” I asked no one in particular.

“Not since this morning,” Mother replied, lifting her gaze from the accounting papers that were laid out on the table. “Why? Has he not been in?”

“No,” I said reluctantly.

“Zain, have you worked all day?” Mother asked, a tinge of anger making the corners of her lips stiff.

It wasn’t the first time I had worked all day on my own. “Nobody came anyway,” I said. I had spent the day with Whitman and Wilde.

The concern wrinkled the lines around my mother’s eyes. She put a hand on my shoulder after getting up from the table. The worry rippled around the room, making Yara go still and Rami look up. Little Karim was too worried about multiplying seven and eight to be concerned about adult matters.

“I’ll be back a little later,” I said.

Mother nodded, but she ran through the list of evening questions even though she knew the answers. Had I locked up? Had I sorted the receipts? Was everything appropriately stored?Yes, yes, and yes. And when that was all done, I took my black coat from the hanger by the door, pulled my orange beanie down my curly locks of hair, and went out.

I wouldn’t find Father so easily. He had many friends in the neighborhood, and going from one to another was impossible. Besides, there was little I could get out of my father. He had been burdened by worries for months, and now, those worries took shape. It was a concerning shape of a wolf wearing a man’s body.

It wasn’t my father I searched for. It was Vivien Woodcock I needed.

Neon Nights was a spacious bar on the ground floor of a two-story, redbrick building. The line of windows facing the street on the lower story was lit with gentle lamps from the inside, and rainbow flags were displayed wherever they could fit. On Wednesday evenings such as this, the bar was a fairly quiet place, but weekends drew big crowds. The contrast was so stark that the place was unrecognizable.

I stopped by nearly every morning to deliver the produce for Vivien Woodcock’s kitchen. That was before the place opened in the morning, so I only ever saw Tristan, the chef, and whoever tended the bar in that shift. At times, Vivien would be there, too. Something about these people, the ones running the bar and spending their days in there, always tugged me to stay a little longer. I wouldn’t let myself. Sometimes, while I was unloading the deliveries, Bradley made me a sugary drink I couldn’t refuse. But it was the evenings I yearned for. It was the dancing, the mass of bodies pressing together, the slow descent into indecency that was so thematic for the weekend nights around here.

Even as I stepped into the bar, heads turned in my direction, all welcoming smiles. “Zain,” Bradley greeted from behind the bar, one hand on the beer tap, the other holding a glass. Thegolden bubbles rose from the bottom of the glass, foaming on the top. “What brings you here?”

“Changed your mind about joining the rascals?” Roman asked from the barstool.

“Er, I was hoping to see Vivien,” I said. I would have joined the banter if my need wasn’t as critical as it was. “Is she around?”

Roman waved his hand dramatically and pointed to the door in the back of the bar just as it opened to allow the matron of the bar to pass through. “Just like Beetlejuice.”

The guys laughed, and Vivien walked toward us, carrying something that looked like a photo album in her hands. It explained how Roman could predict her entrance. When she spotted me from behind the incredibly long eyelashes, her face lit up. “Well, well, well,” she said, putting the album between Bradley and Roman on the bar. To them, she said, “Now, you tell me if I never spent a summer in Sicily with David Bowie.”

The guys laughed harder, disbelief plain on their faces.

Vivien turned back to me. “Welcome, Zain. What are you drinking?”

“Um, nothing,” I said. “I can’t stay long.”

“He’s looking for you, Mama Viv,” Roman explained while flipping through the album. “Is this Elton John?”

---