Page 30 of Necessary Cruelty

Eleven

I spendthe entire drive into the valley trying to convince myself to turn around.

My Maserati convertible takes the hairpin turns of the cliff-side road at reckless speed. Driving too fast on a road that has killed its fair share of people is an objectively bad idea, but I sometimes visualize what it might be like to blow through one of the barriers and go soaring into empty air.

I have no interest in dying, but I’ve always wondering what it might be like to fly.

You occasionally have to risk your life to remind yourself that it’s still worth living. Some days, driving too fast works well enough.

Other days, it doesn’t.

Today is the sort of day when my thoughts turn violently dramatic. Insane thoughts that don’t have any business in the brain of a Cortland.

We have no use for weakness.

Those are the words my father would use if I ever shared anything with him aside from pleasantries and business discussions. I’ve spent enough years of my life being weak. There isn’t any more room for it, not when I have a kingdom to rule.

A wheelchair is still gathering dust somewhere in Cortland Manor, locked away in my old room which is off limits even to the servants. I keep it as a relic of a time that would otherwise be forgotten, because I won’t ever forget.

I’ve been born twice.

Once as an infant, innocent of sin and naive to the ways of the world.

Then I died. When they brought me back, I was reborn as something else.

Whatever it is that I’ve become.

But I’m not going to make any apologies, no one else ever has.

Driving into the Gulch is a visceral shock, especially when coming from the Bluffs. It’s like jumping into frigidly cold water on a summer day — adjusting to it is similar to physical pain. But being in the Gulch is something one never really gets accustomed to.

Poverty like this shouldn’t exist outside of charity infomercials, especially in a town with precious metals still buried in the dirt.

Entering the Gulch is like stepping into an old photograph from the Great Depression: everything is grainy and more than a little sad. I don’t understand how people can stand to live here. Why don’t they head to a bigger town or even to place like Los Angeles where at least there are opportunities for something better?

But I say that, even as I know the situation is never that simple. Most of the people who live here have been around since the beginning, and the newer transplants have their own reasons for staying. The mines and field work were the biggest draws, but the population stayed the same even when that work dried up.

Some of the older folks, like Zaya’s grandfather, act like accepting the inevitable is the same as admitting defeat. They still remember the good old days and swear up and down they’ll swing round again.

I say you should know when to cut your losses before things get worse.

But It’s hard to tear a tree out by the roots, even if the ground around it is barren and dead.

That said, if Old Man Milbourne had left when he had the chance, then he probably would have tried to take his granddaughter with him.

I’m not going to let that happen.

That girl has a penance to pay, and this is the only place it can happen. This only ends where it began, and she knows it. The past is a debt to the future, and her bill is about to come due.

Even if she becomes Mrs. Vincent Cortland.

Even if it destroys us both.

I know where to find Zaya, just like I know everything else about her. Years of useless study and obsessive interest. I’ve known since the day we met that she would either destroy my life or save it. She already did the first one, I’m interested to see if she manages the second.

There is no way she’ll agree to marry me willingly, and I still haven’t decided if I’ll try to force her. For someone who everyone thinks folds like a house of cards, Zaya Milbourne has a core of steel hiding underneath that silent exterior.

She was abandoned by a mother who had her way too young. It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that getting pregnant before the end of high school would be absolutely out of the question for her.

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