Deep Deception (14 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Once the plane was aloft, Adin took his pain medication with a bottle of water and settled in as comfortably as he could. Bran sat on his right against the window and allowed him to pillow his soft cast on the armrest between their seats. Across the aisle, Boaz flipped the pages of a magazine.

Adin tried to get a sense of Donte but came up with nothing except the guilt he felt for leaving Donte behind. The soothing motion of the plane and the medication wiped out even that, until he was drifting, floating off into sleep, into the past that had plagued him in dreams lately.

“This is a very, very serious accusation, Adin.” In Adin’s experience among department chairs they fell into one of two categories, the Machiavellian and the hopelessly obsessed. As department chairs went, Historian Evangeline Chandler fell neatly between the two. She was slim, dark and attractive in a genderless way. No one doubted her sincerity, but everyone trod carefully around her desire for acclaim. Even knowing this, Adin had pulled her out of a cocktail party designed to give her just that.

Adin’s ears were still ringing with the scorn Charles and Shep heaped on him.

“I’m well aware of that,” Adin replied. “I’m trying to prevent a huge embarrassment.”

“I see.” Chandler looked at him thoughtfully. “It will be very difficult, if not downright impossible to prove that anyone is perpetrating a fraud.”

“I know that.” Adin’s heart thudded painfully against his ribs.

“At the very worst, Shep and Charles will claim ignorance. They’ll act the outraged consumer, and blame it on the seller.”

“Yes, they will,” Adin told her. “And of course, that could certainly be true. If, right now, they reveal it to be a fraudulent document even as they’re accepting a cocktail party in their honor for finding it. So many experts said it was the genuine article that this all goes away if they tell the truth now, before they announce their find.”

“You say that Charles was aware of the problem when you confronted him with it?”

“Yes.”

“But they found the problem after they purchased the documents?”

“That’s what they said, yes.” Adin didn’t meet Chandler’s probing gaze. He wasn’t sure he believed that anymore. He didn’t know what to believe.

“I doubt we’ll ever know.”

“They’ll know I spoke to you though. They saw us leave the room together.” Adin tried to get Charles’s angry glare off his mind. Charles would hate him for this. Irreversibly.

“What a mess,” Chandler said succinctly.

“If I try to go public with what I know on my own they’ll find a way to fail me. Accusations of cheating or plagiarism or some such thing. I’ll be an object of scorn for my disloyalty. Tossed from academia forever for my lack of tact and everyone will think it’s because of some sexual melodrama between happily monogamous gay men and a boy who has a hopeless crush.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is that what they told you?”

“In a nutshell. I left out the part about never getting a job at MacDonald’s. I don’t care that they used me. I saw that coming and let it happen. But I do care about the truth. About letting people think that I looked the other way and allowed them to pass off a forgery for a grade.”

Chandler didn’t speak for a very long time. Adin knew she was calculating the odds, going over all the possible outcomes as if she were playing chess. It took her a little time to decide which way to spin the situation, but when she had her answer he could see it on her handsome face.

“That’s not true,” she said, finally.

“What?” Adin blinked in surprise. “I know those papers are fake.”

“Of course they’re fake, but truth isn’t the only thing you care about. You’re angry that they’re trying to make a fool of you, reacting quite naturally, I think, to their blackmail, and outraged by their callous treatment of you, both within the boundaries of your education and outside of it, in bed.”

Adin blanched but didn’t deny it.

“There was a moment when they treated you as an equal,” she continued. “And you liked that. They treated you as a peer, a person with a brain and a heart and value, and that’s over. It makes you sick to think you allowed any of this to happen. It makes you sick to lose that cachet.”

Adin blew out a long-held breath. When she put it that way it was a heady kind of freedom to blow it all up behind him. “Fuck, yeah.”

Chandler smiled at him for the first time. She wore a genuine, indulgent expression. As if she had simply waited for him to say the secret word. As if confetti were going to fall on him along with the warmth of that smile.

He followed her back into the ongoing soiree with the sure and certain knowledge that she would do whatever was right. That would be enough for him.

When Chandler reached the podium, Adin held his breath. Charles and Shep remained together, holding cocktails, still pressing the flesh.

If Adin didn’t know them so well he would say they hadn’t a care in the world. But when Adin looked closely, a muscle bunched beneath Shep’s high cheekbone. Charles held his drink in a death grip, his knuckles white. There was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip.

They’d avoided looking at him when he’d returned to the room at Chandler’s side, but now the promise of terrible retribution animated both their faces. Adin knew he had only a few more days to enjoy this particular institution. He’d have to head home during the winter break and look for another school. Or make plans for something else entirely if another university was truly out of reach for him. Only a few more very tense days, and he could go home.

Chandler could project her voice like a Shakespearean actor, and she did so, silencing everything in the room but the footsteps of the waitstaff and the rattle of ice. “As many of you know, our visiting professors, Dr. Holmesby and Dr. Edgerton, are the guests of honor this evening. Their dedication to finding and preserving documents from the past has been admirable to me since I arrived here.

“Their passion is obvious, their delight in making each new discovery has always been based on the principle that it provides a snapshot of the past and sheds light on the players of history, and not their own aggrandizement. We are so lucky to have such devoted professionals affiliated with this university. Likewise during the time that it’s been my pleasure to preside over this department, I’ve seen some fine students come and go.

“That’s why it’s with mixed emotions that I have to announce that the papers that Drs. Holmesby and Edgerton purchased for the university have been found to be forgeries.”

Everyone looked at Charles and Shep, whose faces never gave up their frozen smiles. No sound could be heard as Chandler continued.

“Drs. Holmesby and Edgerton asked me to postpone this event, or to cancel it altogether under the circumstances. Their disappointment has been profound. Naturally they came to me to explain the situation fully, highlighting the participation of one of their students, Adin Tredeger, in the discovery and I must say, all three men stand as beacons of integrity in a truly difficult situation.

“So tonight, instead of congratulating Charles and Shep on their discovery of the Mary Stuart letters, I’d like to congratulate them on their passionate pursuit of truth, and their mentorship of a young man who is a credit to this university and to the study of history in general.”

At this, Chandler motioned Charles and Shep to join her. She placed her arm around each of them. The three of them seemed to wear the mantle of academic pride. Only Adin knew the reason for her carefully blank smile and their nervous acceptance of her praise.

When they invited Adin over for a photograph of the four of them, he went reluctantly, half expecting Charles’s eyes to bore holes in him like lasers when they shook hands. Chandler cleared her throat for silence again and Adin no longer felt all the eyes in the room on him.

“As a special announcement though, I thought this would be a fine time to reveal that Adin Tredeger will be leaving us as he’s privately discussed with me his desire to attend, and his acceptance by Williams College, where he hopes to become part of the Williams/Exeter program. As disappointing as this is for me personally and for this institution, we wish him all the best.

“I thank you all for coming, please enjoy the evening.”

Adin stepped away from Chandler and watched as Charles and Shep moved back into the crowd. When they walked past, Charles bent his head as if to kiss Adin on the cheek and growled, “Don’t carry hard feelings, Adin. The first cut is always the deepest,” into his ear.

Adin pulled back, his pasted-on smile still beaming. Right then, Adin’s heart froze around the vow that he would never allow any man to make that second cut.

When Chandler finished answering individual questions, she looked neither right nor left but made a beeline for Adin, taking his hand and pulling him from the room. He followed her quietly, saying nothing.

It was fairly clear that she was in control of the situation. She’d handled the possible scandal with the ruthlessness of a Medici prince, and she would tell him in her own time what would happen next.

He didn’t ask, for instance, how she could praise him for his honesty in one sentence and then utter the obvious lie that he was headed for Williams in the next.

Adin heard the tapping of leather dress shoes behind him and turned to find Charles and Shep following, hot on their heels, obviously determined to have an audience with Chandler to tell their side of the story. When Chandler and Adin reached her office, she unlocked it and entered, pulling Adin inside.

The last time Adin saw Charles Holmesby’s face was when History Department Dragonslayer Evangeline Chandler snapped the door shut firmly on it.

A jolt of awareness hit Adin when the drink cart rattled noisily next to his ear. Turbulence. His lashes rose as Bran turned his head to stare out the window at the dark sky. Although in the months just after leaving Princeton Adin had dreamed of Charles quite often, he hadn’t had that particular dream in years.

“Are you messing around in my head again?”


“Maybe a little.”
Bran shrugged.

“I promise there’s nothing terribly interesting in there, Bran.”

“Did you go? To Williams?”

“Yes,” Adin replied. “Eventually. After I fled back home for a while. Professor Chandler helped me greatly, and I went to Williams the following fall. I spent a year at Exeter, later, which was very nice because my friend Edward was there, and he helped me to fit in.”

“You trusted them and they were just using you. They threatened you.” Bran lowered his voice and looked around him at the other passengers. “They should have paid for what they did.”

Adin shrugged and tried to explain. “I had a choice, Bran. They never forced anything on me. Except for trying to make me look the other way when that letter came to light, they were never dishonest. In the end I believe I did the right thing.”

Bran pressed his lips together.

“What?”

“You thought you were in love, and they knew that. They used it against you. They told you if you were smart enough, you’d see things the way they did. There’s a fairy tale right there, if you ask me.”

It was Adin’s turn to be surprised. “And what does that make you, the boy who says, ‘Look, everyone. The king is bare-ass nekkid?’”

Bran grinned. “Not everyone is like them. Not even Donte, and he’s a monster.”

“He’s not a monster,” Adin said impatiently.

“Yes, he
is
.” Bran gripped Adin’s arm for emphasis, momentarily forgetting he was injured. Adin tried not to wince as he disengaged Bran’s hand. “Oh, sorry. Sorry.”

“Donte isn’t… He’s not what you think he is. Not everything, anyway.”

“Donte
is
a monster,” Bran said emphatically. “But he’s
your
monster. I think he knew it was me making him sick, but he didn’t say anything.”

“Why on
earth
would he do that?” Adin asked. “Vampires are hardwired for self-preservation. What you’re saying…that would go against Donte’s very nature.”

Bran raised his eyebrows. “He promised you he would protect me, didn’t he?”

Adin looked across the aisle at Boaz to see what he thought about the matter, but the man was fast asleep, leaning heavily on the shoulder of the woman next to him. She didn’t seem to mind.

Adin turned back to Bran. “I never wanted that. Surely he knew if he’d told me what was happening I would have let him out of his promise.”

“Maybe he didn’t want you to have to choose?”


Adin’s heart sank like the Titanic. “Maybe he was afraid of
what
I would choose.”

“Maybe,” Bran said carefully, “every once in a while you should give Donte a hard squeeze so he can feel you’re there with him. He’s not like me. He can’t see everything that’s in your heart.”

“Stay out of my heart,” Adin muttered. “And my head.”

Bran didn’t reply. He turned back to the window and the night sky.

“Do you really think that?” Adin asked a few minutes later, after the drink cart finally stopped next to his chair and the flight attendant handed him a couple of nip-sized bottles of whiskey and a plastic cup. “That he doubts my feelings for him?”

“I think he loves you, and he’s worried he’ll lose you,” said Bran.

“You said it yourself, you can’t read Donte the way you can read a human,” Adin reminded him quietly.

“But I have eyes.” Bran shot him a purely teenage look that said
Duh
.

“How’d you get so wise?”

Bran took his time before answering. “At the very end, no one ever thinks about what went wrong, Adin. They just long for the people they love.”

Adin swallowed hard. “What a mess.”

Adin stayed silent for the remainder of the long trip, then he and Boaz led Bran off the plane to get their bags and grind through customs.

He held his breath when Bran’s passport was checked, but no one gave it more than the cursory look they gave Adin’s. Boaz had to be fingerprinted for his entry to the United States, because he carried a British passport, but everything checked out cleanly for him as well.