Dark Dream (Love in Illyria Book 1) Read online

  "Where's Bryce?" he asked.

  Marvin's cheeks went red.

  "Probably with Helen."

  That came as a surprise. Why would Bryce be with Helen of all people?

  "They... they have a thing," Marvin said, shifting under his inquiring gaze.

  "But I thought he and..."

  He couldn't say the name.

  "Yeah, that. We made it look like Bryce and Vy had a thing. Please, don't tell anyone about this."

  Maybe he hadn't lost her. He knew it in his heart that Carter wouldn't touch her, but a boy her age… He didn't dare to be relieved yet.

  "Why?"

  "Because Helen is 16, and they could get into trouble for dating, even if they're not..."

  "So, Bryce and..."

  "He and Vy? It was just a cover-up. You're not going to tell anyone about it, right?"

  He wished he could reassure Marvin, but he couldn't help thinking that Helen was barely a few years older than his own daughter. He would not want Diane start a romance at sixteen with a boy much older than her. But what about him? More than ten years older than Vy. Where was this moral superiority when he kissed her?

  Marvin was beginning to panic the more he remained quiet. Only a few months ago, his world was so much more clear-cut. He was a married man who knew what was right and what was wrong. His marriage had crumbled, and, with it, his ability to make hard necessary choices.

  He couldn't be a hypocrite. He wouldn't want anyone to find out about his feelings for Vy, and how far he had gone in expressing them.

  "Are they in love?" he asked.

  "Yes," Marvin answered in a heartbeat. "We wouldn't have helped them if it wasn't serious."

  He nodded. He could believe that. He knew them well enough by now to trust their moral compass. At their age, love was serious business.

  People came back to their table in time to hear Carter slur into the microphone.

  "I want to dedicate this song to my best student," Carter said drunkenly. "You will hear from her again. Vy? Get over here! Let's show this people what rock is."

  He clenched his jaw. Carter's possessiveness got on his nerves. The image of Carter's arms wrapped around her shoulders made him bleed inside. Carter had kept her from him. He wanted to be the one burying his face in her glorious caramel curls.

  He couldn't stand seeing her then and there. He looked around for a way out before she came on stage, but his team surrounded him, and they wanted to hang on to the illusion of camaraderie.

  The song started, and Vy didn't show up. On stage, Carter was flawless, as he so often was, drunk, high or stone cold sober.

  He couldn't help feeling that sometimes Carter could express his deepest feelings better than he could do it himself. There was a raw force still present in Carter's voice that the years of study and experience hadn't dulled.

  "He's fucking brilliant," he said, and took a swig of scotch.

  He wished he could find anything that would overpower the loneliness and unbearable knowledge that his soul was dry.

  Vy

  She walked all the way around the set where the production team had set up the end of season celebration. When she got to the House, the only person there was Kate Redding.

  "Hey, Vy, you were great tonight."

  "Thank you. It's been an incredible experience."

  "Are you changing your clothes for the party?" Kate asked.

  "Actually, I'd like to go home. Do I have any chance to get a taxi here at this time of night?"

  "You want to leave already? We have transport for everyone tomorrow around lunch. These parties usually last until the morning."

  Kate stopped talking when she sensed Vy's discomfort. "I'll get you a taxi."

  "Thank you."

  She went to room four and packed up her stuff. Her suitcase felt even lighter than when she got to the house. Kate came in the room a few minutes later.

  "The taxi will be here in fifteen minutes. I talked to the security guy at the gate to let it pass."

  Vy handed her the key-card.

  "I'll wait outside," she said. "Go and enjoy the party, Kate."

  The taxi took her out of the Bracciano estate and back to her old life. Was Carter expecting anything else from her that night? Maybe it was enough satisfaction for him to see her vulnerable, broken down, in pain. He got the chance to act like a caring mentor for once. If he even cared.

  Someone like Nikki would know how to thank him for the contract. If she sold her kisses for material possessions, she must have done it for her career as well. She thought about Nikki with a mixture of pity and disgust. Maybe some young singers needed to sleep with their producers, but she wouldn't.

  Carter had been demanding, controlling, domineering, manipulative, insidious, but he never gave her a truly creepy vibe.

  She wondered if Nikki could make the distinction any more. When one used and got used as much as Nikki, that was normality, and all the rest was a Disney version.

  Not her problem. She had to get over her Batman complex. Not everyone needed her to come to their rescue. Nikki had made her own choices, long ago.

  All she wanted was to be home for a while. She wondered if her parents already had career paths in mind for her. Maybe a few months of internship at her mother's NGO. Or some more paralegal work for her father until she went to University the following year.

  They were going to be disappointed when she told them she would not do any of that. In her backpack, the offer from TC gave her a path to the life she wanted. An album with his production house. With him. She was overwhelmed by gratitude but had no idea how to express it. She planned on proving him that she deserved the chance he was giving her.

  Chapter 16

  Vy

  Vy soaked in the family atmosphere the weekend after Sing's final episode. Her absence had turned her parents' frostiness into the warm affection. Her mother had prepared escargots de Bourgogne, Vy's favorite meal despite Sebastian's "no snails at dinner" protests. Vy treated them with delicious ricotta pancakes from the Stark family recipe.

  She had expected Sebastian to bring up Sing, but she listened with her mouth open how her mother dissected each episode, while her father made snarky comments from time to time.

  It made it easier to tell them about Carter's offer. They seemed to accept it with only a mild disappointment.

  Early on Monday morning, she took her one suitcase downstairs, and prepared to call a cab. Her father was already in the kitchen, going through his crack of the dawn ritual.

  "Dad, I love you."

  Paul Cesara froze for an instant, then he continued his precise gesture of tapping the coffee and inserting the thing in the espresso machine.

  "I love you, too, Viola. You know we want the best for you."

  "I know," she said, perching on a kitchen chair.

  He sat down on the other side of the table. His serious eyes fixed her for a moment. He had a few more lines around the eyes now. She could see them although he wasn't smiling. Did he have so much grey around the temples before she left?

  "It's difficult to accept that you have to make your own mistakes," he said. "I don't want you to learn the hard way."

  She swallowed a lump of tears in her throat. She had never let them down before, and now she was breaking his heart to follow a dream. She nodded, and walked out the front door into the dark dawn.

  "Not exactly epic," she mused while sitting comfortably in the back of the cab.

  The not-so-Bohemian life waiting for Vy started with a signed deal with Tim Carter for her first album. Even coming third in Sing came with lots of exposure. Her inbox was full of requests to sing in trendies clubs in the Capital.

  She wished she knew more about Orsino's nightlife. Over the weekend, she had replied politely to the emails, with a request to give her a few days to get her schedule in order.

  She had only one source of advice for her career, Tim Carter. His training had been exhausting, and she hated more than liked him, but s
he banked all her future on the belief that he was serious about one thing in his life: music.

  She arrived in front of Carter's studio around seven in the morning. She dragged the suitcase after herself, and grabbed a cheap cup of coffee from an all-night news agent at the corner. She drank the horrible coffee sitting on her luggage and scrolling through ads for studios in the area. Instead of calling any of them, she decided to try and see if there was anyone inside. To her surprise, the security agent's response was that Carter was already in the studio.

  "Good morning," she said.

  He looked up from the music sheet and he seemed impressed to see her there.

  "You're early."

  "There's nowhere else I have to be. You can send me to do some errands or something if you don't have time for me now."

  "Stop that!"

  She started at the harsh tone.

  "What?"

  "The Miss Congeniality thing. The girl next door routine. The everyone's best friend shtick."

  "Why do you think I have to be miserable to sing?" she asked, sitting in one of the swiveling chairs.

  "Because it's not real. If you really were a happy shiny person, you couldn't sing like you do. I hate it when I feel you holding back all the time because you cling to this fantasy that you're normal and happy."

  He hadn't said it with his usual flamboyance. He said it with an earnestness that bothered her. She was a nice happy person. Wasn't she?

  "What if I can't come back? If I do what you say, if I let go of the delusion that I'm nice and normal, what if I lose myself completely?"

  "I won't let you. Don't you know why you're here, in front of me, not Claire or any of the others?"

  She was tempted to say that it was because she was in the final, but she had learned enough about him to know it wasn't the reason. His next words, however, shocked her.

  "You'd be here even if you never came on my team."

  "Why?"

  "No," he said shaking his head. "I'll let you figure it out for yourself. Anything worth learning, is worth learning the hard way. I'm not hiding this from you. What comes next is going to be more grueling than the dream life in IBC's version of a Disney castle."

  "Yes, I figured as much."

  "And you're not afraid."

  It wasn't a question. He nodded.

  "Lesson one. Even if you're scared, never show it."

  "Carter," she said before she could stop herself, "are you often afraid?"

  He looked into her eyes before answering.

  "Yes. And I dare you to figure out even once when I am."

  Her smile was probably one of the least friendly to ever quirk her lips. He had just dared her to do something. With that, she was sure that one piece of the reason why she was there. She wasn't afraid of him.

  "This is the first rule of our collaboration: never lie to me. I will know it even if you lie to yourself, and it still counts as lying to me."

  She rolled her eyes.

  "I'm not in the habit of lying to myself."

  "You say that but I have my doubts. You're a damn good liar, to keep up the pretense of a romance with that mechanic guy."

  "Umm... I want to negotiate something on this rule."

  "You want to negotiate? Already? From the first rule?"

  "Better now than later right? It's just a small caveat."

  He rolled his eyes, mimicking her. "Fine, lawyer-girl. Let's have it."

  "If it's not my secret. I won't outright lie to you, but I might have to keep certain things to protect the innocents."

  "Who's that lawyer superhero guy?"

  "Matt Murdock? Daredevil?"

  "Yeah, him. I didn't know who you reminded me of just now."

  "Come on, I'm serious."

  "But if I guess the truth and I ask you, you can't deny it."

  Vy wondered which one of them was the teenager and which was the adult. It felt like she was arguing with Sebastian.

  "Only if you promise to keep the secret you guessed."

  "Should we be writing this shit down?" Carter asked.

  "I trust you. If you give me your word."

  "Fine. Let's test it out and see how it goes. You lied about the relationship with Bryce because... you wanted to... make someone jealous? That Nikki bitch who messed with you had a thing for the mechanic."

  Vy's jaw dropped. How the hell did he know about her little war of attrition with Nikki? Or about Nikki s feelings for Bryce? Even she hadn't figured that out until it was too late.

  "So that's not everything. What would make you outright lie... Protecting someone. Protecting one of your freak friends. Marvin? Did he and Bryce have a thing? No, they wouldn't need you to cover up why they were always together because they were roommates. Roommates... Ooooh."

  "Please, don't say anything."

  "That's dangerous territory, miss Cesara," he said. "You covered up a felony."

  "No, I didn't, because nothing happened. I covered up to avoid a scandal."

  "Oh, my, how completely delicious life in the big House was. And there we were, pouring our heart and soul into your training and you were all high on hormones. Even the little angel girl."

  "Don't be a dick about it. Seriously."

  "Oh, I never promised I wasn't going to be a dick about it. I just promised I'd keep your secrets."

  She shook her head in disbelief, but a little shard of glass from her heart fell away. It was refreshing to be around someone who wasn't uptight or morally inflexible.

  "In one of your songs I love the most, you sing about being in love at sixteen. Being around them made me think of that song all the time."

  "Flattery? I am impressed with your willingness to be sneaky to ensure my silence."

  "It's not flattery if it's true."

  "I'm an old hand, Vy. Flattery doesn't work if I don't want it to work."

  "And don't you?" she asked sweetly.

  "You're best friend material all over, aren't you, kid?"

  A touch of bitterness in his voice warned her that she was on dangerous ground.

  "Can I ask you a favor?"

  When he looked back at her, there was no trace of his previous vulnerability. He nodded expectantly.

  "I have a lot of offers to sing in clubs and I have no idea how to choose, how much to get paid."

  "Right," he said in a businesslike manner. "Let's talk about that."

  Andrew

  The Monday after the Sing finale, Andrew got to his recording studio earlier than he used to be in the House. He'd left home at the same hour, but the shaving off an hour's drive made all the difference. He shook hands with David when he arrived, a few minutes later.

  "It's going to take a while to get this schedule out of our system I guess," David said.

  "Looks like it," he said. "Maybe we're getting ready to be middle aged."

  "Speak for yourself," David said. "I want to go back on tour as early as possible."

  He nodded. They had talked about it often enough on their drive to and from the House for the past few months.

  "The Christmas concert at Dusk will be a good warm-up," he said. "The New Year's Eve at Rhythm of Heaven will be pretty crazy."

  "Do you think we should have taken IBC up on their offer?"

  The IBC had thrown a lot of money at them to be part of their big New Year's Celebration in the Unification Square. A sizeable chunk of Orsino's youth came to that celebration each year. But with the exposure and the money also came the IBC strings.

  "No. I've had enough of television."

  "Until next season," David pointed out.

  He didn't want to think about it.

  David must have seen something on his face. "Sorry, man."

  His friend knew part of the exploitative contract he'd been under as a teenage star. IBC hadn't stayed on top of the game for so many years by being nice. They had nearly broken him back then.

  "How are you feeling?" David asked.

  "I'm fine," he said. "Tired."


  "Are you sure? I haven't seen you like this in years. This show was supposed to take your mind off the divorce, but it looks like it's done more harm than good."

  Andrew wanted to keep that particular door closed, but David made a good point. "You might be right. I'll consider my options in a few weeks."

  "If you want, I know a guy who has the balls to take on IBC in a contractual dispute."

  He raised his eyebrows. "Really? Who?"

  "Paul Cesara."

  "What?"

  "Cesara flies under the radar, but he is very well connected. My jaw dropped to see his daughter on the show."

  "You didn't say anything."

  "I was going to, but it didn't matter. Not after I heard her sing. That girl has some voice on her.

  "She does," he agreed. "I heard her sing with her band once, you know? They're good."

  "Really? I'd like to hear her before she became Carter's girl."

  Carter's girl.

  Carter's girl.

  Carter's girl.

  "Wanna hear them?" he asked. "Diane sent me a bunch of videos."

  "Diane likes them? Then abso-fucking-lutely. Your kid knows rock."

  His daughter smiled from her photo on his desk. He smiled back. Yes, his kid knew rock. He hit play and tried to freeze his heart while Vy's voice filled the room.

  "Well? What do you think about the kids?"

  "They're good. About our age when we met, aren't they?"

  "Younger. She said they were in high school together," he said.

  "You talked to Vy about the band?" David asked with a shade of suspicion in his voice.

  He shrugged. "She mentioned it when she asked me about me and Carter in high school."

  David laughed. "The rebel and the nerd. The two of you keep switching roles."

  That was true. He was the rebel in high school, and Carter was the twitchy bashful nerd. While he sunk deeper into music, and his rise to fame upped his anxiety, Carter fought his way out of his famous mother's shadow and onto the stage.

  "I like them," David said after a few songs. "They do our songs pretty well. Their own aren't too bad either. Do you want to sign them?"

  "Carter probably signed her," he said.

  "I bet!" David said. "He must be pissed at IBC for how they treated her."