🌁 chapter nineteen: better to reign [let me be your ghost]

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” -John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

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The lie I left home on was four words long.

“Devi needs me downtown.” Signatures, filings, the tabloid cleanup—boring, bureaucratic, safe. Eze was half into a board call when I said it, one ear in a war he was fighting for my name, and he squeezed my hand and mouthed take Xavier, and I said I would, and I didn’t, and the four words worked the way lies work on people who’ve stopped guarding against you.

It was the first thing I’d taken from him since the island. It cost more than everything I’d taken before it combined.

I drove myself to Los Altos in an estate car with, at my request, Tini’s own eyes on the brake lines that morning—“you think I don’t check everything with wheels now, escritora?”—and the gates swung open the moment my plates were read, and Poseidon reared over his fountain in the noon glare, and Dorian Ashcroft received me on his limestone terrace in linen the color of nothing, delighted, unsurprised.

“No Ezekiel,” he observed.

“You said ‘just Lola.’”

“I did. And here she is, on time and unaccompanied.” He smiled at some private math resolving in his mind. “He doesn’t know. Oh, that’s much better than I’d planned for.”

Security processed me at the door like an airport with taste—phone surrendered into a velvet drawer, a wand, a young man with oatmeal linen and dead eyes going through my bag. He lifted the tape recorder out and his eyes posed a question at his employer.

“I’m a ghostwriter,” I said, bored. “You invited me to discuss a book. I record interviews. It’s in every profile your people compiled on me, which I assume runs to volumes.”

Dorian laughed, waved a hand. “Let her keep her instrument. Writers without their instruments get restless, and everything in this house is swept on the way out anyway.” His eyes met mine, warm as an autoclave. “Everything.”

Noted, I thought, and followed him into lunch.