Broken Prince: A New Adult Romance Novel (12 page)

This morning her hair was mussed up on one side, strands of wavy red hair falling forward onto her cheeks. Her green flannel pajama shirt was hanging off of one of her shoulders, exposing her collarbone slightly under the mass of hair. She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her fist.

"You look stunning," Eliot said, beaming.

"Right. I don't know if I would use the word stunning. Maybe shocking. Terror-inducing. Is that what you were going for?"

"Come here, beautiful." Eliot tugged her arm and pulled her onto his lap. "Distract me from this horrible proof."

"Is Lucky helping you with your work?" Brynn scratched Lucky under the chin until he started purring, then leaned back into Eliot.

"He's helping me forget how badly this is coming along," he said. "Cats don't seem to care too much about mathematical theorems."

"That's why they're so happy," Brynn said. She pulled the paper out from under Lucky's paw. Lucky licked at the pads of his paw, irritated at having been displaced. Brynn studied the page. "Linear algebra?"

"I'm working with matrices as my transformation function," he said. "It's a pretty straightforward translation from the equations to the matrix. I was hoping that it would help."

"Let me guess, it didn't?" Brynn let the paper fall back to the desk. Near the bottom were a number of substitutions, all of them scribbled out with increasingly frustrated pen marks.

Eliot laughed bitterly.

"If I was a younger man, I'd turn away from this career and take up gardening."

"Don't beat yourself up over it," Brynn said.

"The Academy board has asked to speak with me," Eliot said. It was hard to meet Brynn's inquisitive eyes. "To see if they'll let me stay on."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"The problem isn't solved, and my reputation here is causing more of a stir than they had expected."

"But you didn't do anything!" Brynn flushed in anger.

"They don't know that," Eliot said, defending the board despite himself. "They're risking a lot, and if I don't produce any results, they'll drop me."

"Do you really care? You don't need the money, right?" Her voice had a strange tone to it.

"No, it's not that. It's just..."
How could he explain?
"Brynn, when I was younger, I was brilliant. Every problem I touched...the solution came easily to me. Like I was wading through water. Now I'm stuck in mud."

"You'll get it," she said.

"Maybe."

She had so much faith in him. He found it hard to find the same faith in himself.

Brynn stood, leaning forward to pet Lucky. The tiny ball of light gray fur rolled onto his back and closed his eyes contentedly. She yawned again, this time against her shoulder, and sighed deeply, still scratching the kitten's belly.

She was so tired. Poor Brynn. He had been so mired in his own issues that he hadn't reached out to her. Guilt washed over him.

"What's wrong? More nightmares?"

"No. I mean yes, but no. That's not the problem." Brynn's brows pinched together above her nose. "I tried to tell you earlier."

"What is it?"

Brynn swallowed, looking unsure about whether or not to speak.

"My grandmother. She just lost her insurance for the medication she needs, and she doesn't have the money to pay for it."

"How much does she need?"

Brynn looked up at him, her eyes glazed with tears.

"It's a lot. Thousands of dollars. I didn't want to ask you—"

Eliot stood and swept Brynn into his arms, kissing her on the top of the head.

"Brynn, don't ever hesitate to ask for that."

"But it's so much!" She fidgeted in his arms and he buried his face in her beautiful hair.

"Money's no good sitting in the bank doing nothing. If I had known that was what was worrying you..."

"I don't want to be a burden. I don't want you to think that I'm just here for that."

"For what?"

"Because you're rich. I don't want to owe you."

Eliot laughed. He kissed her nose, her cheek, her ear.

"I owe you more than I can say," he said.

"You know what I mean," Brynn said quietly.

"And you know that I love you," he said. "Anything you want, anything I can give, I give it gladly."

Brynn didn't say anything, but when Eliot looked down at her face, he saw that she was choked up. Embarrassed at making her embarrassed, he pulled her in closely for another hug.

"Now I have to get back to being stuck on this problem. Can you get Lucky off of my papers?"

"Lucky, come here." Brynn picked up the tiny cat, who promptly nestled into her arms and began a loud purr.

"I'll teach him some math," Brynn said. She crossed the study in a few steps and stopped in front of the window. The early morning chill had left a fog on the glass, and she used one finger to draw shapes on the windowpane.

"This is a circle. This is a square. This is a triangle." Eliot pulled his chair back up to his work, but the sight of Brynn's silhouette against the pale light coming in through the window gave him pause. He let his eyes travel over the line of her body, over the sensual curves of her hips that could be seen only faintly through the robe.

"Let's add some smaller triangles to the sides," she said, using her pinky finger to draw the lines in. Her voice grew fainter, more absentminded, as she drew. "Then some more smaller triangles, and more, infinitely many."

"Do you know what shape that is?" she whispered, kissing the top of Lucky's head. Lucky's ear twitched, but there was no other sign that he knew the answer to her question, and she answered it for him. "That's a Koch snowflake!"

Eliot's mouth twitched upward into a grin. He tapped his pen on the edge of the table. Lucky's ear twitched again at the noise.

"Pretty advanced stuff for a first lesson," he said.

"You're supposed to be working." Brynn didn't even turn around from the window; she kept drawing her triangles.

"I'm working," he said. "It's the proof that isn't working. Snowflakes in June?"

"It's my favorite shape," Brynn said. She continued to add in triangles, smaller and smaller, until she was drawing them with just her fingernail.

"Why? Because it looks like a snowflake?"

"No". Lucky licked her chin and she tossed her hair behind her head, defiantly, it seems. "Because it's bounded. I remember the first time I learned about them—the teacher drew a circle around the first triangle and said that the snowflake would always fit inside. The area is finite. But the perimeter—"

"The perimeter is infinite."

"It's infinity inside of something that isn't infinite. Like the Gabriel's Horn paradox. It goes on forever and ever inside of a little tiny nothing."

"It's a pretty nice paradox," Eliot said. "Your finger will run out of space on that window soon."

"I know it's just because we're thinking about it wrong," Brynn said, still drawing. She concentrated on the triangles, her tongue poking slightly between her lips. Eliot wanted to kiss her. "A line doesn't have any kind of dimension, not even a molecule wide. We can't think about things in the right way to understand them. That's why math is so nice. It gives us a different way of thinking about things. More abstract."

"That's why people hate math," Eliot said. Even his students who were math majors objected sometimes. Too abstract. Too non-intuitive. Too paradoxical.

"They're wrong," Brynn said, laughing. "It's beautiful. And there is no paradox, is there?" She reached up and added a tiny triangle onto the top of the snowflake. "We're just thinking in the wrong dimension."

"Would you like me to make you pancakes for breakfast?" Eliot asked. "They'll have finite area, I promise."

"I'd rather have infinite pancakes," Brynn said, "but I have to go. I'm supposed to meet Csilla's mom at the police station."

"Oh, of course," Eliot said. He did not know what else to say, so he hugged her close. He wanted to do more, to say more, but he couldn't find the words.

"Thank you," Brynn said. "I'll be back sometime later today." She gave a small smile. "I expect you to have the proof completely solved by then!"

"I'll do my best," Eliot said. "I love you."

"I love you too."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Brynn

Brynn went into the office. Csilla's mom was there. She didn't seem drunk, although there were bags under her eyes, covered with heavy makeup.

"Mrs. Deveny?"

She saw me looking at her and turned away too quickly.

She motioned for me to follow her back, and I did, down the hallway where people turned to look at me. I kept my face turned straight ahead. I didn't know if they recognized me as the girl from the tabloids, or if they had been talking about me behind my back.

Mrs. Deveny led the way back to the end of the hall and down the stairs. The stairway was green with fluorescent light, and we came down into a room lit only by emergency lights. Mrs. Deveny flipped the switch and the lamps flickered on overhead, their cold light alien and sterile as a hospital's. The room was larger than I had expected - the shelves were taller than my head, and stretched back far enough that I thought the room might take up the entire space below the police station. All of the shelves were packed full with cardboard boxes behind a metal grating.

"We run the filing offices for everyone in Budapest," she said, seeing my surprise. "There's a backlog of information from solved and unsolved cases."

"You don't put anything online?"

"We try," she said. "Nowadays. When was your mother killed?"

"Thirteen years ago," I said. My voice sounded shaky. I coughed into my hand and pretended that the burning in my eyes was from the dust that hung in the cold air.

"We didn't start digitizing records until just a few years ago," she said. She ignored the tremble in my voice, for which I was thankful. "The government offices are, as always, behind the times."

She brought me back through the shelves, winding her way along the corridors. My eyes wandered over the names which labeled the boxes, all in Hungarian. Again and again I saw the Hungarian word I'd learned from searching for my mother online:
gyilkosság
. Murder.

It was as though I'd stumbled upon a gruesome treasure trove, one filled with horrors rather than coins. Mrs. Deveny strode quickly to the center of one aisle and shook her keys from her pocket. Unlocking the fastener on the shelf, she pulled the metal grate open and pushed the front box aside. A cloud of dust rose from the top of the cardboard boxes and hovered in the thin light.

"Two boxes," she said, pulling out the first crate. I swallowed as I read the name on the side of the box.
Katalin Tomlin
. It made me shudder. Even seeing her name on the gravestone had not affected me so much. I hoped that Mrs. Deveny would leave me alone. I couldn't imagine digging through the boxes of evidence for my mother's murder with her standing over me.

"You take one, I'll take the other," she said. "There's a table in the back. You can look at the evidence there."

I walked, carrying the box in front of me. It carried all my mother's secrets—the secret to how she was killed. I thought to myself that perhaps I would find some kind of clue that would lead me to the killer. Then I thought that I was being silly.

I marched forward bravely. The table was in a holding cell of some kind, surrounded by walls of glass or hard plastic.

"You have to stay in here while looking at the evidence," Mrs. Deveny said, setting the box on the table with a hard
thunk
. Puffs of dust lifted from the surface. So much dust. Like snow, almost. With the glass walls all around me, it seemed as though I was inside one of those snow globes.

Mrs. Deveny pulled the top off of one of the boxes. Overstuffed files were crammed inside of the box, manila folders full of paper.

"I'll be back in a bit," she said. "The door will lock automatically behind me; if there's an emergency or if you're ready to leave, just press the call button here."

"Should I—is there some kind of order I need to keep the papers in?" I would try my best to keep the files as they were, but it looked as though they had been stuffed in at random.

Mrs. Deveny shrugged her shoulders.

"It doesn't really matter. They're not in any kind of order anyway, we've pulled them out for so many different investigators out now. Just don't make too much of a mess."

"I'll try not to," I said, but she was already turning to go.

I pulled out the first folder of papers and sat down at the table. Taking a deep breath, I wondered if I should really be doing this. The mystery of my mother's death had haunted me for so long; would the reality be worse?

"Well, I'm already having nightmares," I said to myself. Still, my fingers shook as I opened the first folder.

I'd been terrified for nothing. The first few pages were simply paperwork about a lead on a previous case that hadn't turned up anything. I read through the entire document before realizing that it was pretty close to useless, as far as understanding how my mother had died. Lots of phone numbers and addresses, and writeups of a couple of interviews with people who knew absolutely nothing. Twenty minutes later, I felt I'd wasted my time on a folder of bureaucratic red tape. There was too much to go through to peruse all of the documents in detail. I would have to skim some of the stuff, or I'd never be out of there. At the same time, I didn't want to miss anything. I sighed, closing the folder and digging into the box to pull out another one. It might take a while, but I owed it to my mother to take my time.

The minutes passed into hours, and some of the documents actually gave me a better idea of where exactly her body had been found. I made a note of it to check out later. I yawned, covering my mouth with one hand. If only I had thought to pick up a cup of coffee when I was upstairs in the police station. I blinked hard, focusing on the chronology of the evidence file that seemed to stretch down the page forever.

When I turned the page, though, the breath left my lungs and my hand rose to my mouth, stifling a scream. Adrenaline pulsed through me and I found my gaze darting from one corner of the room to the other, then back to the file.