A/N: Hello, everyone! Here's another chapter for you. This is a bit of a game-changer for the story, because suddenly, there will be more at stake here. I'm writing the last couple of chapters of the story and it hurts a bit, to see what some of them will go through. But that's enough spoilers now.

Here you go, enjoy!

There's some darkness in every story about light and this moment is part of that reality we don't always see. I hope that whoever has found themselves in this situation, can brave their way out.

***

Books, TV shows and movies would have you believe that the lives of the rich and privileged were wrought with scandals and secrets.

I thought that too, and decided that most of them probably just liked living their lives as if they were in a bad daytime soap opera—or a good one if the goal was to have a plot so full of twists and turns you couldn’t keep track of whose adoptive daughter turned out to be the forbidden love of the man who came back from the dead after his bad twin pretended to be him all this time and destroyed the real biological family of the woman who now carried the baby of a taxi driver who wasn’t really a taxi driver because he might be the long-lost heir to a large and old family fortune.

Caught your breath? I did say it was complicated.

Anyway, I once wondered why anyone would want to live with so much drama. It wasn’t until this week that it occurred to me that the answer might be simple—the rich and privileged may just be way too busy to take the time to untangle the mess in their lives.

When a princess sat on a throne with the entire kingdom looking on, waiting with bated breath for her next command, she couldn’t really keep excusing herself to go to the bathroom so she could splash some water on her face and give herself a little pep-talk to get it together.

Secrets, scandals, betrayals and guilt—they all had to wait for the duties that came first.

At least that’s been my excuse—the one I preferred over the other, which was me feeling terribly guilty and wimping out by avoiding everyone in the know.

Guilt is like gravity—it keeps your head down.

The weekend that followed my come-to-Jesus moment at the Maxfield’s, Brandon and I skipped the usual family brunch.

I didn’t say anything, hoping I didn’t have to face anyone anytime soon but also not wanting to deprive Brandon of his family either.

He may have noticed my reticence but Brandon said nothing of it when he declared that we were driving out to the beach house that weekend. He insisted it was going to be one of the last few quiet weekends we’d have together before the holiday madness took over. After glancing at the Championettes’ itinerary in the coming months, his prediction was spot on.

In two weeks for example, was the Arts Appreciation dinner—the first of the Society’s four big charity fundraisers in the year.

It was held the same weekend every year, with the same concept, at the same venue—the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum which was a stunning piece of architecture, aptly fitting its namesake who was a highly-esteemed patron of the arts and a philanthropist. Inspired by Venetian palaces, it housed an old-fashioned courtyard in the center of three levels of galleries that looked over it. From the glass window that streamed light into the impeccably manicured garden, to the arched balconies, to the lavish details, the place was romantic and inspired, fitting into the Championette ideal of elegance and grace.

Each year, the Society held a fancy dinner event, inviting fresh talents from all over the city to showcase their work to a prestigious guest list that was made up of the press, influential members of the city’s art foundation, and most importantly, well-paying art connoisseurs and patrons from all over the country.

The dinner venue would be surrounded with a variety of art displays, from paintings to stained glass creations to mixed-media sculptures.

Guests wrote big, fat checks to purchase a spot on the guest list, the funds going to the many art programs offered in the city. The other hope was that by the end of the evening, most of the displayed works would be sold off and participating artists would go home with big paychecks and more lucrative future commissions.

Even though Layla only got officially crowned chairwomanship of the Championettes’ this summer, she’d been prepped for the position in the last couple of years. Since she was a bit of a control freak, she’d already planned out all the major fundraisers the Society was doing this year, booking venues, caterers, event-planners and such.

While I was secretly relieved I didn’t have to start from scratch, planning events that could make or break the Championettes’ this year, it also rubbed raw that it felt like I was an inconvenient bit of baggage heaped on to the load while the rest trudged through with plans they’d already made way before I even came into the picture.

I was already taking a crash course in socialite duties as it was but it didn’t mean I could be let out on the road on my own just yet.

The only thing I was tasked with, other than trying to keep everyone from killing each other every time we had a meeting, was to come up with the charity to champion this year through a masquerade fundraiser Layla had named Masquerade Magnifique.

Some members of the board had voiced their doubts about doing another masquerade, which was apparently an overused formula in a society who threw so many damned parties, but Layla gave them all a dainty death stare and proclaimed that it would be the mother of all masquerades because she was planning it.

In all honesty, Layla was a good planner.

But then, dictators didn’t really have a problem giving orders and putting your neck on the chopping block if you failed, which was the reason I’d been playing referee.

The board was made up of individuals with extremely strong personalities. Head-butting, I discovered, was a classic Championette-assembly style. For a bunch of people who were as thick as thieves when they were plotting for my downfall, they were just as ruthless facing off each other. I had to intervene.

I’d rather push heads apart than collect them in a bag later.

Which was why I found myself arriving at the LeClaire’s impressive townhouse in Beacon Hill, Boston’s most prestigious neighborhood. The small but historic and highly-prominent area boasted of postcard-perfect colonial row houses, brick paths and gas-lit streets.

Layla and I were going to be interviewed for a segment in the city’s top morning news show and she wanted us to rehearse our answers together.

I didn’t think it was a bad idea because the last thing I wanted was for us to do a showdown on live TV instead of promoting the Society’s upcoming fundraisers.

An aging doorman with a dour face greeted me and directed me to the sitting room to wait for Layla. I was about half an hour early so I didn’t mind but it struck me as odd that the man practically dragged me into the room and promptly left me with barely any acknowledgement or the typical offer of refreshments, which I was taught was a common courtesy an expert hostess such as Layla would never forget.

It was my first visit to the LeClaire household so I didn’t dare make any presumptions as to how Queen Layla ran her kingdom.

The thing about being in a lion’s den is that manners don’t matter as much—not when you’re about to be served for dinner. Yum.

I wasn’t scared of Layla but I was nervous for some reason.

This house was like a crypt—too quiet and too empty you could almost hear the ghosts walk.

I had just sat down and started leafing through a large coffee table book about rare diamonds in the world when I heard a small scraping sound in the other room.

I was just kidding when I thought about ghosts.

I paused and held my breath, and the scuffing sound of shoes filled the stretch of silence.

I got up and poked my head through the archway that led to what looked like another sitting area, catching a short, lanky figure hovering by a bureau decorated with picture frames and small art figures.

“Hey, you!” I said, narrowing my eyes as I watched the boy, somewhere between ten and twelve, shove something into the pocket of his oversized black hoodie.

Gasping, he snapped his head up and caught sight of me. His eyes were wide with alarm and panic, his hand shoving deeper into his pocket.

With his worn sweater and jeans, he didn’t look like he belonged in Layla’s museum-like house. He looked a little too rugged—and a little too guilty.

I tensed, aware that I was alone in the room with a possible underaged burglar. “Listen. I think you—Hey!”

He bolted into a run and zipped past me, knocking over a small side table that sent a few glass displays crashing to the floor.

“Now you’ve asked for it,” I muttered right after a hissed curse as I took off running after the little rugrat.

As I headed for the main hallway, I heard a woman’s shriek and a man’s shout echo down the grand staircase.

I couldn’t tell who they were but they probably just realized that the house had been broken into.

More determined to catch the kid who was probably dragged along into this heist, I broke into a run again, nearly crashing with the doorman who came out of nowhere with a stupefied look on his face.

“Call the cops!” I practically shouted in his face before I steered him out of the way to continue my pursuit of the young boy.

I was in dressed in a casual pair of low-heeled ankle boots, brown wool tights and a sweater dress which were just comfortable enough for me to race my way out of the hallway and down the front steps of the townhouse.

“Hey! Get back here!” I yelled, before lunging for him as he paused in sprinting down the brick sidewalk at my shout.

His eyes widened as he stood frozen for a moment, when he realized I was coming down on him like a freight train.

I groaned and hissed as my knees and elbows made contact with the ground but I didn’t budge an inch as I held the boy down with my arms and a crooked leg.

He was a few inches shorter than me, his frame slight and scrawny but he was flailing his arms around like a bug on its back. I kept my eyes on his hands, briefly remembering to check if he had any sharp objects he could slice me up with. So far, so good.

“Hey, kid. Stop wiggling!” I told him as I loomed over his ashen face. “I’ve had to wrestle down men easily three times your size before when they were so drunk they thought they were in a petting zoo with a free pass. You’re not going anywhere until I let you go and that’s not happening until you hand over what you filched.”

The boy kept trying to twist free and I looked up and down the sidewalk to see if we’d attracted attention.

The LeClaire residence was in a quieter street in Beacon Hill and while there was an endless line of cars parked along the narrow street, the area was relatively empty. The perks of a weekday afternoon.

I glanced down at the boy again. “Hey, I don’t want to turn you in but I will if you don’t return what you stole. I know life is tough but the first thing you need to learn is that crime isn’t a way out—it’s a way in. A way in into one of those horrible orange suits, a way into your new home of concrete and steel bars with thugs for roommates, a way into a fate worse than the one you’re imagining today.”

I looked into his frightened pale blue eyes and my voice gentled. “So give it up, whatever it is that you stole. It’ll never be worth your entire life.”

His chin trembled and his eyes watered but he pressed his lips together in a valiant effort to hold back his tears. “I didn’t... I’m... I...”

There was hardly anyone walking down the sidewalk right now but I couldn’t pin the kid down to the pavement forever without drawing attention so I sighed out loud and reached into the pocket of his hoodie. “Fine. If you’re going to play hard to get, you leave me no choice but to…”

My voice trailed off and I frowned as my hands wrapped around a small square shape.

I pulled it out of his pocket, my brows drawing together in confusion as I stared at a small, palm-sized wooden frame with a portrait of Layla in it. The frame was nice and pretty but it wasn’t worth a fortune.

“Okay. Now, this is just weird." I looked at the boy but he wasn’t paying attention to me.

Tears were making their way down his face as he squeezed his eyes shut, muttering, “...should’ve never come here... he always gets mad... But we came back early...”

“Hey, kid!” I told him with a hard tug on his elbow. “What in the world is going on with you?”

He kept shaking his head, biting his lip as he tried not to cry.

In that instant, I knew there wasn’t a burglary.

I eased off him and grabbed him by the elbow to help him up. He pulled himself up to a sitting position on the curb, burying his face into his hands as his shoulders started shaking with silent sobs.

I stared at him for a long moment, watching but saying nothing as he cried. I eventually crossed my legs together as I sat next to him on the sidewalk.

I propped up my arms on top of my knees and stared at Layla’s smiling face on the picture frame. She looked very pretty but as I stared longer at her expression, it became easy to see that her smile didn’t quite reach her pale blue eyes.

“If I give you the picture back, will you stop crying?” I asked the boy, gently nudging him on the arm with my elbow.

He shook his head, his face still buried in his hands. “Give it back to her. Tell her I’m sorry. When he finds out... he’ll be m-mad. Tell her I’m sorry...”

If the world had altered in the last ten minutes, I just realized it now.

“What’s your name, kid?” I asked, waiting patiently as it took him a moment to lift his head of shaggy white blond hair, his cheeks flushed and tear-stained, his winter blue eyes even more luminous with a fragile sadness.

My heart squeezed. The kid looked like a damned lost cherub who found himself cast down to the filthy earth. It was heartbreaking.

“Riley,” he murmured, his voice slightly hoarse from sobbing. “Riley Anderson.”

“I’m Charlotte Maxfield,” I told him with a half-smile, handing him the frame. “I’m sorry for tackling you to the ground but I thought you were a thief.”

He didn’t take the picture frame—just stared at it with deeply sad eyes. “I did steal it. I didn’t mean to. But the one I had—Curtis poured grape juice over it. It’s ruined and she wouldn’t give me another.”

Why this boy had Layla’s picture in the first place got my mind whirling with a few dozen theories but the glue that held this young Humpty Dumpty in one piece didn’t seem strong enough for me to test with interrogation.

“What did you do to Curtis?” I asked instead as I flipped the frame around and carefully loosened the panel that held the picture to the glass.

“N-nothing,” Riley said flatly. “He’s in seventh grade. He’s big. And he’s mean.”

I cocked my head to the side to look at him for a moment. “And I suspect that it’s all he’s got going for him. Otherwise, he’d be doing better things than dousing pictures with grape juice.”

“He’s always picking on me,” the boy grumbled.

Looking at the kid, the way his lower lip thrust out in an effort to hold his suffering back, the stubborn hunch of his shoulders that didn’t want to curl in with defeat, the resentful furrow of his brows as he contemplated his fate and the nameless, faceless person he wanted to blame for it, I saw the child I was less than a decade ago.

When you’ve been weaned on fairy tales, superheroes and happily-ever-afters only to find none out in the real world, you feel a little bit betrayed. You either become another villain or you rewrite your part in the world so that heroes may exist. At least that's what I told myself.

“I bet he does,” I told him as I slowly slid Layla’s picture out of the clips that held it in place. “Bullies do what they do because it gives them satisfaction—satisfaction they may lack in some other aspect in their lives, or simply just the satisfaction that they can do what they like.”

“And while I can sympathize with some people’s problems, there’s no reason to end your misery by starting someone else’s,” I continued, holding the photograph up in the light. Layla was beautiful in it—beautiful but surprisingly sad. “But people don’t always see it that way and sometimes, you’ll have to show it to them.”

Riley surprised me with the understanding in his eyes. “It’s hard to do that when they’re holding your head down to the floor and beating the crap out of you.”

My heart clenched as anger and compassion surged through me in equal dose. “I know it’s hard to hang on to your dignity when you’re face down on the dirt. The goal is to eventually learn how to never find yourself held beneath anyone ever again.”

The boy swiped some snot off his face and wrinkled his nose. “Sounds easier said than done.”

I laughed. “Oh, it definitely does. It took me years to figure that out. I used to get my face submerged in a bucket full of dirty mopping water. One day, I tossed the bucket at the girls who used to corner me in the bathroom whenever I was cleaning. It messed up all their pretty shoes and socks. I told them that the next time they get in my way, the bucket was going to end up on their heads. Thinking about it now, I don’t really think I could’ve managed it considering they were all taller than me but I think at that time, I was so sick of it I believed I could do anything.”

“Did they stop tormenting you?” Riley asked, his eyes wide with expectation.

I smiled. “They did. Not because I scared them off with my threats. I think, in a way, they just finally realized that I was taking away permission. It’s all about permission, Riley. People can hurt you many times in many ways but they can’t break you if you don’t let them. And when they realize they’re beating down a stone wall that’s forever sealed to them, they’ll turn around and go away with their swollen hands and bloodied knuckles with nothing to show for them except for time they never noticed passing, and time they will never have again.”

We were quiet for a long moment before I handed him the photograph. “You must have a perfectly good reason why you want this picture.”

He stared at it for a while before carefully reaching for it. “Do you like the stars?”

“I do. They’re very pretty.”

He nodded. “My science teacher told me they’re part of where we’d all come from, once upon a time. The explanations aren’t really clear as to why they’re out there while we’re stuck here on earth but somehow, they’re always a part of us—a part of our history.”

“You’re a science geek,” I teased him with a small laugh although a part of me sensed the old soul in him. “The stars are billions of miles away, you know.”

Riley smiled, his blue eyes brightening. “They are, but I can see them. Sometimes, just knowing where you come from helps—even if you can’t come home. Even if you can only look at it from afar.”

Oh, Layla. What did you take away from this little boy who already doesn’t have much?