Phoenix Rising Rock Band: The Series

by Kathryn C. Kelly

  “I forgive you,” I whisper.

  “Get in bed and rest.” He pulls a key from his pocket and sets it on the nightstand. “Feel free to explore the house.”

  “That opens the locks on the inside and the outside?” I ask suspiciously.

  He nods.

  “Why are locks on both sides of the door?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits. “With my father anything is possible.” The awkwardness between us is a new experience. We’ve always talked to each other. “There’s an emergency ladder running between those two windows on the outside. It serves as a fire escape.” He points to the north side of the room.

  “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”

  “I want you safe,” he murmurs huskily.

  “Sloane—”

  He holds up his hands. “I don’t want to hear anymore. Allowing you to roam the house and my concern about you being trapped in case of an emergency doesn’t mean we have a future together. You’ll never have me again. I slept with Cassandra, so you sought revenge.”

  My mood takes another wild swing and I growl-sob, heading to the huge bed and crawling to the middle. “I went my entire pregnancy without you. My entire life,” I amend. “Except for…what…? Four months? So, fuck you.”

  Fury and confusion darken his eyes and I raise my chin. Our feelings are similar. Except he never had any faith in me, if he so easily believes I betrayed him.

  “I don’t need you, Sloane. Neither does Bryn.”

  “Glad to hear,” he says coldly, “because I don’t need you.”

  What’s happened to us? This is a rhetorical question. I already have the answer. My age aside, our mistrust and feelings of inadequacy destroyed Sloane and I before we really began.

  Lost, I glance away.

  He storms out and takes my heart with him.

  Georgie’s words pound in my head as I stalk to the other end of the hall, where my room is located. Room? Suite is more apt. Dad didn’t believe in just plain, fucking rooms for Mom and I. Those are on the second floor for the ordinary minions who were lucky enough to score an invitation to the great Mason mansion.

  Slamming the door closed, I head to the bar in my…What the fuck did Mom call it? An antechamber. God, these women and their fucking terms. What the fuck happened to the ‘room outside the bedroom’?

  I pour a drink, unable to obliterate thoughts of Georgie or how she looked moments ago, so heartbroken.

  Tossing back the scotch and pouring another, I thrust my fingers through my hair.

  I’m a special kind of motherfucker, refusing to back off, even after I promised myself that I would until I checked into her story about the fucking detective. She’s not denying she talked to him, which sticks in my fucking craw.

  My anger rises up and twists inside of me, so I lash out and almost immediately regret it. Fuck. This can’t be our sick cycle. It won’t be good for her or Bryn, the reason I apologized to her about her mother. The affair I had with Cassandra, though brief, was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. And Georgie’s right. She deserves answers.

  But, fuck, she destroys my determination to keep her at arm’s length. She’s so young and so alone. Her eyes beg me. To believe her. To love her. To be with her. Thanks to her big mouth, my dealings with her will be even more carefully monitored. By law enforcement—if they knew we were under the same roof, they’d throw me under the fucking jail. Also, by the media and my fans—if they knew we were under the same roof, my reputation would be shot to fuck and Georgie’s allegations would have more weight.

  She shouldn’t be anywhere near me, but I can’t stay away from her.

  Confused at my irrationality, I toss back a third drink. Used to hard living, the scotch goes down like water. In a quest to forget, it’s so easy to move to drugs because of my tolerance to alcohol.

  I need to keep my faculties. For Georgie. For Bryn.

  For me.

  She’ll be too vulnerable if I fuck myself up with booze and cocaine.

  Georgie loves Bryn. I see that. I’m sure Helen knows it, and will happily use it as leverage, just as she used my affair with Cassandra against me.

  My dick fucked that up, but I still don’t trust Helen not to betray Georgie on behalf of Cassandra.

  None of them realize Georgie still needs guidance. She has no solid footing.

  Crowell pops into my head. In her misguided trust, she believes in him. Just as she believed in me.

  Fuck.

  The sitting room door opens and Dad walks in. Ignoring his bruised lips and the swollen right side of his face, I scowl.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  He nods to the sofa behind me. “Have a seat.”

  No fucking way am I entertaining my father outside of the public eye.

  “Sit,” he repeats.

  “No. You sought me out, unfortunately.”

  A muscle ticks in his jaw and he glares at me, before heading to the bar uninvited and pouring himself a drink.

  I won’t get rid of him until I hear him out. “What do you want, Dad?”

  He sips from his glass. “Are you calmer now that she’s here?”

  Brushing past him and refusing to respond, I fix myself another scotch.

  “Does she know you were aware of what I planned to say during my interview?” he goads.

  I slam my empty glass down. “She fucking knows,” I snarl. She knows and, still, she loves me. That’s who Georgie is. Depthless in her sweetness, despite her sassiness. I’m fucking up because of this asshole and what he did so long ago.

  “What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want?” I stalk to him. “To have me charged with Steffie’s murder? To pull your support from me for the pending statutory rape charges? What?”

  His face falls and he reaches out. For some reason, we’re close to one another, a fact I don’t realize until he touches me. Repulsed and shocked, I slap his hand away.

  “Sloane,” he croaks in a pleading tone. “Son.”

  After all that’s happened, he has the fucking audacity to call me ‘son’ as a term of endearment. “Don’t call me son! Your son drowned with his sister.”

  “I had no use for Stefanie,” he begins hoarsely. “She was nothing more than an extension of her mother and Alexia was, is, a piece of work. As long as your mother wanted Stefanie around, I could deal with her.”

  It doesn’t fucking matter what Alexia Mason is or was. Nor does it matter if my mother didn’t wish to bother with Steffie. I did. Whatever Dad has to say is years too late.

  “Keep your fucking bullshit story, Dad,” I bite out. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sloane, son…” He glances away at my growl, but won’t relent on this sudden quest. “Don’t you want to know what happened? Hear my side?”

  Is he fucking kidding? “I know your fucking side. I saw it.”

  “Listen on behalf of your mother,” he implores.

  Low motherfucker bringing Mom into this. “I heard what happened with Mom and Steffie,” I snap though I’m caving. He knows my fucking weaknesses.

  For a minute, I hate Mom, too. And Steffie. And Georgie. I want nothing to do with Bryn, either. I need groupies. They’re just pussy and a means for a dick suck. I don’t give a fuck about them or what they think of me. I don’t fucking need them because they are so easily replaced. But Mom, Stefanie, Georgie, and now my daughter, matter to me. I’m not a superstar to them. I’m a son, a brother, a lover. A father. Roles held by ordinary men, who know what it means to be just a man.

  My daughter, for instance, is new and helpless, and didn’t ask to be created or to be born. That was a decision Georgie and I made, whether consciously or not, when we had unprotected sex.

  Bryn doesn’t give a fuck her daddy’s a mega-wealthy, world-famous man slut. I only have to do right by her and she’ll love me.

  “You don’t know the entire story,” Dad presses into the silence.

  “I do. Mom decided she didn’t want Steffie around. You killed he
r, and could no longer keep the hatred you had for me a secret.”

  He goes ashen and his eyes widen as if I’ve just accused him of selling national secrets. “Hate you?” he gasps. “You think…I hate you?”

  I glare at Dad for his Academy Award worthy performance. “No, you fucking love me. That’s why you’ve threatened to pin Steffie’s murder on me for all these years and fed fuel to the hatred burning between Kiln and me—”

  “No!” He points to me. “You did that. I didn’t tell you to stick your dick in your brother’s wife.”

  At the time, I felt more than justified. Now? I’m not sure. It becomes a bitter cycle of viciousness, where the wronged becomes the perpetrator and the perpetrator becomes the victim. “No, you didn’t.”

  “You’re Bryn’s son. Nothing else matters. I don’t care if you fucked Kiln’s wife. You’re our love child. But why the fuck did you return so quickly? Why didn’t you stay longer at the house, son? You weren’t supposed to see me. It was just supposed to be a horrible accident. But you returned too soon. And I knew you’d talk. The only way to keep you quiet was to accuse you of the murder if you ever went public.”

  The words slap me and I stagger back, hitting the bar and shaking the decanters and glasses. Remembering the camera dissipates my shock. He’d planned her murder and his scapegoat in advance. “Lying motherfucker. Dirty, lying bastard. You took photos of me, standing over Steffie’s dead body. You snapped me with my hands on her. You and I know I was trying to revive her, but those fucking pictures made me look like a boy guided by jealousy and revenge, who wanted to eliminate his sister.”

  That’s Dad’s story and the photos tell it succinctly.

  “What did you expect me to do?” he shouts, throwing up his hands in frustration. “Bryn demanded I take the camera because she couldn’t join us.”

  “You had this planned,” I insist. “I don’t remember seeing you with a camera that morning when you sent me back to the house.”

  “Your mother and I went to the yacht the night before. She brought it with her then, in case we ran late the next morning. It was a convenience I couldn’t overlook with your untimely return.”

  “What about the gun? You had a gun.”

  “I was going to shoot Stefanie. Did you not see the tarp? It was laid out so there’d be no blood evidence. The hit I gave her stunned her for a moment, but she got up before I fired. She was wobbly, so I pushed her into the water.”

  “If you didn’t want to blame me, why the fuck did you invite me at all?” I might’ve believed his claims of fatherly love toward me if he’d taken means to shield me from the horror of my sister’s death altogether.

  “I had to invite you. Stefanie wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

  My limbs, so agile onstage, are frozen with the horrible realization that I was the bait used to lure my beautiful sister to her death. I want to throw up.

  Heaving in a breath, he glances away. “You came back, and I had to keep you quiet, so I grabbed the camera as an afterthought. It was that or killing you. Sometimes, I wish I had. I would’ve protected you.”

  Once, I wished he had, too. Now, I’m glad he didn’t. No matter how fucked up I am, I love living.

  “I would’ve fucking drowned you if it meant saving Steffie.”

  “That isn’t true,” he denies. “You aren’t a murderer. That’s why I stopped the interview with Crowell Daniels. You would kill him to protect Georgiana. You’re like me with your mother, where that girl is concerned.”

  “The fuck I am!”

  He offers his words as a compliment, but they’re the biggest fucking insult ever.

  “Once I’m sure Georgie will keep her fucking mouth shut, we’re done. I’m leaving her.”

  “It can’t come soon enough. If it’s discovered you two are residing under the same roof, your bond will be revoked and you’ll be sent back to jail. But you don’t care as long as she’s with you.”

  With every fiber in me, I hate my father. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction of a confirmation or a denial.

  “I’ve tried to amend my sins,” he continues.

  I attempt to go around him, but he blocks me.

  “Your mother knew and she never quite forgave me. She went to her grave holding me responsible for your grief. But Alexia…Stefanie. She was a goddamn abomination. A lesbian.” He spits out the word as if it’s dirty. “I beat Stefanie until she couldn’t walk. It didn’t help, so I told Alexia to fix her! What did she do? She insulted Bryn instead. Said her children, but especially that goddamn freak, was better than you’d ever be. She called Bryn a silly doormat and swore if she had her way Bryn would leave me and take you.”

  He gives me a dull look, not commenting on my gaping mouth, stunned by the extent of his hatred. Steffie’s death had nothing to do with Mom. He killed her because she was gay. She never told me, but it makes sense. That’s why she was never involved with guys and the reason she was afraid of Dad.

  He knew.

  But I didn’t.

  “How could you? She was better than me. She…” All the grief I ever felt for her slams me. The only time I’d shed tears for her was on the day of her death, but they fall now. Because of the reason her own father took her life. Because I can only imagine the terror and the betrayal she felt in her last moments.

  And because if I hadn’t been around, he never would’ve gotten her on the boat. He baited me and he baited her.

  He touches my wet cheeks, and I recoil at the feel of his dirty hands on my skin. Dad feeds on pain, so I pull myself together. If I cry for my sister again, it’ll be away from him. I shove him aside and his eyes grow wild.

  “Don’t you understand, son! I made Alexia pay and I put Stefanie out of her misery. I did it for you and your mother. Alexia grieves to this day.”

  Once again, my father has turned my world upside down, with my future still in his blood-stained hands. “Steffie was your daughter,” I manage, unable to think of a better response.

  “Yes, and Kiln and Jaeger are my sons. Unfortunately, they are her children, as well. Alexia’s. They were all expendable. I loved you. I love you.” He catches his slip-up and retracts it. “But I’ve hated you since that day. You ruined my perfect plan. Just because you were so fucking perfect. My son. I almost lost Bryn anyway. She asked you what happened and you told her you killed your sister.

  I did? I remember little else from that day but what I witnessed.

  “She knew her boy and I had to tell her the truth.”

  “Mom knew what you did to me?”

  “No! Not about my threats. If she’d known, she would’ve taken you and left. After we were questioned by police and Steffie’s death was ruled an accident, she still looked at me like I was garbage. You were only supposed to confess to murder if I told you to. Bryn hated me for a little while and I had to fix it.”

  “Fix it?” I echo incredulously. “There was no fucking fixing murder.” My mother is as culpable as my father—as I am—for the misery he’s put me through. She had the true story and never once gave me a single fucking hint.

  “I gave her the choice. I told her I’d turn myself in, but then she’d have to live with destroying our family. I would’ve gone to jail and we no longer would’ve been seen as perfect. I swore if she and I got past Steffie’s death, I’d spend the rest of my life in her debt. It had to be the way it is. Don’t you understand?”

  “No, I don’t fucking understand either of you,” I say with bitter laughter. Mom lived another four years after Steffie’s death, long enough to see me catapult to the top of the music world. And she lived with the knowledge of my innocence while I suffered in silent fear of going to jail for murder. It being out in the open between us wouldn’t have changed much. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  He purses his lips and swipes his hands over his cheek, like a fucking child instead of an old, crazy motherfucker. “This changes nothing. I still have the photos. I still have…everything.”

&nb
sp; I think of my daughter and of Georgie, completely overwhelmed trying to care for Bryn. I went to see the baby, but the moment my gaze fell upon Georgie, my heart split between love and hate, need and want.

  “Do you want your daughter to see you as a murderer?”

  I kick a table, knocking a lamp and empty candy dish to the floor, shattering both and spraying crystal and porcelain all over the place.

  He scrapes his bluntly-cut nails across the stubble on his jaw. Looking me up and down, he curls his lip. “Think about how you feel about me. Do you want your daughter to hate you?”

  Fuck him, but he’s not manipulating me like he did Mom. “The truth will out. You can’t—”

  “I can. Because I have. And I’ll do even more. Don’t make a move. Think to ‘do the right thing.’” He uses air quotations. “Follow my lead. My direction. We’ll get these charges dropped. You and Georgiana go your separate ways. She’s done nothing for you, but distract you. I’ll allow some time off from the band, but not too long.”

  “I’m not fucking rejoining the band. I was there on your dictates, not because of my music, so fuck you and fuck Phoenix Rising.”

  Offering me a last, smug look, he backs out of the room. I stare at the place where he stood. I take a step. And another one. I walk until I’m at the door and in the hallway, planning my father’s death with each decisive move.

  A noise halts me and I glance down the hallway but find no lights on at Georgie’s end. She hates the darkness.

  With her face in my head, I make my way down the hall to where Steffie slept whenever she visited. I had to suffer fucking Kiln in my fucking room. Jaeger stayed at the cottage on the far edge of our property.

  When I open Georgie’s door with the key I never removed from my pocket, a small light in her sitting room greets me. The entire suite is white; hence its name of White Suite. How fucking original in this fucked up version of a place where fairytales are created, according to the impression Mom and Dad wanted to convey. Steffie was a princess, trapped on a horror set.