by A. L. Woods
Penelope fiddled with the gold bracelet on her wrist, needing to do something with her hands before her mouth coaxed out a question. “Did you get the answer you were looking for?”
Raquel’s nod was so subtle I almost missed it. “Dom wasn’t lying to me this morning. It wasn’t him.”
That’s where she’d gone? To see Dom?
I made a sound that drew two sets of eyes my way, but Raquel didn’t even indulge me by swinging her stare to me. She’d just confirmed that she lied to me. Of all the fucking things she did, this one took the cake. I was pissed at myself, angry that she’d put herself in this position, and murderous when I thought of her going anywhere near Dom, never mind my struggle to digest Cash having put his hands on her. I blew out a scoff, staring up at the stained tiled ceilings above us. It was taking every ounce of mental strength in my body to remain seated. I wanted to get in my car and hunt Cash down, I wanted…to kill him? Was I that person now? Was that what loving her had turned me into? A person who communicated his rage through pain?
I had made the mistake of trusting Penelope this morning when she had reassured me that Raquel was fine. Apparently, Penelope and my girlfriend’s definition of “fine” meant going to see the guy who looked like he would have torn her limb from limb if given the chance. That was a fucking suicide mission. Raquel could have disappeared, and I would never have been the damn wiser. I wouldn’t have even known where to look. I swallowed; my mouth was dry. My fists balled in my lap, my knuckles cracking with each clench.
Dougie leaned forward, his head bending toward my ear. “Cut the meathead crap, all right?” He pumped my fists with his own. “I know you want to kill him; we all do. But your energy is putting me on edge, and I’d put money that it’s doing the same to her.”
I glowered at him, ignoring the shame that percolated inside of me. He was right, and maybe that was why she had pulled her chin away from me. I fucking hated to admit it, but he was right. “You tell me how calm you’d feel if the shoe was on the other foot,” I snapped, not bothering to modulate my volume.
“I’m sorry.”
My eyes followed the trail of Raquel’s voice. She was looking dead at me. “If I had told you this morning, you wouldn’t have let me go.”
I attempted to work at the granules of sand in my throat once more. God, all of the things I wanted to say to her right now, and none of it would have made a damn difference. She had scared the fucking shit out of me. My nostrils flared and I turned my head away. I couldn’t even look at her right now.
“Was Cash—” Penelope paused, her body fidgeting in the seat as if she already regretted starting that sentence.
Was Cash what?
“You going to finish that sentence?” I barked at her.
Penelope turned in her seat, holding out a finger in warning to me. “If you can’t calm the fuck down, I will have him throw you out.” She pointed at Dougie. “I’m not doing this with you right now.”
Huffing a breath, I slouched in my seat. Whether I liked it or not, they were both right. That fear constricted me in a grip that left me shitting bricks. Even though Raquel was here and safe, I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened.
“Cash was here waiting for me, yes,” Raquel said in reply to Penelope’s incomplete question, staring at her knitted hands in her lap. “I should have said something, but I didn’t think—”
“Yeah, you didn’t think,” I snapped.
Dougie clocked a balled fist into my shoulder, a smarting of pain resounding where he had struck. Venom dripped from his words. “Next time you open your mouth, I’m aiming for your face.”
“He’s right to be mad at me.” Raquel tucked her hair behind her ears, giving me clear sight lines of her face without the veil. “It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not,” Penelope said.
“Penelope, I lied to him.”
I sucked back a breath. She wasn’t even denying that she had.
“I lied to all of you.” Her eyes worked the room. “I thought that if I went to Dom directly, that he would tell me the truth.” She rubbed a thumb across the bandages on her palms. “He didn’t.”
Dougie knew enough about Dom to ask the question I was willing to wager was on all of our minds. “Did he hurt you?” He did me the favor of asking, because I couldn’t get my brain to get with the program and manage to ask a question that wasn’t going to inevitably piss everyone off.
A shadow passed over Raquel’s face before her head shook, a small sliver of relief working through me.
“When I got back, Cash was here.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I know that it makes you angry that I didn’t say something, but I really did think I had a handle on it.” My gaze dropped to her palms. She winced when she closed her fists at the invasion of my stare. She always thought she had a handle on things. I was still waiting for that to be true.
“Then what happened?” Penelope asked, placing a hand on her best friend’s bicep. My heartbeat quickened in my chest as I watched the tears flood her eyes again.
“You were right,” she choked out, her eyes glistening. “I got more than I bargained for when I started flipping over stones.”
Penelope looked frozen, her face growing distraught. “No.”
Raquel’s eyes lidded, the tears flowing, leaving streaks across her cheeks that I wanted to thumb away. Her nod was faint, but it was enough that Penelope discerned whatever the hell she was implying.
Penelope’s hands clapped over her mouth, a look of horror dipping her brows into an inverted V. Her hands dropped, her head hanging forward. “Kell, I considered that possibility a few times over the years, but I thought even Cash had a limit. No one would be so fucked up that they would…” The sentence seemed to get caught in her throat. Penelope looked back up, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. “I didn’t think to suggest this to you because Cash always denied it…and Dom never challenged you when you confronted him back then. He played into it…he let you think it was him.”
“It’s my fault. I was blind because I didn’t want to confront the possibility that he would do this to me,” Raquel whispered.
“Are you following any of this?” Dougie asked me. Uncertainty crossed his face as he stared at them, trying to make sense of whatever was being telepathically communicated between the women in our lives.
My molars ground together, tension burning in my shoulders. My lids dropped when Penelope swept Raquel into her arms and Raquel’s pained sobs filled the room. I stood, feeling helpless. I hadn’t been able to prevent her from whatever she had found. She looked utterly broken, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it to make it go away.
“What do you mean, you didn’t want to confront the possibility that he would do this to you?” I asked. Raquel pulled away from Penelope’s embrace Penelope still loosely gripping her. She sniffled, her knuckles working across her cheeks to sweep the tears away. I should have been the one doing that.
Dougie was right; I was being an ass.
But I couldn’t shake that persistent feeling that clawed at my insides and shrilled with warning that I had nearly lost her. That resounding thought pinballing through my head made me want to upchuck all over myself. I rested my palms flat on the table, leaning my weight forward with my head downcast.
Raquel shifting in her seat drew my attention to her. I watched as she leaned back in her chair, her lids dropping for a beat of a minute. When she opened them again, agony that reflected like a shattered mirror glinted within them. “It means,” she said, “that I know who got Holly Jane pregnant.”
Sean had every right to be angry with me—they all did. The silence was fraught in the boardroom, the heat that felt like it was kicking on every ten minutes creating a vortex of stuffy hot air that made it impossible to breathe in here. I wasn’t sure if it was just me until I looked up at Dougie, who was staring out the frosted window, and noticed a bead of sweat rolling from his hairline.
I had the truth
now, and to my dismay, I didn’t feel any better. If anything, I felt worse. The truth hadn’t set me free from my gilded cage like I had thought it would; it shattered me. It made me want to hide on the perch of my swing within the gilded cage some more. No one spoke, but their thoughts were painted on their grim expressions.
If someone who had known you for almost half your life had it in him to betray you, why would anyone else ever be an exception?
“Penelope?” Dougie’s voice summoned all of our attention. “Let’s give them a minute.” He rose to his feet, his gaze fixated on hers. She seemed torn about leaving the room, her grasp on my hand tightening, as though waiting for me to communicate to her through body language that I didn’t want her to go. I kept my hand relaxed in hers, and with a reassuring sweep of my thumb across the stretch of her knuckles, she nodded.
“I’ll just be in the hall.” She glanced at Sean. “And if he’s an asshole, I’ll fight him myself.”
“He’s going to be an asshole, but it’s fine.”
Penelope glowered in Sean’s direction. He didn’t even look at her. He sat stiffly in his chair. He leaned an elbow on the arm of the chair, his eyes pinned to a wall socket. I had heard a growl in his throat when I confessed to knowing who had gotten my sister pregnant.
I waited till the snick of the door shut behind our friends before I spoke to him. “How mad are you?”
Sean bobbed his head like he was mulling over the question, trying to gain an assessment himself. He dragged his hands over his face, then pinned me in my seat with his eyes. “Fucking furious.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” He frowned, cocking his head to the right. “Just what the fuck were you thinking?”
I didn’t think he meant for the question to come out as forcefully as it had, but it made me shiver. There was nothing I could say. There were no excuses for it, other than my belief that he would neither understand nor support my decisions and choices.
And getting to the bottom of this had, in that moment, meant more to me than anything else.
“Raquel,” I hadn’t even heard him get up, but he was standing in front of me now, his hands buried deep in his pockets. His face was a slate of confusion and hurt. “Answer me.”
I didn’t know how to answer him in a way he would be able to understand. How could he? He got to be there for his sister’s and his ma and protect them. I had failed Holly Jane; I didn’t keep her safe from my monsters or hers. An answer wasn’t as simple as explaining a difference of opinion—he wanted an explanation for something that was entrenched in twenty-eight years of my own shit.
I collected answers. I didn’t dole them out.
For a man of his stature, he looked utterly hopeless and dejected. His expression was twisted into a deep scowl, but his eyes were pleading and despondent dark pools—maybe he felt that if he stared at me long enough, maybe I would see we were on the same side.
The longer the silence stretched on between us, the more impatient his energy grew.
“Answer me, damn it.” His voice boomed in the room and possibly resonated throughout the whole building.
“I know you’re angry, but stop yelling at me,” I said, training my gaze on the stained whiteboard across the room.
Sean drove the heels of his hands into his eyes before he set off into an anxious pace across the room, practically burning tracks in the already worn carpet. I saw exactly what he saw, the bandages on my hands…the bloodied stains that marred the knees of my jeans…the hollowed look in my eyes. Cash could have killed me, and in a way he already had.
Sean’s fear was warranted, justified even.
I had felt that fear in the moment, too. Now, I felt nothing.
My nostrils breathed in Sean’s clean scent before I detected him in front of me again. His eyes swept over me as he sank into Penelope’s former seat. His legs parted and he leaned forward, his elbows pitched on his knees. He cradled the back of his neck before moving his hands to bury his face in his palms. A minute or two passed before he fused his fingers together and rested his chin on them.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
My mouth worked, but I couldn’t find the words to say. I hadn’t told him for the exact reason I said I hadn’t—because I knew he would never go along with it. The way he was looking at me right now, though, made me question if my argument had been sound.
I thought I was keeping him safe by not telling him and not bringing him with me to Cheltenham. I should have known that Dom’s loyalties were to Cash rather than to me. “I couldn’t, okay?”
“No,” he said, his eyes snapping to mine. “It’s not okay.”
I chuckled, shaking my head a little. “What do you want from me, Sean? For me to grovel? Beg for your forgiveness? I’m not going to. I did what I had to do. I respect your anger, but I’m not going to plead for your absolution.”
He leaned back, regarding me with tapered eyes. His head weaved in a nod of understanding that felt more sarcastic than sincere. “What I want is for you to be honest with me.” He held up a single finger to drive his point home and added, “Just once.”
I jumped to my feet. Blood rushed to my head, my equilibrium threatening to flatten me on my ass. “Honesty from me gets people hurt. Do you understand that? I keep secrets because—”
He cut me off. “Do you realize that your secrets hurt me?”
My jaw slackened, my arms involuntarily wrapping around my middle. “Your secrets hurt Penelope when she has to cover up your lies and tell me you’re fine when you’re anything but. I’m not sure the reason behind your why really matters that much,” he said.
I staggered backward, the backs of my knees colliding against the chair I’d been sitting in. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
“It doesn’t change shit for me, Raquel.”
A flicker of fear swept through me; I fought off the nervous tremble. What was he getting at?
“A lie is a lie,” he said. “You can dress it up or down however you want in that pretty head of yours, but your bullshit still stinks.”
My foot tapped the ground, my limbs growing restless from my anxiety.
I wanted him to stop looking at me, but he had me ensnared in the flames of his gaze. “You lie to me about absolutely everything under the sun. Where you’re going, who you’re going with, what you’re feeling. I never know what’s going on in your head.” He rubbed the corners of his mouth. “For all I know right now, you hate me.”
My heart sank, but I remained mute. This was sounding eerily close to a termination of our relationship. My inhale felt sharp in my lungs as I fortified myself for whatever came next.
I deserved whatever he decided.
I would survive.
I was living through worse right now, wasn’t I?
“All I’ve been trying to do this entire time is give you a reason to love me,” Sean continued, “and if not, at least a reason to trust me enough to let me earn your heart without walking in someone else’s shadow.”
My mouth popped open. Just say it. Tell him exactly what you told Penelope.
My jaw flapped, but no sound came out.
“I feel like I keep fucking that up somehow, and I’m not sure how to fix it. I keep letting you down, and I’m sorry for it.”
“What?” I sputtered. “This isn’t something for you to apologize for.” I had thought he was ending things, and his totally unexpected opposite reaction wrenched my heart from my chest and sent it spiraling across the boardroom, out of arm’s reach. I didn’t deserve this man who was willing to try to share the burden of my wrong with me. It wasn’t his to shoulder; it never had been.
“It is, though.” He leaned forward, the movement producing a tired squeak. “That’s the only reason I can think of for why you wouldn’t tell us. I didn’t create an environment where you felt you could be honest, and that’s on me.”
“That’s not it.”
“Then what is it, Raquel? Because I’m going nuts in
here.” He tapped the side of his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I keep playing this morning over and over again in my mind, looking for all the opportunities you had to say something but didn’t. I’m not buying what you’re selling, Hemingway.”
There were plenty of opportunities to say it; he was indulging me. “You wouldn’t have let me go, Sean. Admit it.”
His sucked his lips between his teeth, his head rocking from side to side. “No,” he said, his voice a booming baritone. “You don’t get to tell me what I would and wouldn’t have done. You didn’t give me that opportunity. Instead, you decided how I was going to react and made your decision from that.” He stood, towering over me. “But you do not get to do that. That is not a relationship.”
“I told you I wasn’t good at this. I warned you.”
“Fuck right off with that shit, Raquel. You’re not trying, either.”
My head snapped back at the blow.
“You’re so desperate to hold onto that old part of you that slinks around and tells half-truths because it feels comfortable and safe, but it’s not, Raquel. It’s slowly killing you. I’m watching it eat away at your spirit like slow eroding acid.” He pressed his clenched left fist in front of his mouth. “I could have been here for you this morning. We could have dealt with this together.”
“And what? You think I would have gotten the truth out of Cash that way? You’re his damn kryptonite.” The muscle in his jaw tensed.
“I do what I’ve always had to do in order to survive. Don’t you see that?” I argued.
“What I see,” he said, his voice eerily soft, “is someone hell-bent on destroying herself to try to make it up to her sister for something she could have never prevented.”
I swallowed over the lump in my throat. I was flooded by images of what I thought my sister looked like with my ex-boyfriend, my stomach wrenching. “I should have known they were doing that…I never…”
“You could have never known, Raquel.” He shook his head, his teeth grazing his upper lip. “Cash preyed on her; he knew what he was doing. Don’t blame yourself for something he did.”
