Hard Knox

by Nicole Williams

  When he paused again, I asked, “Was your sister . . . was Maggie getting into the same kind of trouble?”

  Something close to a smile formed on his face. “No, she was the exact opposite. Teacher’s pet, straight A’s, didn’t so much as show up five minutes late to class. We were opposite in every single way save for one.”

  “Which one?”

  His smile grew for a fraction of a second before it vanished. “We loved each other like crazy.” He was silent for a minute. He seemed to brace himself as he opened his mouth. “We lived close to the border—so close I could make the round trip in a couple of hours—and when I learned what kind of money I could make buying a certain legal substance down there and selling it fifty miles north where it was illegal but in high demand, all I saw was a way to keep food in Maggie’s and my stomachs, clothes on our backs, and a chance to leave my mom and fend for ourselves.”

  “Did you even know what Rohypnol was? What it was used for?” My head was pounding again.

  He swallowed then nodded. “I knew what it was for. I knew why rich college guys were buying it and that each pill I sold probably meant a life-changing experience for some girl. I wasn’t blind to the lives roofies destroys, Charlie, but I didn’t have the luxury of morals. I had Maggie to take care of, because no one else cared about her. Or me, for that matter.”

  “So you sold drugs for your sister?” I didn’t hide the doubt or accusation in my tone.

  “No, I sold drugs because I was a shady piece of shit, and I knew I could never support Maggie and myself working a part-time gig as some fry cook. All I knew was that we couldn’t count on my mom or the system to look after us, so we had to look out for each other. Selling drugs was the way the troubled, pissed-off, and fucked-up fifteen-year-old version of me went about it.” His muscles visibly tensed through his shirt. “I’ve lived to regret that choice every single day for over five years.”

  “Because she died from the same drug you were selling to support the two of you?” I shifted closer to him, one half of my body screaming as I moved.

  Shoving out of the chair, he moved into the corner of the room. He was putting space between us, physically and emotionally. “Because she died from the drugs I’d sold at that party earlier in the night.”

  I felt my eyes widen as my heart skipped a few beats. “Knox . . .” I reached for him, not knowing what to say or do.

  “I killed my sister, the only person in the world I cared about, the one I’d done everything to protect. She’s dead because some people are born with a curse tied to them, and I’m one of them.” He stared out the window at a twinkling skyline. “I told you to hate me, Charlie. I wasn’t joking. Bad things happen to the people I care about. Bad things happen because bad follows my every step. Bad things happen because that’s what I’m made of.”

  I was trembling now too, although it wasn’t from being cold. I’d known going into our relationship that Knox had a past most people would classify as less than ideal, but I’d had no idea it had been punctuated by those tragedies and horrors. “You can’t blame yourself for her, Knox. You can’t blame yourself for me.”

  His head shook feverishly. “There’s nowhere to place the blame except on me.”

  “You didn’t give your sister those drugs.”

  “No, I sold them to the asshole who slipped a few too many into her drink, and after he’d fucking raped her, she stopped breathing. I was the one who found her, naked on the cold basement floor, dead, her eyes still open. The sick fuck left her like that. He just left her, like she was a piece of trash.” His hands went behind his neck, his elbows covering his face. “I had to close my sister’s eyes knowing they’d never open again. I had to cover her knowing exactly what had just happened to her innocent, fifteen-year-old body.”

  His back was to me, his arms still braced around his face, but I could see the agony on his face from the tone of his voice. I started to cry.

  “When the police showed up, and then the coroner, I wouldn’t let go of her body. I couldn’t give her to them. So I made the trip to the city morgue with them, and when they finally made me leave, it took two Tasers and four officers to get me to let go of her.”

  “My God.” My hands balled in my lap. Too many emotions were swelling inside me. Too many to face when I was stuck in a hospital bed and needed to hit something or run to vent the overwhelming feelings. “Did they find out who did it? The guy who gave her the . . .”

  “The drugs I sold at the party?”

  I bit my cheek.

  “No, no one’s ever been charged with Maggie’s rape and murder. After questioning some of the people at the party and running in circles for a week, the police claimed they’d done their due diligence, and her file became a cold case. What really happened was a young girl from subsidized housing who had a well-known crackhead mother and a just as well-known fuck-up of a brother died at a party where illegal substances were being distributed, used, and abused. Those fuckers wrote her off as another future crackwhore that they wouldn’t have to repeatedly clean off the streets one day. They wrote off my sister’s life. The only life in that whole goddamned place that had a future that didn’t end in some back alley.” His head fell against the window. He looked like he’d consider jumping from it if a thick piece of glass weren’t in his way. “They wrote her off,” he whispered.

  “Was that the night you got arrested?” My words were so quiet I wasn’t sure if he could hear me from where he seemed to be drowning in his own world.

  But he nodded. “They weren’t going to. Apparently they weren’t really in the mood to arrest anyone after a girl was found dead in a basement, but I turned out my pockets, and a wad of cash and pills came tumbling out. They couldn’t turn a blind eye quite as easily.”

  “Why did you turn yourself in if they weren’t going to arrest you?”

  “Because I deserved to be punished,” he said, his voice as dead-sounding as his face looked. “I wanted them to charge me with her murder. I wanted to spend the rest of my miserable life decaying behind bars, but since I had no shortage of alibis, they only booked me with what they could make stick. I did six months, was released, went back to my mom’s shithole of an apartment, loaded a bullet in a gun, and pressed it to my temple. My finger was just brushing the trigger when someone knocked on the door.”

  I didn’t want Knox to see me crying—I didn’t want him to censor his story because he thought I couldn’t handle it—so I wiped my eyes with the back of my arm.

  “For whatever reason, I answered the door and found the only guy on the police force worth a damn standing there. He was holding an evidence bag with Maggie’s necklace inside. He didn’t say a word, just put it into my hand, and curled my fist around it before leaving.”

  “It was like she knew. Wasn’t it?” I had to swipe at my eyes every few seconds now. The girl who’d been rumored as being incapable of crying had turned into a sobbing open wound.

  He nodded. “That’s what it felt like. So after putting the gun away, I packed a few things and left that apartment and everything inside it for good. I slipped Maggie’s necklace on later that night before falling asleep outside some rest stop, and I never took it off. Until that night I put it on you.” His arms fell back at his sides as he turned to face me.

  So much was written in the lines creasing his face—so much in the fine print. There was apology, shame, guilt . . . love.

  “Shit,” he said, studying my face. “You’re crying.”

  I’d forgotten to wipe my eyes. I mustered up a smile. “So are you.”

  “I don’t cry,” he replied softly.

  Another tear splashed into my lap. “Neither do I.”

  When he made it halfway across the room toward me, he stopped.

  “That’s why you’re studying forensic science, isn’t it? Because you want to catch the people who commit crimes like the one that happened to your sister?” It was amazing how a few new pieces of the puzzle could bring meaning to the
whole picture. I’d picked up hundreds of pieces this year, but the ones I’d needed most were the ones I was only just being handed.

  “That’s why, yes,” he said, stepping closer. “After I moved out, I was a tumbleweed, drifting wherever the wind took me, wherever circumstance guided me. For a year, I just floated from place to place, job to job, face to face. One year to the day after her death, I fell asleep shit-faced after downing a couple bottles of whatever alcohol had the highest proof for the least amount of money at the liquor store close to the park I was camping in. I dreamed about Maggie a lot, but in this dream, she was yelling at me, screaming her lungs out. She was getting on my case that since she was dead, I had a responsibility—a duty—to live for the both of us. I was the one with a pulse, but I was living like I was dead.” He rolled his neck a few times like he had to push himself to keep talking. “Maggie was always real quiet and soft-spoken, so to have a dream about her wringing my neck and damaging my eardrums left an impact. Especially having it on the anniversary of the day she’d been murdered.”

  “Valentine’s.” The word slipped from my mouth, another piece fitting into place. “She died on Valentine’s Day, didn’t she?”

  He exhaled like it hurt him to do it. “Yeah. At a Valentine’s party her brother had decided to throw, she snuck in to get her first experience with a guy—no doubt she’d hoped to hold some nice boy’s hand—and she got drugged, raped, and left for dead.”

  “God dammit,” I cursed under my breath, hitting the mattress with my fist. His story was too much to take without hitting something. “That was why you were so insanely pissed when I went to that party without you.”

  “Exactly. Maggie died on Valentine’s. You went to a party on your own on Valentine’s when we knew someone was targeting you . . .” The vein running down his forehead popped through his skin. “Insanely pissed is an understatement.”

  “Knox . . .” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’m sorry for your sister and your shitty childhood, and I’m sorry for not making this year easier on you. I’m sorry I doubted you, and I’m sorry that you found me the way you did with Beck . . .” I couldn’t remember much from that night, but I could imagine how Knox had felt stumbling into another basement to find another girl he cared for in the same bad situation he’d found his sister in. “I’m sorry for so goddamned much, I can’t even get it all out right now.”

  His head didn’t stop shaking. “You don’t get the ‘sorry’s. Not a single one of them. I get them all, Charlie. I deserve them all.”

  I whipped my head around with him. Yes, he had things to be sorry for, but so did I—there was no shortage of them either. “Knox—”

  “Which brings us back to the metal box you found in my desk drawer,” he interrupted.

  I kept my mouth closed, but he didn’t get to end the conversation about ‘sorry’s by claiming them all.

  “What you saw in that box was what I’ve managed to collect over the course of three years at Sinclair. None of it was mine originally. I found and swiped it all from frat parties. I knew the guys in the frats had to have a part in it, but questioning, watching, and threatening wasn’t getting me far. They might have wanted me at their parties, but I wasn’t one of them, so unless it was about girls, sports, or beer, they didn’t talk to me.”

  All of those campus reports that Neve had shown me months ago took on a different meaning. Instead of appearing as a hot-headed alpha who couldn’t control himself, Knox was a man in search of the truth. The guys he’d threatened and pinned against walls weren’t victims but suspects.

  “When I had that dream about Maggie pretty much ordering me to make my life count for the both of us, I partially interpreted that as an order to commit part of my life to making sure fewer girls ended up like she did. Once I’d turned over the so-called leaf, took my GED, and got into Sinclair, I noticed right off the bat that these ‘harmless’ frat parties were anything but. At first I wanted to ignore it, pretend it didn’t exist, act like I’d left that part of my life in the past, but I couldn’t shake the voice inside me reminding me that every time I turned away, it could mean another situation like Maggie’s. Pretending I didn’t know a thing about the drug or how people acted when they’d taken some or how they acted when they were trying to drop it in someone’s drink wasn’t worth it. At every party, I’d see her face and remember why I didn’t get to pretend I was some clueless college kid.”

  I shifted in bed, waiting for him to look at me. I now knew why sometimes when he’d looked at me it had been like he was seeing someone else. “Until the night we met and you really did see Maggie. Or at least a girl who could have passed as her twin.”

  When Knox looked away, I wasn’t sure if it was because he felt guilty or because he just couldn’t stand to look in my face while we discussed his sister. “When I saw you that night, I was convinced someone had slipped something into my drink. I knew of Charlie Chase, but I didn’t know what she looked like, so I asked one of the guys at the party who you were. After I went through the checklist and realized I wasn’t drugged, I wondered if you were Maggie incarnate, coming to kick my ass over what was going on at Sinclair.” A small smile went into place as he stared at the floor. “But it turned out it was just some girl who looked like Maggie coming to kick my ass. Repeatedly. Even right this very moment.”

  I wanted to smile with him, but I couldn’t. “That’s what the attraction was, wasn’t it? I looked like her. You saw me as your second chance to save the girl you lost.”

  His brows pinched together when he looked up. “That might have been what got me to come up and talk with you that night, but that’s not what’s kept me attracted to you. I noticed you because you looked like Maggie, but I fell for you because you were Charlie Chase.”

  Now that smile came easier. “Are you saying I’m nothing like your sister?”

  Knox laughed. “No, nothing at all.” He laughed again when I narrowed my eyes at him. Throwing his arms at me, he said, “You’re proving my point right now. She was sweet, patient, quiet. She followed the rules, didn’t cuss, and kept the peace instead of causing a scene.”

  “I’m those things too,” I fired back before rethinking it. “Occasionally.”

  “Rarely,” Knox said under his breath. “My point is that I liked her for the person she was, and I like you for the person you are. You may look like her, but you’re not her, and I’m fully aware of that. I’m not trying to substitute you for her.”

  “Good.” I shifted again, trying to get comfortable, but as I felt like one giant, gaping wound, no position was more comfortable than another. “It’s strange, don’t you think, that I look so much like her?”

  Knox’s gaze drifted out the window again to study the starlit sky. “When I think about it, no, it doesn’t seem so strange at all.”

  I looked out at the night sky with him, and I smiled. Maybe he was right. Maybe it wasn’t so strange we’d been brought together, as if fate or providence . . . or someone up there looking down on us . . . had a hand in it.

  We’d covered so much. My head had been pounding when I’d woken and was only pounding harder from everything I’d learned since. But there were still a couple questions that hadn’t been answered. I still had to know a few more things before I either fell back asleep or friends and family—or the police needing a report—busted in. “If I didn’t tell you where I was going that day, how did you find me? How did you know I’d be in the Sigma Nu’s basement?”

  Reaching into his pocket, Knox pulled out something. He held a familiar piece of jewelry. “The necklace.”

  My eyebrows lifted. “The necklace led you to me?” I might have been okay with believing in higher-powers with match-making proclivities, but this was something else.

  “Well,” he swallowed, “the tracker inside it did.”

  He was already grimacing before my mouth dropped open. “You were tracking me? You installed a tracker in the necklace you put a
round my neck?” That might not have broken any real laws, but it broke a hell of a lot of trust laws.

  “When I put the necklace on you, there wasn’t a tracker in it.” He looked at me like I was crazy. I was looking at him the same way. “I just drilled it in there while you were asleep a month or so ago. I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t wear it if I could track your every move, but it wasn’t like that. I did it in case there was an emergency . . . which was exactly what I had to use it for.”

  I was still too flabbergasted to feel any gratitude. “Not cool, Knox. You can’t justify breaking someone’s trust just because you were doing so to save their life.”

  “I can justify it.” He crossed his arms and came closer. “I would justify anything if it meant saving the life of a person I cared about. I could justify going to prison, killing someone, stealing, anything, if it meant saving you or—God help me—saving Maggie. You feel free to justify whatever you want, but you can’t tell me what I can or cannot justify when it comes to you.”

  His words dimmed my anger but didn’t deplete it. “I’m too independent for that, Knox. I’m too independent to be tracked and followed and wrapped in protective-boyfriend bubble wrap.”

  “I don’t expect you to be anything less than who you are. Independence and all.” He took another step closer until I could almost touch him. “But just because you’re independent doesn’t mean you have to go it alone.”