by Megyn Ward
Come with me now and come quietly, or I’ll kill your children.
Like Logan said, he preyed on single mothers.
Like Silver.
Like my mom.
And also like Logan said, I’ve been Googling his father and scaring the shit out of myself since I got home from work. I barely wasted time changing out of my business casual slacks and top before I glued myself to my laptop and typed his name into the search engine.
Matthew Collins.
I skimmed over the gruesome details about the murders because I’m not one of those people who’re fascinated by this kind of stuff but mostly because it’s not the father I’m looking for information on.
I’m not obsessed with serial killers.
I’m obsessed with a serial killer’s son.
There’s precious little mention of Logan. Only that he was turned over to social services when his father was apprehended and that—
The next article I read catches my attention and holds it. Makes it hard to breathe.
Because this one is about Logan.
Authorities say Matthew Collins Jr., age 10, was found wandering around Logan airport at approximately 1 AM, Wednesday morning, bearing obvious signs of restraint and starvation. When approached by airport security and asked the whereabouts of his parents, the youth reported that his father murdered his mother “a while ago” and that he “keeps killing the other moms too.”
The Family Man task force was quickly called in to question the boy. Authorities were dispatched to the Collin’s residence and an
arrest of Matthew Collins Sr. was subsequently made. Authorities are still trying to piece together how Collins Jr. ended up at the airport and how he escaped captivity. While an arrest has been made, the investigation into The Family Man case is ongoing.
Next to me on the couch, my phone lets out a chime, signaling a text message:
Silver: I hope you were
serious about chicken
Piccata because this kid
is about to drive me crazy.
I laugh, despite the heaviness in my chest, and shoot back a quick reply.
Me: I’m so down for
chicken piñatas. Tell
Noah I’ll be there in
fifteen.
Forcing myself to shut my laptop, I set it aside and do what I should’ve done yesterday.
I call my mom.
I won’t lie—when I’m dumped into voicemail, I’m a little bit relieved. “Hey, Mom,” I say. “I’m sorry about—well, you know what I’m sorry about. Anyway, I just want you to know that I’ve got everything under control. I’m going to fix it, so you don’t have to worry. I love you—maybe if you don’t hate me, we can see a movie on Friday?”
I hang up and toss my phone back onto the couch with a sigh because I just lied to my mom. I have absolutely nothing under control, and I have no idea what I’m doing where Logan Bright is concerned or how I’m going to fix the mess I made.
Twenty
Logan
The Back Bay apartment is amazing.
Like I’d be some sort of idiot if I turned it down amazing.
“And Gilroy wants to just give this place to you?” Jase calls down from the loft area. “Rent free?”
I called him after Patrick left and asked him to come get me. He was halfway through giving me some excuse about not being able to because he was working late at the office when I told him that I wanted to check out a new apartment. Jase was knocking on my door and dragging me to his car fifteen minutes later.
“No. Not give.” For some reason, the idea of it annoys me. “He wants me to take care of the place for him.”
“Yeah, but why this place?” Jase asks, from up above. “I mean, the guy has a couple dozen rental properties around the city. What’s so special about this one that he needs on-site management?” Like me, he’s trying to find the strings. Find the places I might get tangled.
“Beats the hell out of me.” I shrug even though he can’t see me on my way to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the city. “Doesn’t matter,” I tell him, crossing my arms over my chest with a frown. “I’m gonna tell him no.”
“If you tell him no, you’re a dumbass,” Jase informs me, echoing the same sentiment that’s been running around my head since I walked in the door. “Steam shower. Vaulted ceilings. Open floorplan. Chef’s kitchen—this place is better than my apartment.”
“Mmm, a chef’s kitchen—so I can prepare my gourmet cereal and hot pockets in style.” Dropping my arms, I turn away from the windows and survey the space with an odd mixture of disdain and longing. “Like I just said, it doesn’t matter, man—I can’t live here.”
“Why?”
I look up to see Jase leaning over the railing of the loft overhead. The loft that would be the perfect place to set up my computers. Maybe a reading chair.
Shit.
Dropping my arms, I fling them out in frustration. “You know why—stop asking stupid questions.”
In true Jase fashion, he laughs at my outburst like I’m a toddler, having a tantrum. “What’s your problem with Tob?” Jase asks me like he hasn’t been around, watching the two of us butt heads for the past eighteen years. “I mean, I get it—the billionaire Alpha male vibe he’s got going is a bit much but—”
“That’s not it,” I tell him, lifting my hand to push my fingers through my hair. When Jase just stares down at me like I’m a liar, I drop my hand and sigh. “Okay—that’s some of it, but that’s not—”
“He saved us, you know.” The way he says it tells me everything I need to know about what side of the fence Jase is on when it comes to Tob and me. “He saved you. Saved me. Gray—he didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to make us a family. Make us brothers because we both know Tob would’ve survived that place without us. He would’ve been just fine without a bunch of fucked-up, sniveling shits like us hanging around his neck, making his life miserable.”
“I know that.” I take a step back. Feel my neck go stiff like Jase just punched me in my mouth because maybe that’s it—at least part of the reason why I fight Tobias so much. Why I can’t accept the help he keeps offering me. Why I can’t let myself be grateful for the sacrifices he made for me. Because I didn’t deserve them then, and I don’t deserve them now. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I dunno.” Still glaring down at me, Jase straightens himself from the railing to cross his arms over his chest, his rigid posture a mirror image of my own. “Sometimes, I wonder—especially when you’re acting like an ungrateful little bitch.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you don’t know me.” Hearing it out loud stings, probably more than Jase intended, because I owe Tobias more than any of us. All those years ago, I owed him the truth of who I was and I never gave it to him. He took me in when no one else would. Got me out of Brighton. Made me his brother and all I’ve done is give him lie after lie in return.
He doesn’t even know my real name.
“I know more than you think I do,” Jase tells me, the impossible blue of his eyes flashing down on me like lightning. “You’re not the only one of us with secrets, you know. You’re not the only one who did shit or had shit done to him that he wishes he could forget.” It’s as close as he’s ever come to talking about his life before Brighton. As close as he’s ever come to exposing the wounds that being who he was before he was Jase Bright opened up in him. “We all carry shit—that’s all I’m saying.” He shakes his head and looks away from me for a second before resettling his gaze on my face. “We all carry shit, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.” This has moved past my aversion to accepting Tobias’s help. The fact that I butt heads with him every chance I get. This is about the fact that even though I know I would’ve died without them, I continue to hold my brothers at arms’ length. My refusal to let them in because I know, deep down, that if they knew the truth about me—who and what I really am—they never would’ve love
d me.
Never would’ve made me one of them.
“Okay.” I spit the word at him on a scoff because I’m seconds away from caving. Seconds away from digging up every fucked-up secret I have buried and dragging them into the light. “You want to share, Dr. Phil—you first.”
Jase keeps staring down at me for a few seconds before he moves away from the railing and disappears into the upstairs loft space. I expect to see him on the stairs. Expect to hear him tell me to go fuck myself. Keep being weird, you fucking weirdo.
That’s not what happens.
“My mother’s name was Mercy.” His voice rings out, floating down to me from the open loft space above. “Youngest daughter of a strict Southern Baptist preacher and a piano teacher from Ft. Dodd, Florida. She was beautiful—the kind of beautiful that doesn’t seem real—and spoiled because of it. Everything came easy to her. Everything just fell into place, so when she got it into her head that she was going to move to New York City to become a model, she figured it’d be as easy for her as everything else. When she turned eighteen, Mercy packed her bags, stole one hundred seventeen dollars from her mom’s purse, and took off.” The tone of Jase’s voice is flat. Lifeless. Like he’s reading from the pages of a book about someone else’s life. “She made it as far as Boston before she ran out of money and turned her first trick and decided it wasn’t such a bad way to make a living. New York model dream on the back burner, she registered with a few escort services, posing as a college girl. She lived the highlife, bouncing from sugar daddy to sugar daddy, until, according to her, one of them introduced her to heroin.” He makes a sound, hollow and ugly. It takes me a second to realize it’s supposed to be a laugh. “To be perfectly fair, I have serious doubts that Mercy was as wide-eyed and innocent as she made herself out to be. The only thing I know for an absolute fact when it comes to my mother is that she was a liar, a drug addict, a prostitute, and that she absolutely hated me and blamed me for every wrong turn she took in her life—even the ones she took before I was born.”
Jase appears at the top of the stairs, taking them one at a time in slow, measured steps. “When she found out she was pregnant with me, she was flirting with thirty and showed every hard-living minute of it.” At the foot of the stairs, Jase moves past me without looking in my direction, pointing himself toward the wet bar tucked into the corner of the living room. “Her outsides were finally starting to match her insides, and even though she’d been downgraded from topflight escort services to Craig’s List personals long before I came along, I got the blame for that too,” he says while, back to me, he hunts through one of the cabinets for a clean glass. “When she finally realized she was pregnant, Mercy was too far along for an abortion. According to her, she tried to get rid of me on her own, but it didn’t take—I was bound and determined to fuck up her life. Four months later, I was born, and for reasons I’m sure neither of us never really understood, she took me with her when she left the hospital. Mostly, she just ignored me. Threw me food every once in a while. Popped me upside the head if I got in her way, so I didn’t. I learned to live small. Stay out of her way, and she returned the favor by pretending I didn’t exist. That changed when I was six.” Lifting a bottle from a cluster of them behind the bar, he turns it to read the label. Finding it satisfactory, Jase spins the cap off and gives himself a long, healthy pour. “She used to turn tricks in this seedy little motel off the highway. Make me sit in the bathroom while she did her business. I’d run the faucet and stick my fingers in my ears until it was over—only this time, when we showed up, it wasn’t Mercy the john wanted. It was me—offered her triple.” He lifts the drink he poured himself and slams it in a few hard gulps. “She handed me over to him without a second thought and I’m pretty sure she hated me for that too.” Dropping the glass, Jase repeats the process, refilling the glass only to drain it dry again. “She got arrested for drug possession when I was eight. You know the rest.” I can hear the lie, even if he can’t. There’s more. Things Jase isn’t telling me. It makes me wonder what they are. How bad they can be if after telling me what he just told me, he’s still unwilling to say them out loud.
Jase sets his glass down, the quiet click of it against the bar as loud as a gunshot, and finally turns around to let himself look at me. I’m not sure what I expect to see. Something ugly. Something twisted. As ugly and twisted as the things he just told me—but I don’t.
All I see is Jase.
His perfect face.
His impeccably styled blond hair.
His electric blue eyes.
When potential foster parents came to Brighton, it was always Jase they fought over. Jase they wanted to take home. Jase they wanted to save. They’d take one look at his angel face and instantly decide that he was the one who was worth saving. They were so blinded by the way he looked that they never saw how much he hated them for falling in love with the part of himself he despised most.
I’m suddenly certain he looks like his mother, and I understand how much that hurts. What a shot to the gut it must be, every time he looks in the mirror. To see his reflection and hate the thing staring back at him.
“I’m sorry.” It’s a stupid thing to say. Words so woefully inadequate that I instantly hate myself for giving them a voice.
“Shut up,” he scoffs as he rounds the bar, coming toward me. “I didn’t tell you my sad fucking story, so you’d feel sorry for me, Dr. Phil—I told you so you’d stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Moving past me, Jase heads toward the door. “I don’t know what’s going on with you. I don’t know what it is that you keep running from, and right now, I absolutely don‘t fucking care because you know what, asshole? We all have demons. We all carry shit.” Reaching for the knob, he pulls the door open before aiming a quick sharp glare at me over his shoulder. “I’ve got a trip to pack for, you can find your own way back to that rat hole you call an apartment,” he tells me before stepping into the hall and slamming the door shut between us.
Twenty-One
Jane
“They’re still too thick.” Noah gives the lemons I’m slicing a critical squint before lifting his gaze to my face, the tiniest Gordon Ramsay I’ve ever seen. I’m sure at any moment, he’s going to call me a fucking donkey and kick me out of his kitchen. “Do you want me to do it?” he asks, his implication clear—he’s given me a task so simple a six-year-old can do it and I’ve proved to be sorely lacking.
Scowling, I sweep the lemons off the cutting board and into a bowl, already full of my mess-ups. “No, I can do it...” I snatch another lemon from the counter in front of me and roll it between my palm and the cutting board the way he showed me. “But for the record, chicken piñatas are stupid.”
Noah looks at me, wide-eyed, like I just slapped him across the face with an oven-mitt. “You’re just—”
Before he can launch the first volley, there’s a knock on the door and I reach for the dish towel I have tossed over my shoulder. “I’ll get it,” I tell him, wiped my hands clean on my way to answer it. “And don’t you dare touch my lemons, Noah James,” I call over my shoulder on my way to the door.
“They’re my lemons and you’re ruining them,” he informs me from the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over his chest, lower lip poked out in a pout.
Hand on the knob, I pull the door open with a laugh. Still watching Noah pout over my shoulder, I see his arms drop away from his chest and his pout shift into a grin. “Uncle Logan,” he shouts as he streaks across the living room to shove me out of the way, just as I turn away from him to look at the person on the other side of the now open door. “What’re you doing here?”
Stumbling back a bit, I watch as Noah scrambles up Logan’s leg. At the halfway mark, he reaches down to heft Noah up until they’re face to face. “I came to see you,” he says, his gaze finds mine over Noah’s shoulder, one corner of his mouth kicked up a little higher than the other in a grin that I’ve never seen from him before. “But it looks like you’re busy.”
It
’s suddenly, very, very hot in here.
“We’re making chicken Piccata,” Noah tells him with an exasperated frown. “Can you teach Jane how to cut the lemons.”
“I don’t need your uncle or anyone else for that matter, teaching me how to cut anything,” I say, careful to keep my tone as level as possible.
“You’ve wasted four lemons,” Noah informs me in a tone that tells me he doubts my ability to grasp simple subtraction, his little arm slung around Logan’s neck like it was made to hang there. “You only ordered six from the store—and the wrong capers.”
Because I’ve never been so close to strangling a six-year-old in my life, and because the way Logan is watching me makes me feel like I’m seconds away from bursting into flames, I leave them both standing in the doorway, turning away from it to make my way back to the kitchen without bothering to defend my caper-buying choices. Giving my hands a quick rinse in the sink, I pick up my knife and steady the lemon I left on the cutting board. Behind me I can hear Noah chattering a mile a minute while he leads Logan into the kitchen.
“Where’s your mom and dad?” he asks over the scrape of one of the stools being pulled away from the breakfast bar. He sounds uncomfortable. Like the thought that he might be here alone with Noah and me make him feel that way. I can feel the weight of his gaze on my back and I have to fight the urge to turn around and look at him. Instead, I set the tip of my knife into the lemon and slice off the cap of zest and pith on the end of it.
“Fighting in their bedroom,” Noah says in his usual, matter-of-fact tone. “Only dad calls it negotiating.”
“Negotiating.” Logan laughs. A real laugh that goes straight to my belly and flips it inside out. “Yeah—that sounds like Tob,” he says. “What are they negotiating about this time?”
