Razed

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Razed Page 23

by Shiloh Walker


  Keelie blinked, then shook her head. “A couple of kids jumped you . . . and you took pictures. Why?”

  “So I’d remember. Every time I saw them, I wanted to remember what they’d done.” He shrugged. “You know those goofy kid movies where they show the kid daydreaming about turning into a superspy or something, coming back and taking out everybody who was ever mean to him? That was me. I had this super-cool TV-star little brother. And I was the gawky geek in glasses who’d just gotten jumped riding home on his bike. I wanted to remember what a wimp I was, who’d done it . . . because I wouldn’t be that way forever and I didn’t want to forget it.”

  She reached up, touched her fingertips to the black frames. “I don’t see anything gawky here.”

  “You didn’t know me twenty-five years ago.” He brushed a kiss over her forehead. “Anyway, I had really good grudge mojo. I bet you know what that is like.”

  Keelie lowered her lashes, fought the urge to pull away and hide.

  He saw too much. Way too much.

  Yeah, she carried a grudge very well. Unwilling to think about it, she glanced back at the computer, resting her head on his chest. “That big guy in the pictures . . . was he one of them?”

  “Nah. Just another bully. I didn’t even meet him until high school. Those two, Rick and Rodney, were the bane of my sixth-grade year, but that was the worst of it. I worried more that they’d go after my brothers. Once, they actually were messing with Zach and I went after them—something snapped. I knocked two of Rick’s teeth out and Rodney had to pull me off. They moved away that summer. Was the happiest day of my life.”

  “I bet.” Feeling helpless and angry, she reached up to touch him, then stopped, curling her hand into a fist. “How did your folks handle it?”

  A shutter fell across his eyes. “They never found out.”

  As he pulled back, her jaw fell open.

  “What?”

  He crossed the floor and picked up his laptop. Over his shoulder, he looked at her. “You heard me. That was the only time they ever did any real damage. I was the first one to get home and I locked myself in my room. Mom got home with Zach and Seb. Seb was still a baby so he was there with her all the time. Dad showed up a little while later with the twins. Zach comes to get me about dinner and I picked a fight with him, let him catch me in the eye.”

  Keelie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re telling me that you let your brother take the fall?”

  “No. I’m the one who got in trouble.” He met her stare levelly, his mouth quirked up in the faintest of smiles. “I elbowed him in the gut and called him a pussy, told him to leave me alone. He was getting razzed all the time about being on the show and some of his friends had been teasing him. It was the exact thing to set him off. He shoved me back and I turned around to hit him in the stomach. That was all it took. He laid into me and I didn’t bother to fight back. Mom walked in and pulled him off me.”

  She stared, speechless, as he walked across the floor and put his laptop up. Finally, her brain remembered how to make words and she was able to sputter out, “Why would you do that? You should have told them about those little assholes.”

  For a moment, he stood there. Light shone in the glass windows behind him, casting him into shadow as he stared down at the floor. Finally, he turned and came toward her.

  “I can give you a lot of reasons. I was embarrassed. I was afraid if they got in trouble, they’d do it again. Or that they might go after Zach—or worse, Trey and Travis.” His expression was serious, his eyes grim. “I could tell you that Mom was sick a lot that year—she’d miscarried.”

  Shock slammed into her and she fumbled for anything to say to him but he didn’t even pause.

  “It was a girl.” He brushed her hair back. “They’d always wanted another child and Mom had hoped for a daughter. This was a girl, and she miscarried. She couldn’t stop bleeding. They had to do a hysterectomy. She never did get the little girl she wanted.”

  Curling her hand over Zane’s wrist, she held on. “That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to know.”

  “Oh, I know that.” A mocking smile curled his lips. “I know full well if I were to tell them now, they’d hand me my ass. But I still don’t want to tell them. I hid it. All of it.”

  “How could you hide the fact that you came home with a black eye, and bruises all over you? How do you hide that?”

  “The first few times . . .”

  “The first few.”

  She curled a hand in his shirt, wanting to shake him, hit him, scream. Something. “The first few . . . Zane, how long did all of this go on?” But she wondered why she’d even asked. She’d seen the pictures, the way he aged from barely touching puberty to hovering at the edge of manhood.

  “Too long. Or maybe just long enough. I was one of the lucky ones, Keelie. I figured out how to make it stop on my own, and I did it without hurting myself.”

  “How did you hide it?” She gaped at him, hardly able to believe they were having this conversation. Having this kind of conversation with this man she’d always thought was . . . smart. No. Beyond smart, but he’d done something like . . . “I don’t get it. Why hide it? How?”

  “I already told you,” he said gently. “I was afraid to admit it. Ashamed. Embarrassed. I couldn’t let myself. There’s no easy answer to that, Keelie. As to how? I did it the same way I did the first—picking a fight with one or a couple of my brothers.” He shrugged. “But then . . .”

  He stopped, tension creeping into his body as he moved away. She wanted to go to him, needed to. But she held herself still, arms wrapped around herself. “It happened on set once. One mom had brought her entire family—her daughter had a small part for two or three episodes. I think she was hoping one or two of her other kids would catch somebody’s eye.”

  A sardonic smile curved his lips. “They did, but not the way she hoped. The oldest two were closer to my age. They were two or three years older than me. They were huge. I mean like linebacker big. They were giving Abby grief and Zach told them to leave her alone. One of them acted like he was going to push him.”

  That was it, Keelie realized.

  That was the one thing they couldn’t do. After all, everybody has a stopping point.

  Zane’s stopping point was his family.

  She hadn’t found hers so easily, and by the time she had, there had been damage done.

  Rubbing her hand over her heart, she listened as he continued to speak. “He towered over Zach. Almost six feet, and he was just huge. I got in his face, told him to back the hell off. Abby was almost in tears, Zach was ready to beat on both of them. A couple of the crew members saw it, told the kids to cool off or they’d be forced to leave. The kids laughed like they were just teasing and the crew gets back to work, Abby and Zach and I go off to get more pictures—that’s the main reason I was there. Then they come at me from behind. I was outside by then and everybody is busy. One of them hit me. I remember that and then nothing for a minute or two. When I sat up, both of them were on the ground, one of them is out cold and the other one was puking his guts up. There was one of the guys who helped out in wardrobe. He looked at me and held out a hand.”

  “Mr. Miyagi style?” Keelie forced a smile. “Did he turn you into the Karate Kid?”

  He glanced back at her, shook his head. “No. I had to beg him not to tell my mom. He was nineteen so that probably helped. Plus . . . he’d been where I was. Knew what it was like. Told me that if I was going to make myself into a punching bag, then I either needed to learn how to take a hit better or maybe find something else to do. His name was Tony.”

  “So Tony taught you how to fight?”

  “Nah.” Zane shrugged. “He showed me a few things, then told me to get my skinny ass into the gym, start lifting weights—and he told me about a guy who taught martial arts. I nagged Mom for months before she let me join.”

  “How old were you when that happened?” She thought of all the pictures, how many times he
’d been battered.

  “Fifteen.”

  “And when did you stop being a punching bag? When did you stop being everybody’s victim?”

  “Everybody’s victim?” He turned and looked at her. “That’s not what I was. I was the troublemaker who couldn’t leave it alone.”

  “I . . .” She scowled. “I don’t get it.”

  * * *

  He could see that.

  This was more than Zane had wanted to talk about, more than he’d wanted to explain. But there was no way to turn back now. Self-conscious, he went back to the laptop once more, pulled up the two files. He set up the galleries so the images could be pulled up side-by-side.

  “That was Haley Klein,” he said, pointing to the girl who’d been pinned at the locker. It was weird. He could remember her name. He remembered almost all of the ones he’d captured like this. He didn’t remember the ones who’d pounded on him after. “She was in my ninth-grade English class. Super smart. Broke the grade curve. Her mom was . . . well. Her mom had a reputation. Haley got teased about it a lot. That asshole was saying things my mother would still smack me over—as she should. I took the pictures. That was the first time I took pictures like that. Then I put my camera up. They never even saw me, not until I blocked them from going after her. He had me up against the locker before I could even think of what to do next. I had more guts than brains at that point. He busted my lip, would have done worse but teachers showed up and he disappeared in the crowd. They asked what had happened—I lied, said somebody crashed into me and I smashed into the lockers on accident. He started threatening me, showing up wherever I was with his friends . . . and I started leaving copies of those pictures of him bothering Haley everywhere. A couple of teachers found them.”

  Keelie slid him a look, her brow going up. “Clever. Did they know you’d taken the pictures?”

  “Probably suspected, but I lied, through my teeth. They couldn’t prove it. It’s pretty obvious he’s not asking her to the spring formal in the picture so the school came down on him. I had a few more of him with other students and every time he showed up around me again, I just started dropping more of them. He got the point. That summer, he ended up getting arrested. He’d jumped a kid near his house but he didn’t realize it was a cop’s kid.”

  “Ouch.”

  Zane flipped to the next set, the girl at the table. “Lisa. I don’t remember her last name. She was a year younger than the rest of us, smarter than almost all of us. She got treated like that nonstop. He ended up getting pulled into the office over her—her parents saw the pictures and reported him to the police. He left her alone after that.”

  Keelie worried the neckline of her shirt.

  “That’s Malcolm. He was sick a lot. Asthma put him in the hospital a few times and he caught the flu our senior year—it killed him.” Zane stopped for a minute, just remembering. Unable to say much more, he just flipped to the pictures of his black eye and busted mouth. “They tried to shove him in a locker. They’d done it before. I grabbed somebody’s backpack and swung it, hard enough to knock one of them down. The yelling caught the gym teacher’s attention and they had to pull us apart. I’d already been taking classes for a few months so I’d done more damage and, that time, they actually did call my parents but they didn’t say anything once they heard what those kids had tried to do to Malcolm.”

  “Nobody mentioned how they were always picking on you?”

  “But they weren’t,” Zane said softly. He looked at her. “I’d been the victim before. I’d decided I wasn’t going to let it happen anymore, and what’s more . . . I wasn’t going to stand by when it happened to others. If I got hurt, I got hurt. I was bigger, not as much fun to pick on. But when I waded in, that was when they turned on me. I was the troublemaker by that point.”

  * * *

  I’d been the victim . . .

  Guilt swamped her and she had to turn away while the voices rose up, pealing inside her head like bells.

  Stop, Price . . . help!

  Katherine, let me handle this . . .

  “You’re a better person than I was,” she said, her voice thick.

  She looked back toward the spot where his laptop had been. It was gone, but she could still see the pictures, remember her loathing, and her anger at him. At herself. Only he’d done what she’d wished she’d had the courage to do.

  “Keelie?”

  His hand brushed her shoulder.

  She flinched.

  He didn’t let that stop him.

  How surprising. As Zane closed his hands over her shoulders and pulled her back against him, she reached up, covered her hands with his. That one touch managed to both ground her and still leave her feeling so completely adrift. He pressed his lips to her temple and she shivered, confusion and frustration raging inside her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  What’s wrong . . .

  Such a simple question.

  Such a complicated one.

  She eased away from him, although breaking that connection with him felt like she was ripping out something vital.

  Moving to one of the windows that ran the length of the western wall, she pressed a hand to the smooth surface. The heat from the sun warmed it yet did nothing to warm her.

  For more than a decade, she’d tried to come to grips with the guilt.

  At first she’d tried to hide from it. Then she’d tried to outrun it.

  Finally she’d tried to make amends. It wasn’t ever going to happen.

  You can tell the truth now.

  “When I was fifteen, I walked in while my stepbrother was raping a girl. His friends were watching. Egging him on.”

  Slowly, she turned to face him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Wow. Which one are you?”

  Travis Barnes pushed his sunglasses back on his head and studied the blonde leaning against the glass-fronted case. His eyes automatically bounced off everything inside it.

  If he didn’t look at it, he could pretend it didn’t exist.

  That was how he operated, as far as this went.

  He’d seen some messed-up shit in his life and he’d dealt with it all just fine. Hell, Travis had done some messed-up shit.

  And while he might deny it even on his deathbed, he got a little weirded out over the bizarre, painful, and private places some people chose to get pierced.

  He wasn’t sure if the pieces displayed in that glass case were intended for some of those weirder places. Zach had once told all of them about a woman who’d come up to him and asked him to look at her clitoral piercing. Zach, of course, had declined. He didn’t do piercings, but he knew enough about them—and others—to leave Travis cringing.

  Even Zach had been grimacing by the time he finished.

  Travis didn’t get it.

  Why would a woman do that?

  Why would a man would pierce his cock?

  One reason only, as far as he was concerned. They were insane.

  Insanity explained a lot, really.

  Insanity was one of the reasons he had a job. Insanity, arrogance, and stupidity. Zach and his crew made a living tattooing and piercing. Travis made a living dealing with insane, arrogant, or stupid criminals. Everybody had their quirks. His just didn’t involve shoving metal into sensitive personal bits.

  “Well?” The blonde cocked her head and smiled. Her mouth was a pretty, rather delightful bow, Travis decided, feeling a slow stir of interest. “Which one?”

  “Which one what?” he asked, smiling back. He moved closer and caught a trace of something almost too intoxicating to ignore. If that was her, it was a miracle she didn’t have guys hovering around her like mad.

  “You’ve got to be one of them. You’re too pretty not to be.” She tapped her finger on her lips, drawing his attention back to them.

  Slicked with something pink and shimmery, that mouth didn’t need the highlight. But he liked it all the same.

  “Well, you’re not Zane,”
she mused. “I know him. And you’re not Seb. You’re too old, and don’t take this wrong, but Seb’s full of himself. You look a lot like him, but even if it wasn’t for makeup and all that shit, anybody who has ever seen him in an interview can tell that boy is too full of himself. He has so many thoughts going on about himself, it’s amazing he can think about anything else.”

  Travis ran his tongue along the inside of his lip and tried to decide if he should be offended on his little brother’s behalf, and then decided it wasn’t worth it. Seb was an arrogant little bastard. And hell, he understood her question now.

  She was trying to figure out which brother he was.

  “Well, if you know us that well, then that leaves . . . ” Deciding to play, he leaned against the counter and smiled at her. It brought him closer, let him fill his head with the scent of her. Seriously. It was almost a drug.

  “The twins.” She cocked her head. “I know about the writer, have seen pics of him online. You’re not him.”

  “How can you be sure? We are identical.” Travis and Trey had looked, and acted, enough alike to fool their brothers and parents right on up until halfway through college. It wasn’t until that point that it was easier to tell them apart. But strangers still had trouble.

  “No. He’s got sad eyes.” She shrugged, one shoulder lifted. “Can’t blame him. But you don’t have sad eyes.”

  “Well.” Damn. She was good. “I guess I don’t have as much reason as Trey does.”

  “Probably not. However, he has the cutest little boy on the planet. Bet you can’t top that.”

  “No. I cannot.” Travis smiled and then held out his hand. “Since by default that only leaves one . . . I’m Travis. The other twin.”

  “Anais.” She wrinkled her nose. “Most people call me Ani, because they butcher the name. It’s not that hard, though. Ann—EYE—ees.”

 

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