Bittersweet (Redemption Book 3)

by Jessica Prince

  Looking back up at her, I finally saw what Jensen had been forced to live with his entire life. I knew the kind of hell he’d gone through, but until that very moment, I never really understood the depths of it.

  “You’re sick,” I whispered, shaking my head in amazement. “You’re really fucking sick. You need help.”

  “It’s true! It’s all true. Just ask him!”

  “Get the hell away from me, Cordelia. I’m not joking. Leave now, or I’m calling the police.”

  Finally realizing she wasn’t going to get any help from me, she spun on her fancy shoes and stormed off.

  I opened the back door with shaky hands and I buckled my boy into his booster seat, promising him that I was fine, even though I was far from it.

  My entire body trembled on the drive home as I replayed her words over and over in my head a million times.

  He almost killed a man.

  He nearly beat someone to death.

  He’s dangerous.

  As soon as I was parked in my driveway, I yanked my phone from my purse and hit the button I needed. It rang three times in my ear before my aunt answered. “Hey there, honey pie. How’s it goin’?”

  “Caro, I know it’s really last minute, but would you mind coming over and watching Brant for me right now? There’s something I need to do. It’s an emergency.”

  Her answer was instant. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Shane

  This was the first time I’d set foot inside the offices of Elite Security since they opened up shop months ago. It was housed in an old brick building that had originally been opened as a steel work front by bootleggers to move moonshine during prohibition.

  The exterior still had that cool-as-hell old-school industrial vibe, but the inside had been completely redone. The walls were exposed brick, and the pipes were visible along the ceiling, but the main floor had been cordoned off into separate offices and rooms with walls made of brick and glass. At any other time I would have thought it looked awesome, but at that very moment, I was too frantic to appreciate the badass design aesthetic.

  My eyes scanned my surroundings as I started toward the open reception area right up front. The woman sitting behind the curved wooden desk looked up at me with a timid grin. “Hello. Can I help y—wait, ma’am. You can’t just go back there! You need an appointment!”

  She scuttled after me as I rushed down a hallway with offices and conference rooms on both sides. I passed one, catching a glimpse of Gage out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t stop.

  “Jensen.” I called out.

  “Ma’am, please. You really can’t do this,” the receptionist insisted.

  “Jensen!”

  Laeth’s head popped out of a room on my right, and he mumbled, “Oh shit,” as soon as he spotted me. I sensed him and Gage behind me, following to see what was about to happen, but I didn’t pay either of them a bit of attention as I continued to shout Jensen’s name.

  Finally, he stepped out of the last office on the left at the end of the hall. “What the fuck is going—Shane? What are you doing here?”

  “Did you almost kill a man?”

  “Fuck,” one of the guys hissed.

  Jensen’s stormy gray eyes filled with panic as he took a slow, measured step toward me. “Where did you hear that?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I heard it from. I want to know if it’s true. Did you get into a fight at a bar and nearly beat a man to death?”

  His throat worked on a thick swallow, the gray eyes growing desolate as he relied on a gruff whisper. “Yes.”

  “And that’s why you left. Because Daddy pulled some strings and made the Army an option over prison time?”

  “Shane, you have to believe me,” he started desperately, holding his hands out as he moved closer, like he was afraid I’d spook and take off running. “I’m not that guy, I would never—”

  I took a step back from him, unwilling to let him touch me. “I know that, you idiot!” I shouted so loudly I could have sworn the glass all around me rattled.

  Jensen rocked back on one foot in shock. “Y-you do?”

  “Of course I do! I spent more than four years with you. I slept beside you. I had a kid with you! You think I didn’t know the kind of man you were back then?”

  “Then . . . if you aren’t scared of me, why are you so upset? Why’d you just move away from me?”

  I threw my arms out wide. “Because I’m pissed! You took five years away from me, away from us, when all you had to do was tell me the truth!”

  “Okay, I gotta say, that is not the reaction I expected,” I heard one of the guys say from behind me. I jerked my head around and glared at both of them.

  “You two can feel free to fuck off at any time.”

  “Christ,” Gage grunted. “They’re perfect for each other.”

  Before I had a chance to let them have it, Jensen grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward the room he’d just come out of. “You guys are a fuckin’ pain in my ass,” he growled at his friends. “Go do some work.”

  As soon as we cleared the threshold, he slammed the door closed and spun me around, backing me up against it and caging me in with his hands on either side of my head. “Sunshine, if you’ll just give me a chance to explain—”

  I scoffed, giving his massive chest a shove and ducking under his arm so I could move across the office, putting some much-needed space between us. “A chance to explain what? Why you didn’t trust me with the truth all those years ago? Is that what you want to explain, because I’m all ears.” I crossed my arms and cocked my hip out, closing myself off to an approach with that one move.

  “I was scared, Shane. I’d busted my ass to prove to you that I’d changed, and in a handful of minutes, I destroyed all of that.”

  “Stop,” I said, lifting a hand to cut him off. “I don’t want to hear your self-loathing. I want the truth,” I demanded. “All of it. Tell me everything right now, Jensen, or I’m walking out that door and this”—I waved my hand in the space between us—“us, it’s over in a way there’s no coming back from, ever.”

  He cleared his throat and reached up to massage the back of his neck. It would have easily endeared me to him to see him so nervous if I wasn’t heartbroken and infuriated all at the same time.

  “Do you remember that day, when I came home in such a bad mood?”

  “Of course I remember,” I clipped. “It’s been burned into my brain for years.”

  He nodded, looking completely crestfallen as he said, “Well, I was in that mood because my father had come by the garage earlier that day to let me know what a piece of shit I was, and that I’d never be able to give you and our baby a good life. I shouldn’t have let him get to me. I should have talked to you. Fuck, I should have done a lot of things different, but I didn’t. I came home and took it out on you.

  “After you and I got in that fight and you left, I went for a drive and ended up at some shithole bar outside of town. I was fucking trashed and pissed off at myself for how I’d treated you, so when this guy bumped into me, I started talking shit. I kept at him until he took the first swing. He might have been the one to throw the first punch, but I was the one who started it. It was my fault. Something in me snapped after that.

  “I don’t remember anything about that fight. It was like I’d been outside my body the whole time, watching what was happening. That’s not an excuse, I know that. What I did was fucked up. When they pulled me off that guy and I saw what I’d done, it scared the shit out of me to think I was capable of something like that. The cops came and arrested me and the guy was taken to the hospital. One of the cops at the department knew Whitman, so they called him without me knowing. I don’t know how long I was there. It felt like a fucking eternity, then all of a sudden, my father was there.

  “We went into this little room, and he laid it all out. The guy I beat up was in critical condition, on a ventilator. It didn’t look good. H
e started going on about how, at the very least I was looking at felony assault, but if the guy died, it would be voluntary manslaughter. He told me either way I’d be going to prison for a really long time. I broke when he said that. I lost it, Shane. Because I did that to myself. I nearly took a man’s life and he did nothing to deserve that. Not a goddamn thing. I couldn’t handle knowing what I’d done, what I was capable of.”

  My throat felt tight, my chest was aching, and I was having trouble staying on my feet, but I pushed all that down. “And that’s when Whitman gave you a choice.”

  “Yes,” Jensen said, lifting his hands and raking his shaky fingers through his hair. “We made a deal. He said if I enlisted, he’d make sure you and Brantley were taken care of. He’d make sure you’d never need for anything, but I had to leave and stay gone. I couldn’t contact you. I had to end it. That was the only way he’d agree to anything. I had to give up the only thing that ever made me happy. It meant he’d finally won, he beat me. But I didn’t think I had any other choice. If I didn’t do it, he was walking away. I’d go to prison, and you and Brantley would be left with nothing.”

  I couldn’t hear any more. Squeezing my eyes closed, I waved a hand to stop him and began pacing. “I can’t—” I lifted my hands and dragged my fingers across my scalp, fisting my hair. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you would actually listen to that man!”

  “I didn’t see any other way!” he barked. “I never wanted to be that guy. The guy who lost control and beat someone so bad he had to be hospitalized. I was struggling with the fact that a man might die because of me while stuck trying to decide between two impossible fucking choices. I could lose you and destroy any chances of a future completely, or lose you, but at least know you were taken care of and hope to Christ there was a way I could come back down the line and make things right. Either way, Shane, I was going to lose you. I wasn’t handling the knowledge of that very fuckin’ well.”

  He moved across the room so fast I was forced to backup, scuttling backward until I slammed into the rough, abrasive brick wall behind me. He kept coming, pinning me to that wall with his weight as he placed his palms on the sides of my neck and brushed my jaw with his thumbs. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in an agonized voice as he lowered his forehead to mine. “I’m so goddamn sorry. I was just so scared. I was scared of what I’d done to that man, that I was capable of that kind of violence. But what scared me most was that you’d find out and you’d see me differently. You’d never look at me the way you did when I made you happy. I was fucking terrified you’d see me as a monster, because that’s how I saw myself. I was a monster and you were nothing but light and goodness. I never felt like I deserved you, and I couldn’t stand the thought that you might one day realize that as well.”

  “And that’s the problem,” I whispered, grabbing hold of his wrists and pulling his hands away. I instantly missed his touch so badly I thought I might cry, but I couldn’t waver. “You didn’t trust me.”

  “Baby, you’re the only person I’ve ever trusted.”

  “No,” I threw back. “I’m not. Because if you had trusted me you’d have known that I would never look at you and see a monster. Not even after that. If you trusted me, you would have believed I was telling you the truth every time I told you I knew what kind of man you were. You wouldn’t have felt the need to run, because you would have known that there was nothing you could do, nothing, that would make me stop loving you.

  “You were my whole world, Jensen. Not because you showed me the man you thought I wanted, but because I saw through all your arrogance and bravado from the very beginning. I saw through your bullshit to who you were on the inside. That man was good and loyal and loving. He made mistakes. He fucked up, and he did it huge, but none of that changed the core of him.”

  My heart was breaking all over again, the pain so acute it was a wonder I was able to stay on my feet. “If you had just talked to me, we could have found a way through it. I knew you had anger issues and I knew why, Jensen. You never hid that from me. When I told you I loved you, that meant I accepted every single part of you, including the scars. We could have found our way through it together, but you didn’t give me that chance. That’s not trust. You didn’t trust me then, and I don’t trust you now. And a relationship without trust is doomed to fail every single time.”

  “Don’t say that,” he hissed, the storm raging in those deep gray eyes growing darker and more turbulent with his pain. “Please don’t say that, sunshine. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. There hasn’t been a single day since I walked into my bedroom in that goddamn house and saw you standing there that I haven’t loved you. I told myself I’d win you back, I swore it. The only fucking thing that got me through the past several years was that promise. I’ll make it right, Shane. I’ll earn back your trust. Just let me fix this.”

  I wanted to believe him. I wanted to think there was a possibility of a future with this man, because the truth was, I didn’t think there was a day that had passed in all these years that I hadn’t loved him too. But I just didn’t know. I was feeling too much. My head was pounding, and it felt like a storm was raging inside of me. I needed time and space. I needed to think, and I couldn’t do that with him so close. When he was near, when he touched me, when I smelled his strong, masculine scent, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but him.

  “I-I have to go,” I whispered, slipping from between him and the wall. “I can’t be here right now.”

  “Shane, please.” He reached for my hand, but I stepped out of his reach. “We can make this work, baby. Can we go somewhere and talk? We can get through this.”

  “I need some space. I just . . . I have to go.”

  The desolation was carved deep into his features, and seeing it killed me. Unable to face it for another second, I spun around and crossed the office, pulling the door open as his voice called my name. I didn’t look back as I hurried down the hall and out of the building.

  But as I climbed into my car and started it up, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I’d made a huge mistake by running away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Shane

  Twenty years old

  I stared up at that monstrosity of a house with my heart in my throat. I’d told myself I would never set foot on this property ever again, but I had no other choice. It had been a week since I walked out of my apartment after my and Jensen’s big fight, and I hadn’t seen him since. He wasn’t answering my calls or texts. He wasn’t staying with friends. I’d checked all the hospitals in the area. There was nothing. No one had heard from him since that night.

  I’d gone from angry to concerned to downright panicked. I hadn’t been able to keep down anything I ate or drank in days, and the stress of not knowing where he was had caused me to start having false labor pains. Now I was officially so sick with worry and desperate for answers that I’d come to the only two people left who could possibly have any idea where he was.

  My skin tingled and my pulse pounded as I headed up the long walkway toward the front door. Just the thought of seeing these people made my stomach turn. They were the worst kinds of human beings for what they’d done to Jensen, the pain they caused him, the self-doubt they battered into his head every time they belittled him, until he actually started to believe it himself. I hated them with every fiber of my being.

  I rapped my knuckles against the solid wood of the door and waited. A minute passed with no answer. I knocked again as the emotions swirling around inside of me became a tempest. Agitation warred with fear that battled against sorrow that was beaten back by blind rage. It was all too much for my body to contain, and I was afraid it might all come spilling out, rendering me completely useless.

  I knocked a third time, this time, banging on it with the side of my fist. I wasn’t leaving here without answers, damn it. The door finally swung open, revealing Jensen’s mom, Cordelia, in all her immaculate, perfectly put together glory.

  T
he irritation in her expression doubled the instant recognition struck, and her top lip curled up like I was nothing more than I bag of dog shit on the front steps.

  “Mrs. Rose,” I started, but she didn’t give me a chance to finish.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for Jensen. He hasn’t been home in a week. I have no idea where he is or if he’s okay. Have you spoken to him?”

  “Jensen is just fine,” she answered. At the knowledge that he wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere or unconscious in a hospital bed, but had purposefully disappeared on me, making his parents—who he hated with a passion—aware of his whereabouts, hurt like hell.

  “Could you tell me where he is?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and looked down her straight nose at me. “I’ll do no such thing. It took longer than his father or I would have liked, but my son’s finally come to his senses and realized he could do so much better. If he wanted you to know where he was, he would have told you himself.”

  I hadn’t thought it possible for a person to endure the kind of pain I was feeling just then and survive, but against all odds, I was still standing. Placing my hands protectively on my protruding belly, I spoke softly. “That’s not true. He wouldn’t leave us like that.”

  “Well, it appears he’s done just that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more important things to do than deal with you.”

  She started to close the door in my face, but I quickly raised my hand to stop it. “He wouldn’t leave us like that,” I repeated, my tone much stronger this time. “He wouldn’t abandon his family.”

  “We are his family,” she said with a sneer. “You’re just the little girl who got herself knocked up in order to trap him and take his money.”