Possession fa-5

by J. R. Ward

  “G.B., I need to know something,” she said in a dull tone.

  “Anything.”

  “I need to know where he lives.”

  She was absolutely going to confront him, but it was going to be in person, not over the phone. She wanted the satisfaction of seeing his reaction when he found out that he’d been caught in his lies.

  “Where am I … where … am I…”

  As Cait heard the words leave her lips, she thought … God, she’d said the same thing the night this had all started. Instead of being in search of a hair salon, though, she was out in the boonies, driving along rural roads that were not marked, in search of a farm.

  Didn’t exactly narrow things in this kind of neighborhood—

  Cait slammed on the brakes, the Lexus grabbing onto the pavement and stopping just before a turnoff that had a mailbox reading, RR 1924, next to it.

  Swallowing hard, she wondered if she was really going to go through with this—namely, wait for Duke to get home and confront him in person.

  The decision was made once and for all as she thought of G.B.’s expression when Duke had come out of nowhere at the grave site. G.B. had been shocked not just because she’d been seeing someone else—but rather because he’d known what it meant; he’d known the man she’d been fooled by.

  Someone capable of lying about whether or not he had a kid? A brother who was alive and well?

  Nothing was out of bounds.

  She turned in and started down the dirt path, going past acres of shorn cornfields that would no doubt imminently be turned over for planting season. The farmhouse that first appeared was quite large, a brick construction of sturdy, ageless style. She went by it, as she’d been told to do, and kept on the road, eventually coming up to a squat ranch that had a decade-old car parked off to one side and a picnic table underneath a pine tree on the other.

  Stopping right in front, she got out and looked around. Then she marched up to the windowless door and knocked.

  Heart pounding, she had no idea who was going to answer the—

  The stench of pot smoke that greeted her was enough to make her cough. And sure enough, as she looked past the skinny, happy-looking guy between the jambs, she saw two different bongs, a plastic bag full of weed, and enough lighters to start a bonfire on a pitted coffee table.

  Annnnnnnnnnnnnd he did drugs.

  What a fucking winner.

  “Hi,” the man said. “Are you Cathy?”

  Like he’d expected someone by that name.

  “No.” Anger sharpened her tone. “Does Duke Phillips live here?”

  “Yup, this is his place and I’m his roommate—what can I do you for?”

  Lies, drugs, and a roomie.

  You know what, she thought. This was bullcrap. Duke didn’t deserve some confrontation. The best thing she could do, the only thing she should do, was take care of herself.

  Cait just shook her head. “Nothing, actually.”

  As she pivoted away, he said, “You here to see Duke? He’s due home any minute. You want to wait? I’ve got some cold pizza.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Who should I tell him was here?”

  “Nobody. I just took a wrong turn, but I’m going to fix that.”

  Cait went back for her SUV, and was rather proud of herself. No tears. No sobbing. No hysterics.

  She did, however, feel like the stupidest woman alive—

  “Wait! Hold on!”

  She closed her eyes as she put her hand on her door. “Yes?”

  The guy came loping over. “Seriously. You came here to see Duke, right? I mean, no one comes out here without a reason.”

  Cait cocked a brow. “Actually, fine. You can tell him that the joke’s up. His brother told me all about him, and I’ve just come from the mall, where I saw Duke with his son. So he’s not to call or come by to see me ever again.” She opened her door and hopped into her seat. “Oh, and you can throw in a ‘fuck off’ in there somewhere while you’re at it.”

  As she started her engine, the pothead backed off with his palms up, like he was afraid she might mow him down in her bid to get back to civilization.

  Clearly, he hadn’t smoked out all his brain cells.

  Chapter

  Fifty-four

  When Duke pulled his truck up in front of the Appaloosa Way condo, he put things in park, but didn’t cut the engine.

  Nicole had been entirely too grateful when he’d called her on the way home from work and offered to take the kid out for a mall crawl and a talking-to. And maybe because of that, he didn’t want to go inside even though she wasn’t due home from her shift for another couple of hours.

  Some lines, he didn’t want to cross.

  Others … might be okay.

  He looked across the seat. The boy was sitting there like a bump on a log, lanky arms linked across his pigeon chest, his long hair in his face.

  “So do we understand each other,” Duke said grimly.

  “What,” came the grousing response. “Like you takin’ me out for a burger’s gonna make me—”

  Duke reached across and clamped a hard hand on the kid’s shoulder. As Tony’s wide eyes swung to his, he dropped his voice. “You’re gonna stop bullying that kid, are we clear? I hear anything more about you picking on him? The next visit will not be about an early fucking dinner.”

  Tony narrowed his eyes. “I can do what I—”

  “Not while I’m around, you can’t.”

  “You’re not my father!”

  “Well, there’s no one else stepping up, so it looks like you’re stuck with me.” Duke put his face in close. “No more. Do you hear me—whatever the hell is wrong in your own life, you do not take it out on some poor son of a bitch in your class.”

  The kid’s momentary flash-in-the-pan aggression didn’t last in the face of a grown man getting up in his grille. But Duke wanted this to be about more than ripping Tony a new one.

  He sat back. “Look, I know I haven’t been around much, but I was wondering if maybe you and me, we could start getting together. My night job doesn’t start until late, and you’re just fucking around here in the afternoon. No reason we shouldn’t kick some hours together.”

  Wow. Parental figure of the year over here, dropping the f-bomb. Whatever. He’d never done this before.

  After a period of silence, Tony glanced over. Looked away.

  Looked back.

  The suspicion and mistrust were a ball buster, they really were. But like the kid hadn’t earned the right to be cautious?

  “You’re a bouncer, right?” Tony asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you beat people up at work?”

  “Only when they deserve it.”

  “Cool…”

  “Not really. Dealing with stupid, drunk people is no way to make a living.” Duke shook his head. “I wanted to be a doctor, actually. Now, that is cool.”

  “Why aren’t you one?”

  Because your mother and I were…

  Fuck that. “I quit college.”

  “Why?”

  “I was a pussy.” Yeeeeeeah, he probably shouldn’t be using that kind of language around the kid, but the truth was the truth. “I didn’t even apply to medical school. I pulled out two credits shy of what I needed to graduate. Biggest mistake I ever made.”

  His head had been too fucked to keep going, although in retrospect, he knew that was more about the evil that his brother was than anything he’d felt for Nicole: The concept that he’d shared a womb with someone capable of such casual cruelty had crippled him, shut him down … essentially infected him.

  A chance meeting with Cait seemed to be turning that around, though.

  And now he was going to try doing the same to Tony.

  Trickle-down wasn’t just about economics.

  “Monday,” he said. “Five p.m. Be in your gym shorts with a towel and a bottle of water on you. We’re going to go play basketball. Deal?”

  Tony na
rrowed those eyes again. But after a moment, he nodded. “Okay.”

  Duke nodded back. And stayed around to watch the kid walk to the door and disappear inside.

  Before he could even put his truck in drive again, his phone went off—for the third time. Answering the call, he barked, “Rolly, what the hell is your problem?”

  “You had a visitor.”

  Duke rolled his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, do not tell me you’re dropping acid again. The last time, you were convinced Bob Barker was staging an intervention.”

  “Okay, that was just a bad trip.”

  “Yeah, because you didn’t listen to Mr. Price Is Right and put up your damn bong—”

  “It was a woman. She was talking all weird, something about your brother? And, um…”

  A blast of cold fear cleared his head and then some. “What. Rolly, what did she say?”

  “Something about seeing you with your son?”

  Duke exhaled in a rush, a swift pain hitting him in the gut sure as if he’d been kicked by a steel-toed boot. “When did she come by?”

  “’Bout an hour ago? That’s why I’ve been calling you. You never have visitors, and she looked pretty upset—”

  “I gotta go. Bye.”

  Stomping on the accelerator, he skidded out as he turned around and flashed down to the exit of the development.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he bit out as he called a number he’d never expected to dial.

  Five rings later, like the phone’s owner wasn’t in any goddamn hurry, a voice drawled, “Hellllllo.”

  “You fucking asshole.”

  “I’m sorry, who is this?” G.B. mocked.

  “You know exactly who it is. What the fuck are you doing?”

  “God, how rude are you, my dearest, darling, long-lost brother? We don’t speak for how many years, and you don’t even ask how I’m doing before you—”

  “Do not try to play me. I know what you are, and I know what you’re capable of.” He’d just evidently forgotten that—why the hell hadn’t it dawned on him that his brother was a liar, too? “Leave Cait out of this.”

  “Oh, but see, I can’t do that. You were the one who brought her into it.”

  “You don’t even know her!”

  “And neither do you—or should I say, neither will you. Duke, you’ve just got to understand something—you can’t keep women from me. Didn’t work with Nicole, not going to work with this new one.”

  Duke’s hand cranked down so hard on his cell that it let out a long beep, like it was going into cardiac arrest. “Listen to me. You stay the fuck away from her—”

  “Not your call. And do yourself a favor. Don’t try to win her back—you don’t have a chance.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  He hung up the phone and then threw the thing at the dash. Slamming his hands into the wheel, he clenched his teeth around the scream in his throat. He knew better than to try to talk to his brother—back in the early days, he’d given that enough shots to last twelve lifetimes.

  No talking. No reasoning.

  The only thing he could potentially work with was Cait.

  “Shit!”

  Steaming across town, he pulled into her neighborhood going Nascar fast, but slowed down—because running over some kid or somebody’s dog over was not going to help the situation. And as he came up to her house, he was sorely relieved to see her car in the driveway.

  Now, if he could just get her to answer the door.

  Jumping out of his truck, he jogged up to the front entrance. Just as he was about to push the doorbell, he frowned and looked over his shoulder.

  He could have sworn someone was standing right behind him. The presence wasn’t aggressive, though. Quite the contrary; it was almost like, after all these years of going it alone … he’d picked up a guardian angel or something.

  Whatever, he thought as he punched the bell’s button.

  “Please answer the door,” he prayed as he hit the thing again.

  Cait was sitting at her desk, getting nothing done, when she heard a ding-dong go off at the front of her house.

  She checked her phone. No calls. But she had a feeling who it was. The question was then … what did she do about it.

  Ding-donnnnng.

  Getting up, she brought her bottle of water with her for no other reason than she wanted something for her hands to do. And as she closed in on the door, she thought, Well, she had wanted to see his face when she told him what she thought of him…

  Now was her chance.

  Opening the way up, she stood strong and stared right into Duke’s face. “You really think there’s anything you can say that I want to hear right now?”

  “Can we do this inside?”

  “No, here is good. You’re not going to be here long.”

  “Cait, I swear—”

  She held up her palm. “Wrong approach. Any vow you give me? Isn’t worth a dime.”

  He cursed and paced back and forth on her stoop. “Cait, you’ve got to understand my brother—”

  “This isn’t about him. It’s about you.”

  “It’s all about him! He’s evil, Cait, I swear to it—he’s—”

  “Evil? What do you call lying about the fact that you have a son?”

  “Tony’s not mine. He’s G.B.’s.”

  Cait opened her mouth. Closed it. Felt a pounding in her temples that suggested very soon, maybe in the next ten minutes, she was going to need to lie down in a dark room for several hours.

  “You know what,” she said slowly. “I think it would be best if I don’t see either one of you again. Please just get in your truck and go—I’ve got enough to worry about in this life. I don’t need this drama.”

  Stepping back, she was about to close the door on him when he caught the thing and held it wide. “Just let me explain. You don’t have to do anything but listen, and if at the end of it, you still think I’m full of shit? Throw me out. Hell, I’ll throw myself out. But, Cait, please. Don’t let him do this to me again.”

  She frowned, thinking that was a weird phrasing.

  Oddly, she remembered the janitor.

  Talk it out. You need to talk it out.

  “Please, Cait.” God, there was such anguish in that voice of his. “Just hear me out.”

  After a long moment, she inched back enough to let him through. Closing the door, she went over to the bay window that faced the street and sat with one hip on its ledge. She didn’t want him getting any ideas that either one of them was going to get comfortable.

  Duke walked around her little living room, dragging his hand through his hair, shaking his head, looking like he was about to explode from some inner conflict. Whatever. She wasn’t going to prompt him or make this easy on him in any way: As the light drained fully out of the sky, and the lamps that were on in the room became the only source of illumination, she just sat and watched him suffer.

  Kind of gratifying, considering how she’d felt since she’d been to that goddamn mall.

  “When you asked me whether or not I had family,” he said abruptly, “I told you I didn’t, because short of sharing some DNA with G.B.? He and I are strangers—and I want to keep it that way. I need to keep it that way.” He closed his eyes and cursed. “We grew up at Our Lady’s, and he started killing things then—”

  Cait felt her eyes bug.

  “G.B. exhibited all the classic signs of serious pathology. Setting fires, stealing, wetting his bed, setting traps for other kids. He was removed from the place and sent to a juvie facility by the time he was ten, and he never forgave me for the fact that I was the one they kept. He hated me—although, honestly, he hated everyone and everything, it seemed. After he left? I didn’t see him for years. But eventually, he found me at Union. Didn’t know it, though. I had no clue where he’d been or what he’d become.”

  He stopped and looked at her. “I was dating a woman, had been for a while. It was my senior year and I had all kinds of plans, yo
u know, med school—she was going to go, too. We were all about the future. But you know, premed? Hard major. And I wanted to be ahead of everyone else. I was busy busting my ass in the library—while my brother, who’d been watching me, tracking my patterns, infiltrating my life … was starting to talk to her. He’s a great one for cover-ups—a liar right out of the history books. And he got through to her, in ways I couldn’t.”

  Cait blinked, the plausibility of the story increasing a little with every word he spoke—even though she wished it didn’t.

  “He, ah, well, let’s just say he started sleeping with her behind my back. I found out about it all because she got pregnant. And I’m sure Tony’s not my son as I hadn’t been with her for two months before that because—to be honest, because I was focused on my work and not her.” He cursed again. “I spent a lot of time blaming myself, thinking that if I’d paid more attention to the relationship, maybe it wouldn’t have happened—but ultimately, I believe G.B. would have gotten through. He wanted to ruin me that badly. And he did—and it worked. I left school, shut down, backed out of everything. It was incredibly successful, and what he’d set out to do to me.” He dragged that hand back into his hair. “I can’t explain why the whole thing castrated me like it did. I just … the world didn’t feel safe at all, anymore. And I guess I figured, fuck it and fuck everybody. I’m out.”

  As shades of her own story filled in the picture he was painting … she felt a commiseration she hadn’t expected, and probably should have fought.

  The trouble was, his affect was spot on, the confusion, the pain, the anger … everything she knew from having walked that path herself ringing true.

  And yet … G.B. had seemed equally credible—

  From out of nowhere, she thought of the way that man had looked behind the wheel of his car as he’d driven off from St. Patrick’s.

  That expression … what if it revealed who he really was?

  “I don’t know what to say,” she blurted.

  “I told you, all you need to do is listen.” Duke sat on the couch, and braced his elbows on his knees, his eyes nothing but straight-shooter as he stared up at her. “And here’s the part I’m not proud of—well, actually, I’m not proud of a lot, but this … this is the part that involves you. When I saw you at that café? I knew you’d been to see him—you had that … hypnotized look on your face as you walked out. See, our roles got reversed after the Nicole thing. I started to track him at that point—and I went there that night to … I don’t know. I was pissed off because I’d just covered the child support he was supposed to be paying for, like, the hundredth month in a row. But when you looked at me, and I got out … there was something between you and me. Later, I went to that theater hoping that you were just there to hear him sing, but then you said he’d asked you to meet him.”