by S. M. Soto
She swallows. “Of course, there is.”
I smile. It’s cold and detached, so unlike me. “I hope you lose that person in the most gruesome way. I hope the pain I feel every single minute of every single day, you feel tenfold. Now, take me back to my room or you’ll regret it,” I hiss out, something sinister in my tone. It’s new. Something I didn’t even know I was capable of.
Dr. Aster lets out a ragged gasp at my outburst, her body going rigid at the tone in my voice, concern lighting her eyes. At this point, I can’t tell if her concern is for me or for herself due to my outburst.
“Gary.” She clears her throat, her eyes never once straying from me, as I keep my hateful glare solely fixed on her. “Please wheel Ms. Wright back to her room. Thank you.”
I’m silently fuming the entire way back to my room. If I had more fight in me, I’d quite literally fight off Gary and not have any qualms about shoving my fist into the good doctor’s face.
How dare she say those things to me? She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know anything about my life.
Vibrating with hatred, I stew in my room for God knows how long. That’s the thing about being stuck here. My sense of time is off when I have nothing else to do but sleep, eat, and stare at blank walls. I can understand now why so many want to be with others. They want the interaction, just as I do. I crave it. But being with others isn’t safe, especially now.
After the cryptic comment from that woman in the activity room, the tarot reading, and that possible sighting, I’m not sure who to trust. If she is working with him, then how many others are working for him, too? And Dr. Aster, is she in on it, too? Maybe that is what the notebook is for? She’s keeping notes for the rest of the guys.
Soft knocking on the door startles me out of my paranoia, and when I see who it is, I want to groan. For fucking fuck’s sake, wasn’t that enough psychoanalyzing for one day?
The doctor walks into the room, looking a bit unsure. She pushes the edge of her glasses up her nose and squares her shoulders, clasping her hands in front of her.
“Mackenzie, I want to apologize if I upset you earlier. In any way. That’s not my intention here.”
“If?” I laugh, but it’s without humor.
“Yes. If I crossed the line, I’m truly sorry.”
“Well, you did,” I snap, thinking back to all the ugly things she said. “So, you can take your apology and fuck right off.”
Obviously taking my words as an invitation instead of a dismissal, she grabs the chair and pulls it to the foot of the bed. I realize when she sits, crossing a leg over the other, her hands resting in her lap, what’s missing. The notebook. The notebook isn’t here.
For some reason, that cools some of the indignation billowing from within. I settle back into the pillows on my bed and feel my heart slowing its angry race in my chest.
“I’d like to start over. Maybe talk about something else other than your sister. Can we discuss your previous relationship?”
My heart squeezes.
That’s another sore subject.
Inhaling a deep breath, I purse my lips, trying to remain aloof on the outside, when on the inside, I feel like I’m being ripped in half at just the thought of discussing Baz. I’m not sure any part of me is ready to talk about him.
She quirks a brow, clearly waiting for me to give the green light. So, I nod, but lay down some ground rules.
“The second you piss me off, we stop.”
Surprisingly, her upper lip twitches, like she’s actively hiding her smile from me. “I can do that. Now, let’s talk about him. What’s his name, and before you say it, really stop and think about what saying his name does to you. What emotions do you feel?”
I pause. His name rests inside my throat like I was born trying to say it. It’s the kind of inevitability I don’t dread even though I should.
“Baz King.”
She nods, urging me to go on and dig deeper. I close my eyes, and the pain is what hits me first. An all-consuming pain that takes my breath away. It rips my heart in half, breaking my already broken bones.
“Pain,” I whisper.
The next emotion that hits me is betrayal. Images of our naked bodies wrapped around each other burn the backs of my eyelids as I think about how deep his betrayal ran. Our web of lies was a wicked game I wasn’t ready for. He knew all along. He used me while I gave him pieces of me. The me I was never able to show anyone else. And none of it was real. Our entire relationship had been tainted by lies, and now, we were buried in them.
“Betrayal.”
The more I think about his betrayal, the angrier I grow. I feel it consuming me, spreading through my veins like wildfire. It fills my chest with an inexplicable tightness that has me gasping for breath.
“Anger,” I grit, as I think of all the ways I’ll get him back when I get out of here. He’s going to wish he would’ve killed me. They’re all going to regret the day they met me.
“Good. Very good, Mackenzie. Now, can you tell me what happened? When did it start, and when did it end?”
“When did it start?” I muse, letting the hurt fester as I recall the farce of our relationship. “Summer. In the summer, the monster ripped his way through my chest, twisted my heart until it became some deadened thing, and he buried it somewhere in the leaf-littered woods. Right next to my dead sister. He left no marker, no signs leading back to it. That was when it ended. The night he tried to kill me and failed. The night all his lies became my truths.”
Dr. Aster frowns, her lips turning down with sympathy as she regards me. “How many previous relationships were you in before…Baz, you said his name was, right?”
“One, maybe two that were serious. After—” I clear my throat, pushing past the sudden lump lodged there. “It was difficult dating other people and being happy. It felt like a betrayal to her and her memory. She wasn’t always the greatest sister, but she was my blood. My other half. She was the strong one, the one I looked up to.”
“And these previous relationships, what were the men like?”
“Well, the first guy was my opposite. He was everything I wasn’t. In a lot of ways, he was like Madison. I lost my virginity to him, and it was one of the things I regretted immediately after it happened.”
“Don’t we all,” she muses. “And the second?”
“He was a nice guy, maybe even nicer than I was. Much too nice for someone who had been through everything I had. I was angry and hurting. Angry that my sister had been stolen from me. Angry that my parents had stopped caring. And hurt…hurt because the second Madison died, that was when I died, too. In their eyes, they’d lost both of their children that night.”
She nods as if she’s deep in thought, processing. “What I’m hearing is, you felt abandoned by your parents. Have you ever expressed this to them?”
“How can I do that? They’re still the same way. They don’t care about me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Oh, really?” I scoff, leaning forward. “How many times have they called to check in on me here? How many times have they tried to visit?” I can read the answer to that question by the flash of remorse that enters her eyes. She feels bad for me, but she’ll never say that. “Exactly,” I breathe out, sitting back against the pillows.
She clears her throat, averting her gaze. “Back to what we were saying. What kind of man was Baz? Where did he fit in?”
He was a liar. That’s what he was. A damn good one.
My eyes slam shut as I feel the moisture pool there. It takes me a few beats to gather myself, and when I do, I push all thoughts of my ex-lovers out of my head.
“I’m done.”
For a second, I think she considers pushing for more, arguing and forgetting the agreement, but in the end, she nods begrudgingly and pushes to her feet.
“Thank you for sharing that with me, Mackenzie.”
I watch her and Gary leave, and when I’m positive everyone is gone, I let the tears fall f
reely, the pain enveloping me whole.
The air is charged in the upper level of the Kings. It’s been that way for the past few days I’ve been coming in to get work done, but today especially. I told the guys to meet me here, and I must’ve fallen asleep waiting for them in my office. Sleep hasn’t been my top priority lately.
There’s a sharp knock on the door, and Marcus pokes his head in. “The rest of the guys are here.”
We have shit we need to discuss. I need answers. There are things each of them has hidden from me and from everyone else.
That isn’t how this works.
Swiping my glass of bourbon off the oak table seated next to the chaise, I head into the lounge that overlooks the dance floor, where everyone currently is. I eye each of them. They’re sitting in different spots around the room. Our lawyer, and my friend, Noah, is hovering near the hallway, arms crossed over his chest in a no-nonsense stance. Zach is sitting at the bar, Trent is leaning against the glass that overlooks the dance floor, and Vincent is splayed out on the couch, a cast still covering his arm. Marcus is already seated on one of the chaises, and when our gazes lock, I see the cogs churning in his brain. He wants answers just as badly as I do, but as I look at these guys, my brothers, I don’t know who to trust anymore. I want to believe Marcus when he said he doesn’t know what’s happening, but he could be working with Vincent. Makes me wonder how many of the other guys are working with him, too.
Dan’s reported findings have shown me as much. We didn’t have an answer as to why he was in Ferndale, but one thing he did find that I found interesting was that Mackenzie’s paper trail showed her on her way to Ferndale a whole day before Vincent’s GPS system showed him out there. He claims she followed him, but I’m starting to wonder if he was out there for something much more sinister.
It’s plausible he figured out who Mackenzie really is. Who her sister was.
A name change and dyed hair might’ve been enough to fool me because I wasn’t there that summer after Madison’s death. I wasn’t a paranoid mess like Vincent was. Maybe his reasons for wanting “Scarlett” out of my life weren’t because he thought she was a gold digger but because she was a threat to his very existence.
I feel my temper rising the longer the silence drags on. It gives my brain more fodder to wade through. It gives me more time to confirm my suspicions of each of them.
Zach is the first to break the silence. “What are we doing here, Baz?”
“I still haven’t gotten the answers I want. That’s why we’re here. Feel free to fill me in on whatever the fuck it is you all are up to.”
“Us?” Zach drops his glass down on the bar top with extra force, and my jaw tightens. I clench my teeth together. These days, it’s getting harder and harder to rein in my anger. “Why don’t you fill us in on your fucking plan, Sebastian? Everything is falling apart. Someone is looking into the case, your girlfriend tried to run Vincent off a cliff, she broke into my fucking house, and you have the nerve to walk in here and act like everything is under control? You were supposed to fix this!”
Red seeps into my vision, and anger spills into my chest. My lip inches up into a vile smirk. I let out a dark laugh, rubbing my thumb across my lower lip, contemplatively, as I make my way across the room. It’s a slow trek, the way I sneak up on him. Before he realizes it, I grip the back of Zach’s neck and squeeze. He grunts in pain, and I lean in near his ear, so no one else will hear my next words.
“Who’s been cleaning up your messes for the last fifteen years, Zachariah? Don’t fucking test me. Cross me, and I promise you, Covington, it’ll be the last breath you take.” I shove him forward by the grip I have around his neck, and he catches himself in the nick of time, before his face slams against the bar top. I turn, facing the rest of the guys.
Trent’s face is shrouded in anger, his upper lip curling, and unable to rein his stupid in, he blows.
“What, you think you’re hot shit now? You think you can change the fucking rules because your bitch has good pussy?” Trent mocks, stalking across the room and getting in my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Noah take a hasty step forward as though he’s going to jump between us, but I raise my hand, silently telling him to stay put. “Mackenzie is the very reason everything is falling apart. It’s not us. It’s not any bullshit secrets you think we’re keeping. It’s her. And it’s you. I wish she would’ve fucking died in that car with Vincent. Maybe then things would be—” I’ve done well at keeping my cool, but all that vanished the second Mackenzie’s name fell from his lips.
Clamping my hand around his throat, I slam him into the wall, cutting him off midsentence. He chokes, his face turning an odd shade of purple at the force. I’ve done this plenty of times before, held Trent’s entire life in the palm of my hand, but this is the first time my grip has ever been this unrelenting. If I squeeze any harder, I’ll crush his windpipe and kill him.
It’s tempting. So very tempting.
“Try me, Trent,” I goad. “I’ve been waiting for you to fuck up just one time, so I can finally put you in your place. Don’t forget who you’re speaking to. Don’t forget who fucking made you. Who picked all your sorry asses up from the floor—who gave you everything when you had nothing? Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness, Ainsworth, because I’ll fucking end you with no remorse.”
“We’re s-supposed to b-be brothers-s,” he chokes out, his eyes bulging from lack of oxygen.
“Brothers don’t try to fuck each other’s bitches,” I grit, tossing him away from me. “Clean yourself up. You look like a fucking mess.” I turn to the rest of the guys, my gaze colliding with Vincent.
His face is vacant, much like it always is. He’s the only one who hasn’t said a word, and under the circumstances, I thought for sure he’d be the first one to hobble to his feet and let me know just how pissed he is that everything has gotten out of hand, but instead, he sits there, quietly, like he’s plotting. If that isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.
“How’s the family?”
He works his jaw back and forth. With that simple question, he knows I know. I may not know everything, but he knows without a shadow of a doubt I don’t believe anything he’s told me. “Still pieces of shit,” he finally says.
I smirk. “Doesn’t surprise me. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, now does it?”
His nostrils flare, and he purses his lips, just dying to snap at me, but that’s one thing about my relationship with Vincent. We don’t always agree on everything, but we also never fight. He respects me and my family, and the things we’ve done for him over the years. You never bite the hand that feeds you.
“All right. Enough,” Noah says, stepping into the center of the room, growing tired of our mess. “Now that all that macho bullshit is out of the way, we have some serious shit to figure out. Even though Baz has spun the narrative of the accident in your guys’ favor, it doesn’t mean that whoever is looking into that fucking case isn’t after something. Could be justice, revenge—whatever the hell it is, it’s a problem. For all of us. So…” He sighs, pausing to drill his gaze into each of us. “That means, if they’re going to uncover something I don’t know about, or Sebastian doesn’t know about, say it, or die a slow death when Baz lets you get thrown to the wolves.”
Silence descends.
We all share a look. Trent, of course, is the first one to break.
“All right. Fine. That summer wasn’t when it started. It started that night.”
My gut clenches.
“You remember, don’t you, Baz?” Zach asks, digging the knife in.
I do.
I can’t forget it. Even if I tried.
“You knew,” I grit out, the second Dan steps into my office. I called him over under the pretense I needed his help with something, but really, I was ready to chew his ass out. It feels like everything is crumbling around me since I learned the truth. I don’t know who I can trust anymore. My upper lip curls as I work to control my an
ger. I so desperately want to take it out on Dan or the rest of the guys.
He keeps that same impassive expression on his face, the one I’ve grown accustomed to over the years. “I did.” There’s a displeased tilt to his lips, as though he despises a part of himself for keeping such a secret from me.
“And you didn’t think to fucking tell me who she was? Or why she was here, creeping her way into my goddamn life?”
Slowly, he glances up, and the look on his face gives me pause. “You pay me to do a job, and I do it well. The second she stepped foot inside the building, I knew who she was. I looked into everything about her. I wouldn’t have let her get close to you if I thought otherwise. I knew she wasn’t a threat. And you and I both know that wasn’t why she was here. Maybe with them she had an agenda, but not with you.”
A growl reverberates in my chest, and I jab a finger at him. “Stop sticking up for her. Stop trying to make everything she did seem right. How is it you looked her up and found everything, and when I did it, I found nothing?”
He purses his lips at my outburst of anger. It’s unlike me. It just goes to show how off my rocker all this shit has me. “Whoever she’s working with made it to where you would see what they wanted you to see. Some kind of hacker, I presume. She isn’t working alone, that much I know. And listen, I’m not saying she’s innocent. I’m saying I didn’t view her as a threat. She never once dragged you into any of it. She was just a broken woman looking for answers, and she used you to get them.”
“Exactly. She used me to get them. How do I know any of it was real?”
He shrugs. “Guess you’ll have to find out, won’t you?”
I hate the way he’s looking at me right now. With that fucking amused tilt to his lips, as if this is somehow funny.
“And how do you expect me to do that? I kicked her out of here and told her to never come back, and now, I can’t find her anywhere.”
“Did she listen?” He quirks a brow, and I hate him at this moment. Why must all the people in my life be a nuisance?
