Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2)

by Savannah Rose

  “Are they? How interesting. And do they have any evidence of this?” Jason’s shoulders tightened slightly. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of his mood just then.

  “Yeah, they got evidence,” Kenny said. “They got all the evidence in the world. Your kids vandalized the hedge maze! One of them assaulted my niece’s boyfriend!”

  “Hm. And your evidence is…?”

  “What?”

  “You said you had evidence,” Jason repeated patiently. “I’m waiting to hear it.”

  “Clowns! Skeletons! Spring-loaded traps! Music! Smoke! Smashed hedges! This!”

  Jason jerked back slightly as Kenny shoved a polaroid at him. Jason took it, squinted at it for a second, then raised an eyebrow.

  “Love, Julianne?” he asked incredulously. “You must have the wrong house, Bird. None of my boys are named Julianne—and I’m pretty sure none of them would be willing to sign their names in glitter.”

  Yes! It worked. That had been a bitch to set up, but totally worth it. Sticky slime all over the decorative spider webs, glitter time bomb, the soap wall to keep people from getting glitter-blasted in the face—all totally worth it.

  “And they soap bombed the pool,” Mr. Bird said. “There was so much foam it shorted out the fuse box. My garden lights are blacked out until I can get an electrician out in the morning.”

  “Unfortunate,” Jason said. “But I still haven’t heard a reason to let you speak to my boys.”

  “Call it neighborly courtesy,” Mr. Bird said.

  Jason chuckled. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I showed you the neighborly courtesy of letting you speak to my children you went out of your way to hurt them.”

  “Now Seymore, if you’re talking about Eric—”

  “I am.”

  “—Then you can’t really blame me for what happened with him. That boy had bad written all over him from the very beginning, and I know how you like to give your kids the benefit of the doubt, but the fact of the matter is that we still don’t know who the guilty party is in that case and—”

  “Leave,” Jason interrupted with quiet fury. “Now.”

  “Now just a minute, be reasonable! There was a lot of monetary damage done tonight, not to mention emotional distress. It would be a shame to have to sue you over this, why—”

  “Why don’t you try,” Jason interrupted calmly. “Coming back—with evidence?”

  He closed the door on Mr. Bird’s squawk of dismay. He locked it, then dead-bolted it, then leaned against it for a long, long time.

  “Jason?” Rudy said tentatively.

  Jason shook his head. “I’m not going to ask,” he said. “I’m not. But I expect to hear from Bird again tomorrow.” He straightened, still facing the door, and took a deep breath. “I told him to come back with evidence. I hope—” he let the word hang in the air for an uncomfortably long time. “—that there isn’t any evidence for him to come back with.”

  Jason turned around then, his eyes smoldering furiously. “I don’t care what you do tonight,” he said quietly. “I don’t care what you do tomorrow morning. But you will be here tomorrow evening. Kennedy, your parents will be joining us tomorrow night. Be here.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said meekly. I expected dread, but there wasn’t any. In some way, meeting my parents here instead of at home seemed—safer. “Um—why didn’t dad mention that when I talked to him?” I asked.

  “Because he doesn’t know it yet,” Jason said. He grabbed his keys off the hook by the door. “But he’s about to.”

  Then Jason was gone like a knight charging into battle. I guess that makes my dad the dragon?

  “What are we going to do now?” I asked when the sound of Jason’s car faded into the night.

  Rudy blew out his cheeks and pulled out his phone. “No evidence,” he muttered. “No evidence.” He dialed and put the phone to his ear. “Where you guys at? Okay, stay put. We have a problem.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  RUDY

  We met my brothers in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Chris had his eyes glued to his phone, but the rest of them looked nervous. I gave them the rundown of the argument between Jason and Julianne’s dad.

  “So basically we need to go back,” I finished. “We need to get rid of all of that shit—unless they already took it out of there.”

  Chris shook his head. “The screeching harpie isn’t letting anybody into the maze. When the cops showed up she sort of hunkered down out there and told them to stay out of it and she’d handle it. They started talking to her about animal endangerment and shit, but she just kept screaming at them to get out of her yard and away from her roses.”

  “Is she still out there?” Kennedy asked.

  Chris shook his head. “She went inside about an hour ago. Haven’t seen anyone else outside since. She wouldn’t even let her husband go in there, like she was really losing her shit.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s nuts,” Gary said carelessly. “Whatever. Makes our job easier. You said the garden lights are out, right? Think the alarm system will be down too?”

  “Probably,” I said with a shrug. “I think it would all be part of the same system.”

  “Even if it’s not, I still have the code,” Kennedy said. “We could just go back in the same way we did before.”

  Bradley was staring at the hood of my car with a funny look on his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  He shifted nervously from foot to foot, then nodded at my car. “Even if her parents can’t come up with evidence, Julianne is going to know it was us. I think—I think maybe the glitter bomb was a step too far.”

  “She would have assumed it was us anyway,” I pointed out. “Besides, the whole school has seen my car by now. Anybody could have set that up. Hell, anybody who makes the connection will probably think it’s like a new trend or something.”

  He didn’t look convinced, but he shook it off. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  For the second time in two days we pulled up in Julianne’s neighborhood after midnight. Even on Halloween weekend, the houses were dark and the streets were quiet.

  Every few blocks or so a house would be lit up, but the parties had mostly died down and the white-collar workaholics were soundly passed out in their overpriced beds.

  Chris was still glued to his phone.

  “What’s so interesting? I thought you said she went to bed,” I asked.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out why she’s so obsessed with those damn roses,” Chris said. “I’m no flower specialist, but those roses don’t look like anything special. And it was really weird—when she first showed up on camera, she didn’t even try to protect the roses. She was way more interested in the dirt around them, and she kept chasing people away while she crawled around on her hands and knees with her fingers in the dirt. Fuckin’ crazy, man.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she’s secretly a pirate and that’s where she buried her treasure. Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  The alley was way more tamped down than it had been before and I paused after about five steps. “Hey—guys—what are the chances they left a beat cop by the back gate to watch for shit like this?”

  Bradley hissed through his teeth. “Ah—probably pretty good.”

  “Chris, do any of your cameras pick up that side of the fence?”

  “Uh—no? Duh. No video evidence of crimes, that’s basic.”

  My stomach clenched and I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. “Then one of us is going to have to go check.”

  “I’ll do it,” Kennedy said.

  I stared at her. “What?”

  She shrugged. “I’m the only one who could even potentially have a halfway decent excuse for being back there this time of night. This is my neighborhood. My house is that way. If anybody asks, I’m just walking home.”

  I glanced around at my brothers, who all seemed to think it was a decent idea. I wasn’t happy about it, but I was outvoted.
Besides, it was her decision.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just text me when the coast is clear.”

  She paused long enough to kiss me. Relief washed through me as her lips touched mine and I realized I’d spent hours waiting for the tension between us to snap and for her to leave me. Her kiss pushed that fear away for a few seconds and I clung to her, not wanting it to end.

  “Wow,” she breathed when I finally let her go. “You and I should follow up on that later.”

  She kissed my nose, then wandered off down the alley as electricity trickled through my body down to my toes. I blew out a slow breath and closed my eyes, telling the universe to keep her safe.

  “Dude. You’re like—in love and shit,” Chris said without taking his eyes off his phone. “Gross.”

  “You’re gross.”

  Chris shrugged a shoulder. “Your m—hold on… shut up.” He’d been wearing one earbud, but he shoved the other one in and turned the volume up on his phone. “There is a cop,” he whispered. “Kennedy’s talking to him. Oh shit. She sounds like she’s crying. Hold on, shut up!”

  I exchanged an exasperated look with Bradley. Literally the only one talking was Chris. He listened hard for a couple of minutes, then waved his hand in the air. “Let’s go, come on! Cop’s gonna walk her home.”

  My heart jumped. “What?”

  “Shut up, come on.”

  Frustration burned behind my eyes. I should have taken the stupid phone from him.

  What did he mean, the cop was walking her home? Why? Was she actually going to go home? What about her parents? And what did she tell the cop to make him think that walking her home was the thing to do?

  I rolled my fingers into fists until my nails bit my palm and followed my brothers into the dark alley.

  “You guys got this, right?” I said to Benjamin as I passed him.

  “What? Where are you going?”

  “Gotta deal with something. I’ll keep that cop off your back. Here—” I pressed my car keys into his hand. “If I’m not back by the time you’re done, have Bradley get my car out of here.”

  “Rudy, what the hell?”

  I put a finger to my lips and padded off down the alley in the direction of Kennedy’s house, ignoring the exasperated huffs behind me. They’d just have to deal. I wasn’t about to let Kennedy walk into an explosive situation all by herself—besides, if the cop decided to just walk her as far as he needed to for her to “find her way,” I would need to keep him from going back to his post.

  Kennedy’s text came through then. A few minutes late, but whatever. I checked it as I walked. “Go. Going home.”

  My heart sank. I wasn’t always smart about things, but that seemed like a pretty clear-cut rejection to me.

  She was going home to face the music and leaving me to clean up the mess.

  I stopped walking and read the text over and over again. Go. Going home. It sounded like a hiccup. Or like a drunk text—

  I slapped my forehead. “Rudy, you’re an idiot,” I muttered.

  I took off after her again, hoping my idiocy hadn’t put too much space between us. Of course she couldn’t say “all clear” or explain herself, she was walking with a cop who was probably being nosy. She was probably faking drunk to get him to walk her home. Fucking brilliant.

  I ran as fast as I could without letting my feet slap too loudly against the sidewalk, and had the two of them in sight by the time they reached the bottom of her street.

  Just as I thought, Kennedy was stumbling and weaving a little bit, making the cop slow down to keep her from stumbling into the street.

  She was chatting loudly with him and giggling, really selling the whole wasted teenager thing, being completely distracting. Perfect.

  I closed the distance and stayed a couple yards back, just close enough to hear what they were saying without drawing attention to myself.

  “I, I can find my way now,” she said, slurring a little. “You have to work, I distracted you.” She sounded adorably sad, like a little kid. It threw me a little bit.

  “Oh, I don’t think so, young lady. I think I better have a talk with your parents, don’t you? Just to make sure they get you to bed okay.”

  “Oh, they don’t know how to do that,” she said drunkenly. “That’s what nannies are for but I’m grown now, I don’t need nannies.”

  “You’re not that grown,” the cop chuckled. “Oop! Come on now, focus. What’s your house number?”

  She mumbled and grumbled a bit, but eventually told him. My mind was racing, trying to figure a way of getting her out of that situation without putting my brothers at risk of getting caught.

  Somehow I didn’t think that her being escorted home by the cops, apparently drunk, would go over well with her dad. If I could just distract him somehow, she could take off. But would she?

  I fiddled with my phone in my pocket for a moment, thinking.

  “Ah, fuck it,” I muttered.

  I sent her a short text, then ran up into a driveway and yanked on a car door handle. It opened easily. That was not what I was going for. I crossed the lawn, jumped a flower garden, and tried the next car. Same deal.

  “Does nobody set their car alarms around here?”

  I tried a few more with equally frustrating results. The ones that were locked weren’t alarmed, but there weren’t many of those.

  The people in this neighborhood weren’t nearly paranoid enough for my liking, and Kennedy was only a few houses away from her front door by then. I needed a new plan.

  I watched her stumble and jerk away from the cop, going down to her knees. She was really playing this up—she was a better actress than I gave her credit for.

  The cop tried to help her but she waved him away, telling him she was going to puke. He gave her space—enough space for her to get a text back to me.

  “Don’t do that. Let this happen.”

  God damn it. What the hell was she up to? She couldn’t want to go home like that, a cop trailing two feet behind her, could she?

  I scowled at her as she got tipsily back up to her feet and started toddling toward her house once more. I didn’t like feeling helpless. I swallowed my anger and kept walking, giving her space.

  Seemed like I was always walking a fine line with her between giving her space and smothering her with affection—I wasn’t sure I understood yet when to do which, and I didn’t like being uncertain about something so goddamn important.

  She made a point of slowing down when they reached the walkway up to her door. I figured she was giving me a chance to get close, so that’s what I did.

  The deep shadow behind the bush in the deep corner formed by the meeting of the garage and the house was just big enough to hide me, and just close enough for me to listen.

  “All right, just lean on the wall there, that’s a good girl. I’m going to ring the bell. Let’s hope they’re awake, right?”

  Kennedy only giggled in response. I heard the bell echo inside the house.

  It took less than a minute for Kennedy’s dad to answer the door; he must have been up waiting for her.

  “What can I do for you officer? Wha—Kennedy?!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  KENNEDY

  Just let me in the door, I thought. “Hi, Daddy!”

  He blinked at me, narrowed his eyes, then looked from me to the officer. “What’s going on, officer?”

  “Sir, I found your daughter wandering around the neighborhood trying to get home. She appears to be inebriated. It’s Halloween, we kind of expect this sort of thing to happen. Just get her inside and get her to bed, we wouldn’t want her getting herself into any more trouble.”

  The cop shifted me toward the door by my elbow and I went with the motion bonelessly—but dad didn’t move out of the way.

  “Any more trouble?” Dad asked with quiet, dangerous emphasis. “What trouble is she in already?”

  The officer chuckled uncomfortably. Dad had that effect when he wanted to. “None at all
, so long as she stays home and sobers up,” he said. “Good night, now.”

  Dad stared at him for another tense few seconds before moving aside to let me stumble into the house. By then, the stumble was real; maintaining a drunken posture on purpose was a literal pain in the ass. Getting rid of it was equally as hard.

  I watched through the window as the cop went back to the sidewalk, then stood and stared at the house thoughtfully for a moment or two. Good, keep dawdling. When he started walking again, I sent a text to all the guys at once.

  “Cop coming back. 10-15 minutes. Finish and go.”

  When I put my phone back in my pocket, Dad was leaning against the door with his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed at me.

  “You aren’t drunk,” he said accusingly.

  “Nope.”

  “So why were you acting drunk?”

  I shrugged slow and thought fast. “Seemed like the best way to get a police escort home. I don’t like walking alone after dark anymore.”

  He scoffed. “Because of the whole, what was it, alien abduction thing?”

  I looked at him flatly. “No aliens. Just abduction.”

  He shook his head and cracked a disbelieving grin. “God, you really are dedicated to that story, aren’t you? Got the whole town riled up over it. You know I had Jason Seymore over here tonight insisting that your mother and I go over to his place tomorrow? And that was after I got off the phone with your vice principal, who is likewise insisting that I show up to your school on Monday for some kind of conference about, and I quote, your future. What’s the matter, Kennedy? School too boring for you?”

  “No,” I said tiredly.

  “Oh, I see. It’s an attention thing. We haven’t been paying enough attention to you, right? Have to go and stir up trouble and tell stories all over town to get your mother all worked up and worried so she’ll cancel my tour and stay home and baby you. Newsflash, kiddo, it didn’t work. We’re leaving, no matter how much trouble you try to cause.”