My hands fisted. If I’d known earlier that that fucking bitch had taken advantage of a grieving teenager, I’d have ripped her hair right out of her head. “What happened?”
“I was a teenage boy ruled by hormones. She was hot and kind of young for a teacher. What do you think happened?”
“I mean, how did you come to hate her so much? You have every right to hate her. I fucking hate her. But I’m guessing this somehow ties in with Levi’s suicide. Am I right?”
“Yes.” He tapped his fingers on the back of the sofa. “Turns out I wasn’t the first kid she’d … groomed, I guess you could say. I also wasn’t the only kid she was toying with at the time. But I didn’t know that until Levi killed himself, leaving a note to say that he couldn’t live without her.”
“She’d broken it off with him?”
“Yes. I don’t know why exactly—he didn’t explain that in the letter. Maybe he wanted them to go public, or maybe he was just getting too old for her. If it’s the latter, she probably would have dumped me pretty soon after that.”
Personally, I believed it was likely to be the latter. She obviously had a preference for young boys—maybe out of some twisted sexual deviancy, or maybe because the taboo of sleeping with her students was a thrill for her.
“Levi never mentioned her to me until it ended. He didn’t tell me her name. Just said he’d been seeing a married woman and that she’d dumped him.”
“Wait, she’s married?”
“Not anymore. Her ex-husband knew about it. Didn’t care. She once told me that he didn’t give a damn about anything she did as long as she kept her nose out of his business. Anyway, as for Levi … I didn’t even think that the woman he was seeing could be Liza. It really didn’t occur to me. It should have done. It should have clicked in my brain, but it didn’t.”
“Why would it have done? I’m guessing she told you that she cared for you, that she said she would never have broken so many rules to be with you if she hadn’t. Considering she’d put her career on the line, it must have been easy to believe she loved you. Am I right?” At his curt nod, I added, “Well then, you were hardly going to assume she was also sleeping with others.”
If my words at all helped, Blake didn’t show it. “Levi might not have mentioned her if I hadn’t demanded to know why he looked like shit all the time and had turned into someone I didn’t know. He’d lost weight, stopped taking care of himself, clearly wasn’t sleeping, and didn’t change his clothes for days at a time. His grades went to shit, he didn’t want to leave his house—a house he hated—and he dropped out of the football team.”
“Sounds like he was depressed.” My mother had deteriorated like that several times.
“He told me a little about her, but not her name. Said he needed her. Loved her. Couldn’t live without her. You know what I did? Told him to stop being a bitch. Said no girl or woman was worth putting himself through the ringer for and that there were plenty more out there.”
The self-recrimination in his tone was painful to hear. “You were a teenager, Blake. You couldn’t have known just how far down he’d sunk.”
Blake ignored that. “He went to her house, uninvited, and saw me leaving. More, he saw me kissing Liza on the porch.”
I flexed my fingers, wishing I’d slapped the sick bitch when I had the chance. “Did he confront you?”
“No, I hadn’t known he was there until later. He thought she’d dumped him for me. He killed himself in my house, Kensey. I came home, went up to my bedroom, and found him hanging there. And I found his note, detailing everything.” Blake clenched his teeth. “He died hating me. Hating me so much that he wanted me to find him that way.”
Oh, fuck. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his friend had killed himself, blaming him for his own misery, he’d also died in Blake’s room … just as his mother had died of smoke inhalation in his old room.
I would have reached out. Grabbed his hand. Something. But his body language screamed, “Don’t touch me.”
“There was an investigation, and it all came out. She was arrested, but not convicted.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because I lied to the police and said that it hadn’t happened. I said that I was the one who wrote Levi’s note, wanting to get my teacher in trouble.”
I looked at him, perplexed. “But … why would you do that?”
“Same reason the other kids kept quiet. She had videos, Kensey.”
My belly churned. “Videos?”
“She’d secretly filmed herself with us for her own sick reasons. Maybe the videos were like trophies to her, I don’t know. She confronted me outside school and showed me a sample. From that angle, you couldn’t tell it was her, but you could see me perfectly clear. She threatened that if I told the truth, all the videos she had of me and the others would be posted online—particularly on child-porn sites. Like I said, I was fourteen when it started. That’s just the right age for some sick fuckers. Once something like that is online, Kensey, you can never really get it off. Videos get shared. Downloaded. Copied. Put in physical format.
“Me and the other boys got together to talk about it, and we made the decision to keep our mouths shut. We didn’t want to live knowing that sick bastards were jerking off at the sight of us. Didn’t want to live knowing someone could recognize us from the videos or that they could be one day used against us. Didn’t want them haunting us all our lives. We also didn’t want Levi’s memory stained by them. We couldn’t save him, but we could at least be sure there weren’t what were effectively porn videos of him floating around.”
Fucking hell. “So she got away with it?”
“There are different kinds of justice. I haven’t hurt her, Kensey, if that’s what you’re wondering. I never rolled her up in a fucking carpet. But me, Bastien, and Tara have made her and her ex-husband pay in other ways. They divorced shortly after I bought and took apart the last of his businesses.”
“Hasn’t she threatened to post the videos online if you don’t leave her alone?”
“A year after Levi’s death, she and her ex-husband came back from a dinner party one night to find their home ablaze. Very little survived the fire. Shame that.”
I didn’t need to ask if he’d had something to do with it. Considering Blake’s mother died in a house fire, it might have surprised me that he’d set someone else’s home alight. But he’d clearly known Liza and her ex-husband were out of the house, and I could hardly blame him for wanting to be sure the recordings were destroyed. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that someone had explicit videos of you that could be uploaded onto child-porn sites at any time. As he’d said, it would have haunted him all his life. “And you’re sure the vids were destroyed?”
“Positive. See, she was blackmailing Bastien.”
“What?”
“Bastien was angrier than the rest of us. Like Levi, he’d loved her. Trusted her. Allowed her to do … things to and with him that he hadn’t been comfortable doing, but he’d gone along with it all just to make her happy. So, yeah, he was running on rage. He kept loitering near her house, following her around, and turning up wherever she was just to psych her out. It worked. He scared her. So she threatened that if he didn’t back off and agree to pay her a monthly sum, she’d upload some pictures of him onto the web; pictures in which she was wearing Dominatrix gear and doing some heavily kinky stuff to him. It wasn’t about money for her, she was trying to keep him under control.”
Oh my God. “She has no soul at all, does she?”
“No, baby, she doesn’t.”
“Did she blackmail you or the others?”
“Me? No. But then, she didn’t have any pictures of me in kinky situations—I hadn’t jumped through sexual hoops for her. If she tried blackmailing the others, they didn’t say so. After the fire, Bastien told her he wouldn’t pay her another penny unless she could prove she still had the pictures. But she couldn’t. She threatened to upload his videos instead,
but he called her bluff and said he didn’t believe they’d survived the fire. He also said that if she could prove she had them, he’d pay her double what he’d been paying her to stop her from uploading them. She’s a greedy bitch, Kensey—if she’d still had the videos, she’d have shown him a clip so that she could get her hands on his money and keep him under her control.”
“Free from the threat of the videos, did you go to the police with the whole story?”
“No, because we would have had to explain why we lied in our statements. We would have had to talk about the videos and tell the police the ins and outs of what happened. Shame kept us quiet. Shame and guilt over Levi.”
Needless shame and guilt—the boys had done nothing wrong. But I suspected that those words wouldn’t comfort Blake. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew intellectually that the emotions were senseless. But what you knew and what you felt weren’t always the same.
“Bastien, Tara, and I don’t spend every waking minute of our lives concocting schemes to make her pay,” said Blake. “We leave her alone for years at a time. We give her a chance to rebuild her life. Get a new job. Make new friends. Find herself a boyfriend. Then, just when it’s all going great …”
“You swoop in.”
“She once made our lives hell.” He shrugged. “We’re just returning the favor.”
And who could blame them for that?
“She got engaged a few months ago to a very rich man in Louisiana. She gets engaged a lot. Very good at making the male gender fall for her.”
“You anonymously sent him information about her arrest and the investigation that took place, didn’t you?”
“Yes. We did the same to her other fiancés. She no doubt claimed it was all lies, but none of them ever gave her the benefit of the doubt—probably because they were all high-society people like politicians, who can’t risk being associated with that kind of scandal. I don’t know.”
I absentmindedly rubbed at my upper arm. “How did Tara fuck up when we were in Mexico? It was her who called you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. Liza managed to get a job as an online tutor, doing webinars and such. To me, that doesn’t mean her students would be safe. She could groom and lure them to her—she’s good at grooming. Tara should have been watching her closely enough to notice, since she long ago declared that she’d ensure Liza never worked with children again.”
“I take it Liza no longer has the job.” Which meant she’d lost her fiancé and her job in short order. “So, once again, her world collapsed around her. And she came to me, thinking it would make you show up.”
He slowly leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs. “I’m so fucking sorry that she got near you. I never thought that would ever happen. Didn’t even realize she was in Redwater. She hasn’t been back for years.” He tentatively laid his hand on my bare knee, eyes drinking in my face. “I didn’t want her to ever breathe your air, let alone speak to you.”
I could understand that, since I didn’t want Michael anywhere near him. “Thank you for trusting me with all that.” He’d had the choice of letting me walk away, but he hadn’t. “But I’m going to reiterate that you don’t bear any blame in what Levi did. You don’t deserve to have someone pound on you with their fists.”
“I like the pain, Kensey,” he said, his tone something between sad and bitter.
“You say it helps you. I don’t understand.”
“I’ve never tried to explain it before. It clears my mind. Makes me feel … real. At peace. Alive, like after a really tough workout. I can focus better afterward. I feel more in control.”
And he’d had control wiped away from him several times in his life.
It was little wonder that demons lurked inside him—he lost his mother because she’d refused to come out of the fire until she found him. He lost a father he’d been unable to connect with, leaving him with a messed-up stepmother who’d made sexual advances several times. His teacher had groomed, abused, and fooled him into thinking she cared for him. And his friend had committed suicide in Blake’s bedroom, hating him.
I snapped out of my thoughts when Blake’s hand squeezed my knee gently.
“Having you living with me wasn’t the only reason I stopped fighting, Kensey,” he said. “I made the decision to stop on the day you confronted me about the pictures that Smith sent you. I saw how hurt you were that I’d lied to you. I fucking hated it. I didn’t want to have to lie to you again, so I stayed away from the rings and the cages.”
My brow furrowed. “But you said you need the pain.”
“I need you more.” His thumb drew a circle on my knee. “I knew that if I wanted you in my life, I had to give it up. Completely. When I want something badly, I do what it takes to get it. I knew this was what it would take to keep you. I’d already started to need it less since you came along. You give me a different kind of peace. One that’s real, not brought on by endorphins. I got to learn the difference. Like I’ve said before, you’re my good thing. Don’t ask me to watch you walk away. I can’t do that. I won’t.” His jaw set, telling me he meant it. “It makes me a selfish bastard, I know, but I won’t.”
I didn’t want to walk away. I knew that if I did, he’d go back to the way things were before me, and the thought of that made my throat thicken. It wasn’t the fights that bothered me; it was the reasons behind him having them. No matter what he thought, it wasn’t as simple as liking to give and receive pain. It wasn’t as simple as finding the endorphins somewhat addictive. Whether he saw it or not, he was punishing himself each time he let someone hurt him. Whenever he stood in a ring or cage, battering his opponent, he was striking out at those who’d hurt him. And I’d bet that one of the people he was angry with was Levi, and that only made him feel guiltier—which just fed his subconscious urge to punish himself.
It was a vicious cycle, and I didn’t want him to be part of it anymore. I didn’t want that for him.
“If anyone deserves ‘normal,’ Kensey, it’s you. And I don’t just mean because you have Bale as a stepfather. I know the weight of your mother’s fragility sits heavily on your shoulders. I know that being living proof of another person’s infidelity has left its mark on you. These are my marks, and they’re ugly. But I need you to say you can deal with them.”
I blew out a breath. His marks were more than just ugly. But Blake didn’t need my baggage any more than I needed his, did he? Still, he was here. He accepted it. Accepted me. And I truly didn’t know how to walk away from him. It would rip me apart because … because … well, I loved the bastard, didn’t I?
Still, I needed to be sure of something. “You mean it when you say that you’re done with the fights? There are a lot of things I can accept and deal with, Blake—you hurting yourself isn’t one of them. Be honest, you wouldn’t like me climbing into a ring, week after week, getting all banged up—especially when it’s in search of some kind of artificial peace.”
He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm. “You’re right, I wouldn’t want that. I’d fucking hate it, and I’d do what it took to make you stop. I won’t lie to you, baby, the pull to get in one of those rings or cages hasn’t gone. It might be a while before it does. It’s been my quick fix for a long time. But I made the decision to stop, and I’ll stick with it. Never again will I do it, Kensey. Never again.”
His voice rung with a solemn sincerity. I studied his face, seeing that same earnestness there. It was impossible to doubt him. And I wanted to believe him. Badly. Maybe he’d stick by his promise; maybe he wouldn’t. But he deserved a chance, didn’t he? And he’d already been hurt so much … What kind of person would I be if, after baring his soul that way and trusting me with his secrets, I walked out on him? I was better than that, and he deserved better.
I took a deep, cleansing breath, letting the tension in my muscles ebb. “Okay. But if you break that promise, I’ll join you in that ring and kick your epic ass myself.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Closing his eyes, Blake drew in a long breath through his nose. I could almost feel his relief, it was so profound. When his eyes opened again, they were blazing with an emotion that was undefinable yet made my pulse quicken. “Come here, Kensey.” I pushed myself off the sofa and moved to him. He caught my wrist and pulled me onto his lap. “There’s my girl. So much tougher than she gives herself credit for.”
He palmed my face with his hands and stared at me in a way that made my throat grow thick. The tight feeling in my chest loosened, and the chill that had invaded my body eased away. I felt warm. Safe. Cared for.
“My good thing,” he whispered. Then his mouth took mine, soft yet insistent. The kiss was lazy and wet and intoxicating. There was so much emotion there—Blake poured himself into the kiss and savored what I gave back to him.
He snaked his hand up my thigh, under my skirt, and cupped my ass. And then … Jesus, it was like someone switched the intensity dial as high as it would go, because the kiss turned wild and desperate. My blood raced, and my nerve endings sprang to life.
I had no idea how the hell we ended up on the floor, but suddenly we were there—my skirt hiked around my waist, his fly undone, his cock hard and ready. And then he yanked my panties aside and rammed into me. No foreplay, no preamble, no warning. But I didn’t have a moment to feel any pain from the rough possession, because he pounded into my pussy like he’d been put on the Earth to fuck me.
I held on, nails and heels digging into his back. I felt his guilt and anger in every thrust, but I also felt the force of his relief and possessiveness. When his thumb rubbed my clit and he ordered me to “fucking come,” I flew apart. He buried his face in the crook of my neck and exploded inside me with a muffled curse.
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