by Tijan
Copyright © 2019 Tijan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes only. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created by the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.
Edited by Jessica Royer Ocken
Proofread by Paige Smith, Kara Hildebrand, Chris O’Neil Parece, and Amy English
Formatted by Elaine York, Allusion Graphics, LLC
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Kian Chapter One
To my readers!
A NOTE TO THE READER
To my knowledge, there is no Lakeshore Wharf.
I needed to fictionalize this area for the purposes of this book.
PROLOGUE
Fourteen years earlier
My boarding school roommate was a mafia princess.
Although I didn’t learn that at first. Our beginning six months went by without a hiccup.
When I first walked into our room, I took in her bedding, which looked like a cloud with crystal lights surrounding it, the massive amount of photographs she’d taped to her wall in the shape of a heart, and the framed canvas with a quote in glittering font that read, Fairytales Happen.
That’d been the only pause for me, because I was not this type of girl.
I’d been shipped to Hillcrest Academy slightly against my wishes—but also not. The fighting between my parents was at an all-time high, and even though we lived in a mansion and they kept to their wing, I could still hear them. It was hard not to when I snuck up to sleep in the hallway adjacent to theirs. I was an only child, and lonely. Maybe not all twelve year olds have that insight, but I did.
I also had the insight that while I loved my mother, I loathed the battlefront that was in our home, and my shoulders sagged in relief at the quiet in Hillcrest Academy.
On the day I moved in, there’d been some shrieks, some giggling, music playing, and a mom who’d shouted at a little boy who darted under my legs and took off down the hallway, but none of that was really noise. It would never match the shouts, the yelling, the sound of walls being hit, and especially not that last thing I’d heard two nights ago: a bloodcurdling scream.
I hadn’t even been in my parents’ hallway when I heard it. I’d been over in my wing, having given up on trying to be near them, but I’d bolted upright in my bed.
I’d laid back down after a few moments when no other sound followed, feeling and hearing my heart pounding in my chest. I wasn’t altogether shocked when my dad’s secretary told me the next day to start packing. I was going to boarding school.
My dad was gone the next day.
My mom cried in her room. The whole day.
I was told by Claude, our butler, when to be ready to leave. And it was only when I stood in the doorway, feeling all sorts of weird and sick butterflies in my stomach, that my mom came to the entryway. She seemed so frail.
I knew she was thin, but I would have the image of her that day seared into my brain forever.
She shuffled forward, as if walking was painful, wearing a sheer robe with a white nightgown beneath. Her feet barely peeped out from the robe, but when they did, I saw she wore her usual fuzzy-slipper thongs. They were her favorite. She wore them when she got pedicures, but today she also had a wrap around her hair, half shielding her face. The part I could see was perfectly made up, with pink crystal lipstick over her mouth and her skin caked over with complexion smoother. Sunglasses hid her eyes.
I stepped into Claude’s side when I saw them. I hadn’t meant to. The sight of my mom wearing sunglasses wasn’t unusual, and it wasn’t even unusual for her to wear them inside, but this was my day to leave.
I wanted to see my mom’s eyes before I went.
She never took them off.
She knelt in front of me, where I was half hiding behind Claude now, and she opened her arms.
I ran to her, throwing my arms around her neck. I didn’t care how skinny she was. I wound my legs around her waist, and still kneeling, she caught and held me. She ran a soothing hand down my back, bending to kiss my shoulder.
“I love you, my little ray of sunshine,” she whispered. “Have fun at this new school. Make new friends.” She squeezed me tight.
Claude cleared his throat, opening the door behind us.
I pulled back reluctantly as she let me go.
Claude already had my bags in the car. He wasn’t going with me to the new school. My assigned car ride was with Janine, the secretary who’d told me I was leaving the day before. I had no doubt she’d made all the preparations for me.
As I walked out the door, I looked over my shoulder.
A single tear streaked down my mother’s cheek.
That was one of the last times I saw her.
CHAPTER ONE
Present day
“Die, you fly!”
I locked eyes with a black fly, or maybe our eyes weren’t locked, but he was perched on the rock next to me. He was going down. He had been harassing me for the last hour. I was outside, trying to clean up the yard, but I was going nuts with this damn thing buzzing all around me.
He was teasing me, taunting me. He flew out of the way every time I swung at him. He was too fast, and as he paused on my shoulder, I swung at the same time the screen door opened. I heard its creak across the yard right before a numbing pain explo
ded in my shoulder.
“Ry—did you just clock yourself?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I groaned, my knees buckling.
I had.
I’d swung with the rock in my hands, and now I felt blood trickling down my shoulder and arm. My shirtsleeve was rapidly turning red.
The fly fucker was trying to kill me, by outsmarting me.
“Shit.”
The door slammed shut, and I heard Blade’s feet scuffling down the stairs as he ran to me. The gravel crunched under his weight, and then he slid in behind me. His pants would be ripped up, but knowing Blade, he wouldn’t care.
He rarely cared about clothes. We were just happy he wore them, most of the time.
“Fuck.” He swore under his breath, his very tanned and slightly oily fingers gentle as he looked at my wound. His dark eyes seemed to penetrate my shoulder before he sat back on his heels, raking a hand through his dreadlocks. “What were you doing?”
I wasn’t going to admit a fly had outwitted me.
When I was doing yard work, Blade made himself scarce. For the years he’d been living with us, he’d been content to clean the inside. He did most of the cooking, cleaning, and dishes, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to come home from shopping and find him wearing a maid’s apron and duster—and nothing else.
So for him to come looking for me outside like this wasn’t normal.
“What is it?” I jerked my head toward the house, hearing the television blaring.
His concerned eyes lifted to mine, and a whole different look slid over him.
My alarm level went up three notches.
Of the three of us living in this little cabin outside of Calgary, or Cowtown as we called it sometimes, Blade wasn’t the one who got concerned about things. He enjoyed indulging in marijuana, kept his hair in tight dreadlocks, and dressed like a child from the sixties in a brown vest, no shirt, and a tie-dyed bandana over his hair. Only instead of bell-bottoms, he wore tight, frayed jeans over regular runners. He handled all our computer stuff, and when we walked inside, I wasn’t surprised to find he had switched over the news he’d caught on his computer to the main television screen.
I also wasn’t surprised to be watching a report from New York City.
“—ennett mafia princess has been missing for forty-nine hours now.”
Ice lined my insides.
A picture of my old boarding school roommate, Brooke Bennett, flashed on the screen, along with numbers to call if she was found.
Found…
As in, she was lost?
I felt punched in the chest.
Brooke was missing.
Dazed, I reached out for a chair to sit in. Blade moved to my side.
“That’s your old roommate, right?” The chair protested. Blade’s hand left my arm, and his voice came from my side. “The one you had at that rich school.”
I almost snorted at his wording, but I was still in a daze. I nodded instead.
Brooke. Man.
The news was showing pictures from her social media accounts, and she was gorgeous. Fourteen years. I don’t know why that number popped into my head, but it felt right. It’d been so long since I last saw her, or was it fourteen years since we first met? One of those.
“She was always so girly,” I murmured, almost to myself. She’d been so full of life.
Not me. I’d been a numbed-down, post-traumatized zombie when I walked into that room.
“Oh my gosh! You must be my roommate!” She had launched herself at me from behind the moment I entered the room, wrapping her arms around me. Her face had pressed into my shoulder.
Janine had squawked. “Oh my.”
I’d ignored my dad’s secretary and had taken one second before the girl let me go and hurried around in front of me. Her hands went to my arms, just underneath my shoulders and she’d looked me up and down.
I did the same: black oval eyes, stunning jet-black hair, a pert nose, small mouth—but lips formed just like the ones that had been a stamp on my last Valentine’s Day party invitation, full and plump.
I was slightly envious, or as envious as I could get since I wasn’t usually the jealous type. She had a small chin to end her perfect heart-shaped face, and her eyes were glittering and alive.
That had been the one moment when I truly was jealous of her. Life. She had what I didn’t. I wasn’t jealous of her looks, though if I’d had a different upbringing maybe I might’ve been? In a way, that was something I was thankful for. Life meant more to me than looks or things. It meant yearning for safety, smiles, the feeling of being loved.
The other girls had been jealous of her money. For a “rich kids” school, everyone seemed to be pissed about how much money they had. They always wanted more, and they seemed to know who had the most. I was toward the lower end of the wealthy crowd, but Brooke—as it had been whispered around school—was at the top.
There’d been other whispers, other looks, but we were twelve in our first year there. I didn’t understand what the word mafia actually meant. But it was used often as a taunt by our second semester at Hillcrest. The first semester there hadn’t been that kind of bullying. Some girls liked us. Some girls didn’t. A few hung out with us, and our room became known as the “hot guy” room. Not because we had guys there. Far from it. I would’ve died if a cute guy even looked my way. No, no. Our room had the name because of all the posters and photographs Brooke plastered all over our room. All gorgeous males.
It never made sense that some of her pictures didn’t look professionally taken, but the posters were real, and who wouldn’t drool over a full-length shot of Aaron Jonahson, the best football player in the United States—or the celebrity actor from everyone’s favorite television show, or the so-hot model that’d been a convict first. Brooke seemed to have all the guys covered, but some pictures seemed more like snapshots. Which was the truth.
I found out around the holidays: they were her family.
They weren’t celebrities—not in the sense that I understood back then—they were her brothers, all four of them.
Cord was the oldest at eighteen.
Kai was fifteen.
Tanner was fourteen.
Brooke was twelve.
And Jonah brought up the rear at nine years old.
Brooke was quiet about her family, really quiet. But when I found out those boys were her brothers, and their names, I was fascinated. I couldn’t lie about that. I just hadn’t known who I was becoming obsessed about.
Cord kept his hair short, almost a crew cut above his more angular face. Brooke told me he was usually the reserved one, and artsy. She almost hissed when she used that word, as if it was a curse, but then she shrugged. “It’s the truth. He wants to be a painter one day.”
Next in line hadn’t been Kai. She’d skipped over him and chewed on her lip, pausing before pointing to Tanner. As she did, her eyes lit up and a bright smile took over her face.
“Tanner has this shaggy hair that he bleaches blond, and sometimes it’s dark when I see him. He’s funny, Ry. He’s so funny, but he also has an attitude. All the girls here would die over him, literally just die.”
I still remembered all the emails she got from a tannerinyourmama—almost her entire inbox was emails from him.
When she’d gotten to Jonah’s picture, she’d quieted, but a fondness had shone through her. She’d spoken almost as if he were in the room and words could break him.
“Jonah’s the baby,” she said gently. “He worships Kai…” She’d paused and scratched at her forehead before continuing. “But he doesn’t look like the rest of us.” That’s all she’d said about him.
I’d inspected the picture of her and him together. She had pulled Jonah onto her lap, her arms around him, and his still-baby cheek pressed against hers as he smiled. His skin had a darker tone than the others, but they all had the most luscious facial features. All dark eyes.
Cord and Kai had black hair in their pictures. Tanner’s w
as lighter, and Brooke’s a lovely shade of dark copper. Jonah’s hair matched hers, with a twinge of curl in it too. Tanner’s was long and shaggy, sticking up all over. Kai’s was short, where a hand could run through it easily and it’d fall back in place—just a touch longer than Cord’s barely-there hair.
I returned my attention to the television now, coming back to the present.
In the photos on the screen, Brooke’s hair was still the length it’d been in school. She’d kept it trimmed just above her waist and had been adamant that no one would cut it. She’d whispered one night about a fight with her dad, that her father went after her with a pair of scissors. But her hair was still long when she told me, so whatever the fight, he hadn’t been successful. And like all the other times she talked about her family, she didn’t go into detail. She always said just enough so I knew what she was talking about, and then she would close up. Her shoulders would shudder before a wall slammed down, and that night had been the same.
A soft sigh left me as I continued to watch the images on the news.
Brooke had her chin up, proud, as her braided hair curved around her neck. In another she struck a sultry pose in a bikini. She could’ve been a model, except maybe she didn’t have the height—not like me. She’d been an inch shorter than me in school, though now I had shot up even taller to five ten.
They teased us about being sisters at school.
I had loved it, though I never said a word. I didn’t know if Brooke enjoyed it. She never spoke for or against it, but I could see now why people thought that way. We both had dark black hair. Okay. Maybe I couldn’t see why now. That was the end of our similarities. Brooke had a rounder face. I was fairer in skin. My eyes were more narrow. My face a little longer. And taller. I was always taller.
Brooke used to sigh that I could be a model, but she was wrong. She was the future model. I saw the proof now.
She looked like she’d gotten a tad bit taller too, maybe another inch, but that was it. It didn’t matter. Brooke could’ve been a model just because she had turned into a celebrity—which was also why the story about her being missing had been picked up by a news channel from New York City, where I didn’t think she lived.