by K. V. Rose
“Don’t you dare,” he snaps, eyes wide. He presses a finger into my chest, leans down until we’re brow to brow. “Don’t you dare. He was my brother, and you fucked us both up—”
“I got fucked too!” I scream the words, taking a step back from him, my voice raw. Benji stands up and he crosses his arms as he watches us both. “I got fucked too, Caden.” The words come out choked. I shake my head. “It wasn’t just you—”
“What’re you talking about?” His voice is still cold.
I can’t tell him. It doesn’t matter that it would make me feel better. That he would see the why. It doesn’t matter that his dad is a monster and a fucking piece of shit. What matters is that I can’t hurt Caden again. Not like that. Not even after he’s brought Benji here, clearly to fuck with me.
“I have to go.” I reach for my bag again, but he snatches it away, throws it behind him.
“Caden.” That’s Benji’s voice, a low warning. For some reason, it makes me nervous. Caden is safe. Benji is dangerous.
I glance at him, but his stare is for Caden. Caden, however, ignores him.
“You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what the fuck you’re talking about. Who was in that video, Riley?”
I snatch my bag again and this time, Caden pushes me against the wall, one hand tangling in my hair. He yanks my head back, scalp burning where he pulls. And I still feel it. Even now. That rush of want. I don’t let myself move. I don’t trust my own body.
“Who fucked you?” His words caress my face. His breath is hot on my skin, minty.
“Caden. Let her go.”
One hand still in my hair, Caden rounds on Benji at his back. “This has nothing to do with you,” he growls to him.
“Let her go.”
I grab Caden’s wrist, dig my nails into his skin, fight against the part of me that wants this, even still. He whirls back around to me and steps back, eyes narrowed. I let go of him.
“Fuck you,” I say with as much loathing as I can muster. “Fuck you. You’re too wrapped up in your own self-pity to—”
Benji steps in between us as I realize I’m yelling in Caden’s face.
We’re both breathing hard, Caden’s eyes glistening in the darkness and he looks at Benji’s hand on my chest and says, “Don’t touch her.”
Benji scoffs but drops his hand. I grab my bag and turn to go.
“You never deserved him.”
It’s the last thing Caden says before I walk out of his house, slamming the door behind me.
Twenty-Nine
Present
I told her she never deserved him.
I meant it. She deserved me. She still does, and I don’t care that it makes me a sick, twisted fuck. I don’t care that my own mother might disown me. I don’t give a flying fuck what anyone has to say because Riley Larson deserves me, and I want her.
More than anything else in the world, I want her.
Even if I hate her, even if I still haven’t decided if I’m going to show that video to my father…I still want her. These fucking games we play…they just go to show me more and more that she’s mine.
I have shit to do. Mergers calling my name. Clients to return emails to, words worth millions of dollars that I didn’t get to today, because I was thinking about this moment. Work I’ve neglected. And I don’t give a fuck about any of it.
No. Instead, I want to know what she meant when she said she got fucked too. There was something she wasn’t telling me, something that made her eyes go dark. And goddammit I didn’t mean to hurt her, and maybe I did want to scare her a little, but fuck Benji for not letting me get her to tell me.
To talk to me. Confide in me.
Fuck him.
As if he’s in my head he says behind me in the kitchen, “You’re just going to let her go like that?”
I grip the edges of the marble island to keep from lashing out at him, too. Benji might be a dangerous guy, but tonight he’s acting more like me when I’m not being a psycho.
And his words...they hit me.
But I can’t go after her. That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to fuck her over, and we got the video. We did that. I need to let her go. I need to burn her life up, watch as it goes down in flames.
So why do I feel like I also want to be the one to help put out the fire?
“If you don’t go after her,” Benji says, and the way he says it, I turn around to meet his dark eyes, “then I fucking will.”
My gaze narrows on him, even as I see the darkness beyond the wall of windows at his back. She’s out there. Alone. I don’t know if she has her phone. But The Villa isn’t far from here. She’ll be okay, I tell myself. I don’t care if she isn’t, I tell myself.
“Is there something you want to say to me?” I ask Benji, jaw clenched.
“We have the video. It isn’t her first. And she deserves the hell that’s coming to her. Every bit of it. But,” he clinches his fists and there’s a murderous calm in his gaze, “someone hurt her, man. And you need to find out who it was.”
I don’t take any time to respond. I turn around, weave through the kitchen that’s too fucking big to be a kitchen, head down the stairs and grab my keys from the marble plate by the door, suspended from the wall.
Why anyone needs a marble plate is beyond me, but the designers installed it. I’ve spent too much of my life letting people decide things for me by throwing money at them. It’s convenient, sure. I’m a sorry prick for complaining about the luxuries money can buy, that I can afford, that I’ll probably be able to afford for at least the foreseeable future.
But the thing about giving anyone else control over your life—even if you pay and demand them to take it—is that you wake up one day without any idea what the fuck is going on. You no longer run your life. Your life, and the people in it, run you.
As I think about this while I jog down the dark, empty street, looking for Riley, I wonder who is controlling her life. I realize I don’t know much about her anymore. I know the bad that’s in her, the darkness that’s probably as bleak as my own. I know the essence of her. But the external—her life circumstances, how her mom is doing, how school is going—I know none of that. I’ve spent the last three years hating her, loathing her very existence, but she was right.
Even if it kills me to admit it. Even if I don’t want to think about it because I don’t want to think about them, she was right. She lost someone too.
Jack wasn’t just my brother. He was my mother’s son. He was someone’s best friend. And he was, despite what she might have done with me—and whoever was in that fucking video—someone Riley loved.
Fuck’s sake.
The thought is still like a punch to the gut for so many reasons, I really should hire a shrink to unpack them all. But I don’t have time for that. Not right now.
“Riley!” I call into the night. I can see, beyond the large expanse of my backyard, Lake Ontario gently lapping against the shore under the moonlight. But the street is empty, my nearest neighbor not close enough, and if Riley didn’t have a phone, she couldn’t have called a cab. The Villa isn’t far, but I imagine she doesn’t know how to get there from here. I live on a private street, away from the main roads.
I stand in the middle of the road, turning around, calling her name over and over like a lunatic.
For some reason, panic settles in my bones. It’s irrational. This is a safe neighborhood. The safest in Ontario, actually. Part of the reason I moved here. It’s not good for business to live in a crime-ridden town. The worst thing she might come across here is coyotes, and they generally don’t stray too close to the lake, at least not that I’ve seen.
Besides, she could take a coyote. Hell, Riley could take on the world.
“You haven’t found her?”
I see Benji’s form striding up the long driveway, jogging toward me, his brow furrowed. Why he’s become so concerned about her all of a sudden, I don’t understand. Just moments ago, we were filming her without he
r consent, and he had cooked up the plan. Now, he’s worried she might be hurt?
I spin around to face him.
“What’s going on.” I don’t phrase it as a question.
He shakes his head, runs a tan hand through his dark hair. “She couldn’t have gotten far,” he mutters.
“Answer me.” At this, he turns to me.
“Excuse me?” he asks, voice low.
“What the fuck is going on? You created this scheme to get Riley to—”
“Scheme,” he says, shaking his head and turning away from me, still scanning the empty street. “Don’t put the blame on me for that. I know you’ve wanted to fuck Riley over for the past three years, man.”
“So have you. You mourned Jack just like I did. What changed? Just now?”
He takes a breath and doesn’t look at me when he speaks. “You know I deal with some shady shit, right?” I’m surprised at how he says it, like he’s ashamed. I’ve never known Benji to be ashamed of anything, and definitely not since he got out of prison. And certainly not from shady shit.
I don’t say anything, the bugs chirping around us and the rolling water of Lake Ontario the only sound.
“I saw her. When she lashed out at you.”
“Yeah,” I bite out. “You came between us.”
He rounds on me. “You had murder in your eyes.”
I shake my head. “I would never hurt her.”
He scoffs. “You did. Emotionally. That still counts. Sometimes it counts just as much.”
I put my hands on my head, blow out a breath. “You don’t sound like Benji right now.”
“I saw her,” he says again, dropping his gaze. “She meant it. Whatever she was talking about, I don’t know. But she meant it when she said she got fucked, too.”
I shake my head. “I don’t get it. By who? She lied to me, man. She fucked over Jack. That’s why…” I bite my lip.
“You don’t have to say it. I know what she did. It was fucked up. But maybe…” He shakes his head and spins around, scanning the street again. “I don’t know, maybe there’s something we haven’t figured out yet. She always said she didn’t send it, right?”
“She’s a fucking liar. That’s what liars do. They fucking lie! What could possibly make any of this make sense?” There’s my philosophical speech for the night.
Benji shrugs. “Let’s just find her, okay?”
I want to argue with him, but it’s really dark outside and I’m still panicking over where she might be.
“It’s really touching to see the two of you so concerned over the girl you cornered in your basement.”
Her low, soft voice is right behind us and we turn as one to face her. She has her head cocked to the side, her purse dangling from her shoulder. Her green eyes are bright even in the darkness, and they’re narrowed.
On me.
“Riley,” I manage to say, “I’m sorry, that went too far—”
She grins. It’s not her usual smile. It doesn’t meet her eyes. It’s just white, straight teeth, and menace. “Oh, Caden. I don’t think we went nearly far enough.”
“Riley, what—”
She silences Benji with a look. A look. But her gaze finds me again.
“Why wouldn’t you film me sucking your dick instead?” she asks, so calmly. To hear those words come out of her pretty little mouth, well, it doesn’t surprise me. She’s always been as dirty as I’ve been. But now she knows. She heard us.
She takes a step toward me.
“You wanted the world to see me, is that it?”
At that thought, my fists clench.
She laughs, and Benji curses under his breath.
“You actually think I’d fuck your father?” she taunts coldly. A part of me feels relief at that question. That challenge. Because it means she didn’t. But that relief is short-lived. “Not yet,” she continues. “But there’s a lot of bases before that one, aren’t there?”
Icy anger plunges over me. Through my veins. Like a living thing. If my father was here, I would probably literally kill him.
“I’m leaving here,” she says, looking at Benji. “I’m not coming back. Don’t stalk me. Don’t contact me for him. Don’t even think about me. Or I will come after both of you for what you did tonight.”
She turns around.
I make to grab her wrist, but Benji stops me with a hand shoved into my chest.
“How are you getting back to The Villa?” I call after her, my mouth barely working. I don’t know if I want to tear her apart or crush her body against mine.
And then I see a car pull down the street, windows down, Moon Tooth pumping loudly through the speakers. The headlights are blinding, and I put my hand up to my eyes, squinting.
She opens the passenger door of the black Altima and hops in without another glance my way. And in the driver’s side, I see her best friend, Tyler. He’s glaring at me like he wants to kill me.
As I watch him turn the car around in the middle of the street and drive away, the feeling is definitely mutual.
Thirty
Present
I haven’t cried about it.
I won’t.
I don’t cry. And definitely not over Caden Virani.
Tyler’s retreat ended, he took a flight back and came straight to me. We got my stuff from The Villa, and now we’re back in the city, in his shitty apartment that’s still less shitty than the one I’m going back to.
He’s passed out asleep on the couch and I’m in his twin bed, even though we argued about who would take it. I lost that argument when he started snoring in the living room while we watched Sabrina on Netflix. I wish I was a motherfucking witch.
I roll over again, my phone in my hand, my eyes closed. I want to sleep. I really, really do. But in the morning, I’ve got a flight back to North Carolina, thanks to Tyler and his savings account that is probably now depleted.
Adam has called me half a dozen times, texted more times than that. I’m thinking of blocking his number, but for some reason, I haven’t yet. Maybe because I’m lonely. Maybe because even though I know me and Adam would never work out, and not just because he cheated so publicly, it’s still nice to have someone who wants to talk to me.
Besides that, Adam would have never filmed me without my consent. Then, to rub salt in my wounds, Caden had Benji come down the stairs while I was still half-naked. I’m no prude, and hell, Benji is hot. But that’s not the point.
Unless it was.
Because I didn’t really mind him coming down the stairs, and I think that makes me a twisted, twisted girl.
And the cameras…they really have no idea. They really just don’t get it. Which is my fault. Because I won’t tell them.
I shove a pillow over my head, squeezing my eyes shut tight.
Rolland has only called once more. I don’t know what he’s planning, but I know I’m not getting out of this without a few more bruises. For fuck’s sake, I might not get out of this alive. Caden and Benji are one thing, but Rolland…I don’t know what he’ll do. And this isn’t even his fault. It’s fucking mine. Because I let Rolland Virani entrap me.
Fuck him.
And Caden actually believed I would willingly sleep with his own father?
I know he thinks I’m a monster. I just didn’t know he thought I was a cold-blooded one.
“You awake?”
Tyler startles me, and I roll over, clutching the pillow to my chest. His sleepy golden eyes gleam in the light pouring in from his too-thin curtains. The city is always alive. I’m not sure how he sleeps at all here.
I slowly sit up, drag a hand through my hair.
“I am now,” I say playfully.
He comes into his room and sinks down beside me on the bed, one arm draped around my shoulders.
“He’s a bad boy, you know that, don’t you?” he asks quietly. I know who he’s talking about.
He still smells like paint. I wonder if he came back just to see me but brush the feeling of guilt
aside. Tyler is a great friend. My best friend. But he wouldn’t leave Vancouver on a whim. His boyfriend lives there, too.
I nuzzle against his chest.
“Have you been working out?” I ask with a little laugh. Tyler has always been jacked.
He shakes his head and I feel his chest rumble beneath me. “You’ve always been good at dodging the hard shit.”
I laugh, snorting. Rather undignified, but it’s Tyler. “I don’t think that’s quite true,” I say, quieter than I really mean to.
His fingers squeeze my arm, gently. “No,” he answers softly, “you’re right.”
I sit up, twist around to face him, his arm falling from my shoulders. His ruffled dark hair is sticking up at all angles, courtesy of his rest on the couch. I told him everything on the way home earlier, everything except the truth of who’s in the video. He thinks it was a random hookup. I’m not ready for him to know the truth. He’s always been the one to say that it was only natural for Caden to blame me. People, he said, always want to blame someone when tragedy strikes. And it’s really, really hard to blame the victim, or even the illness sometimes, in cases of suicide.
It wasn’t Jack’s fault.
But these past few years I’ve carried the weight of his death like it was mine. I still think it is. But I just don’t know how long Caden wants to punish me for it. If he only knew his father already was.
And even now, Tyler is quick to say that what Benji and Caden did was way too fucking far. Not to mention illegal.
“It hurts,” I finally say, breaking the silence. I see in the darkness, Tyler’s eyes soften. “It hurts that he hates me so much. That he thinks I would sleep with his…” I trail off, unable to say the word. Tyler doesn’t know why Caden might think that. He thinks Adam paid for my flight here, that he cancelled because we broke up.
Some secrets have to stay between Rolland and me. I don’t remember the last time I could just be. The last time the truth didn’t make me feel so fucking ashamed.
But I want to keep it that way. If everyone knew, it’d be worse. Because even though it wasn’t my fault, the pain of the memory, on top of everything else, is too fucking much.