Give in to Me

by K. M. Scott

  Her words hit me like a fist to my chest. “That’s not fair, Jordan. I’m no different than I’ve ever been. I can’t believe you’d bring up Tristan never coming back like that.”

  “Isn’t that what the whole Gage thing is about? You knew I liked him, and still you’re acting like that with him? Why would you do that?”

  Defensiveness raged inside me, and I lashed out. “That whole Gage thing, as you call it, is just me being the same old Nina I’ve always been. That I’d never been really nice to him or West wasn’t because I didn’t think I should be but because I was feeling depressed all these weeks. So now I feel a little better and I get accused of being someone else and not myself? That’s bullshit and I don’t deserve it.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and she screamed, “You have everything here! Why do you have to go after him too? Isn’t it enough to have all the money you’ve ever wanted? Now you want another guy in addition to Tristan? What happened to waiting for him and being so madly in love?”

  Jordan had never yelled at me like that and I stepped back in astonishment for a moment, but I wasn’t stunned for long. I barked back, releasing all the months of unhappiness on her. “I have nothing here! What do I care about money when the man I love is absent all this time? You think I stay in my room curled up in a ball so much because I’m fucking happy? I stay there because it’s all I have left of him. It’s the only place that truly feels like he’s there with me. I’m not doing anything with Varo, and if you think I would do that to Tristan or you, the two people I love more than anyone else in this world, then maybe you’re the one who’s changed, not me.”

  She looked stunned by my outburst, but I saw the hurt in her eyes too. As I turned to leave, I heard her mumble about West and something he’d said, but I didn’t care. I stormed out of her room across the house to my own room, devastated that my best friend had just accused me of trying to steal the man she wanted. Burying my face in the pillow, I let the tears flow from all the frustration and hurt bottled up inside me. How could she think I would ever do that to her?

  I wanted to believe she’d lashed out at me because of her problems at work, but her words had hurt. All the money in the world meant nothing without Tristan, and she knew that. She knew how much I loved him, so why would she think I’d ever go after Gage? And that she thought I’d ever break the girlfriend code and chase after someone my best friend wanted, even if there was no Tristan in the picture, was crazy. Since that first day in college, we’d been like sisters. My own sister had never rejoiced in anything that made me happy, but Jordan did. From the moment we met, I’d been able to tell her whatever was in my heart and she supported me, and I’d always been there to do the same for her. I’d never betray her, and it hurt like hell that she could even entertain the idea that I would.

  I needed to clear the air with her. No matter what else was going on, she was my best friend. Hurt or not, I had to make her understand there was nothing between Varo and me. How I’d ever explain the two of us being seen as a couple in public was beyond me at that moment, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

  Just as I sat up to go back to her room, my phone vibrated with a text. Looking down, I saw the first words scroll across the top of my phone.

  I think it might be better if I move

  I quickly swiped the phone and read her entire message. I think it might be better if I move back to the city for a while. Maybe we just need some time apart. I know you’ll be safe here with all these people to take care of you.

  My heart sank as her words sat there staring up at me in orange on the screen. What hurt more were the ones she hadn’t typed in. That somehow I’d changed and didn’t need her anymore. By the time I reached her room, she was gone. She’d cleaned out her dresser and much of her closet, but most of everything she owned was still there. I ran to the garage to catch her, getting there just in time to see Jensen drive through the gate at the bottom of the driveway.

  I typed out I don’t want to lose another person in my life and clicked Send. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and close my eyes. I already missed her. When she didn’t text back, I walked back to my room and climbed into bed, the smell of buttered popcorn still hanging in the air. It wasn’t even nine o’clock at night, but it didn’t matter.

  Grabbing my phone from the nightstand, I typed out my last message for the day, as I always did before I went to sleep, but unlike usual, it wasn’t a profession of love. Losing my best friend had put me in a mood that was anything but loving.

  Jordan moved out because she thinks I’m with Varo now and she liked him. I hope this whole plan of yours is worth it. Now it’s just me, Varo, West, and Jensen. Maybe it would be better if you got rid of West and Jensen so the world really could see Varo and me as the loving couple we are. Just a thought.

  Chapter Five

  Tristan

  As I lay in bed awake just staring at the ceiling, I heard the phone vibrate on the night table next to me. It was the one Nina messaged me on. Picking it up, I read her text so full of anger—at me, at the entire situation we found ourselves in—and I couldn’t blame her. That didn’t mean her mention of her and Varo as a loving couple didn’t make my insides churn from jealousy. Just the thought of it made me want to race back to the house and remind her how much I loved her.

  Except I couldn’t. Doing that would put her in as much danger as I was in, and the last thing I wanted to do was get her hurt in all this.

  Fuck. I hated this. I’d intentionally avoided the whole business thing with my brother and father for this very reason. All this cloak and dagger shit was what they’d always reveled in. I didn’t care. If it weren’t for Nina, I would have handed Karl the damn notebook at the beginning of all this and walked away to live on a secluded island somewhere. The problem was that whatever he was looking for didn’t seem to be in that notebook.

  I’d combed through those pages until I knew their contents by heart. How my brother and father were the monsters I’d never imagined they could be. How the Cashen family had paid more than any should for my family’s greed and callousness. Some days, I sat with the tablet in my hands, unable to open the cover because I didn’t want to face the ugliness inside. On those days, I hated the name Stone more than I ever thought possible. I wasn’t like them, no matter what lies I’d told in my life, but the real fear that what they were wasn’t something I could choose but something innate in me terrified me to the bone.

  Other days, I did nothing but read those lines over and over, needing for some masochistic reason to be reminded of my family’s crimes and the terrible consequences that had resulted. Not that I would ever forget what they’d done. The memory of Taylor’s treatment of that young girl and her tragic death, along with Judge Cashen’s murder and the killing of all those innocent men, women, and children all for the sake of saving my father from losing some sexual harassment lawsuit would forever be imprinted on my mind and my soul.

  I’d be stained by their guilt for the rest of my life.

  But what about my mother? Had she known what my father and brother had done? There was no mention of her in any of Joseph Edwards’ notes about Amanda Cashen’s suicide and her father’s murder, but the thought of what she may have known loomed as an unanswered question in my mind every time I thought about what Nina’s father had uncovered.

  Sleep wouldn’t come if my mind continued to race with all these thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them. They spun in my brain like some tormented top, slamming into good memories and corrupting even them. Of all my family, my mother had always been an island of kindness in a sea of ruthless behavior, a quiet presence I now understood I never appreciated enough. While my father and brother had worked to rearrange the world to suit their twisted desires, my mother had been the often silent, gentle force behind our family.

  Nearly invisible to even me, she’d been an angel among devils who looked on her with distaste and an indulgent son who ignored her in favor of satisfying his hedo
nistic soul. But as she watched the three men in her life do as they liked with little regard for those they hurt, had she known or even had the tiniest hint of what they truly were?

  I slid out of bed and made my way to the living room, lured by Joseph Edwards’ notebook like sailors to the sirens’ calling. Tonight was one of those nights I couldn’t fight the need to read those words once again, filling myself with a loathing for my family and by extension, myself.

  My eyes glided over the pages, taking in the words I knew as well as my name. The details never changed, as much as I wished they would. Was it madness to hope that just once that tablet wouldn’t contain the horrible truth of who I came from?

  I told myself that I continued to read through every page to find that one detail I’d missed so I’d finally know what Karl was looking for, but that wasn’t the entire truth. I read these notes written by a man my father had murdered because I couldn’t help myself. It was like some kind of penance I felt I needed to pay. Somehow, if I read them just one more time, I’d be able to reconcile who I was with who my father and brother were.

  So far, it hadn’t turned out that way.

  As always, I reached the end of Joseph Edwards’ notes on my father and brother’s crimes and felt revulsion at every word. My usual next move was to skim over what remained of the notebook and throw it off to the side, discarding it as if it was the reason my life had gone to fucking hell. My first instinct was to do exactly that tonight, but I stopped myself and forced my eyes to focus on the remaining pages in his tablet.

  It’s not that I hadn’t read them before. Separated from the notes about Amanda and Albert Cashen and my family by just one page, there was information about some drug I suspected Edwards had researched concerning another suicide—some drug for heart disease I’d never heard of. It appeared, from what he’d found, that it had received FDA approval but had become a killer drug for those that needed it most. His notes on this only took up a page and ended with the letters TR and a question mark.

  I had no idea what that could mean, but as far as I knew, it had nothing to do with the ugliness between the Stone and Cashen families. The next page read like some kind of foreign crossword puzzle, full of clues I couldn’t decipher. Edwards had written a series of words repeatedly, the order never changing.

  -Cordovex—death?—TR—October

  Again, TR. Who or what was TR? Had they committed suicide? Had my family been implicated in their death? TS would make sense because it could refer to Taylor, but TR just sat there on the page meaning nothing to me. Was TR supposed to indicate a name? Someone’s initials? Thursday? I had no idea.

  A knock on the front door yanked me out of my thoughts, and I cautiously walked over to look through the peep hole to see Daryl standing on the other side. I opened the door, and he pushed past me before I had a chance to welcome him into my temporary home.

  “Shit’s getting interesting, to say the least, my friend,” he said ominously as he plopped down into the chair across from my seat on the couch. “Karl obviously knew about the LA house since it’s been turned over three times already.”

  I sat back down and considered what Daryl had just said. “Not a coincidence since that house hasn’t been touched since my father died. What the fuck is he looking for?”

  Daryl shook his head, all the while stroking his beard that seemed to grow bushier every time I saw him. “I don’t know. I can’t decide if he’s looking for you or that tablet you have there.”

  “There’s nothing in it. I’ve looked. Other than the ugly details about my family and the Cashen family, all Edwards seemed to be interested in was some prescription drug for heart disease. Seems it was anything but helpful for some people.”

  “The girl Taylor was doing died. Any chance she didn’t hang herself but instead took the drug?”

  I shrugged and shook my head. “No. It wouldn’t matter anyway, would it? The problem my father would want to cover up was that she killed herself because of Taylor, not the way she did it.”

  Daryl silently agreed. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “We’re missing something here. I say we have to look at the obvious first. Your places are being ransacked for something, but what? Karl’s looking for evidence, and he wants that tablet enough to make the copies he got from Nina’s sister not good enough.”

  Leaning forward, I rested my elbows on my thighs. “You’re missing the big question. We have no idea if Karl knows what’s in this notebook. Maybe he just thinks what Kim gave him wasn’t the entire book.”

  Daryl stared at me with a look of confusion. “But why would he think that?”

  “I don’t know. I can tell you that he doesn’t have everything. I don’t know why, but Kim didn’t have copies of the pages about the drug investigation her father was pursuing. When Karl showed me what he had, there was nothing about Cordovex or anything like it. He only has the pages about Amanda’s and her father’s deaths.”

  Daryl leaned forward toward me, his eyes wide. “Then that’s it. Karl worries there’s more, and he knows what it’s about. What do we know about this Cordovex?”

  “Nothing. I’ve never heard of it. All Edwards says over and over is that he associates it with death.”

  “Let me see that notebook,” he said, reaching out his hand. “I want to see what he’s talking about with this Cordovex.”

  I handed him Joseph Edwards’ notebook opened to the page where he had detailed the information he’d uncovered. Daryl’s brows knitted as he read it over before he flipped to the last page of the tablet. Running his finger down over the metal coils holding the pages together, he made that clucking nose with his tongue he often did when he was thinking.

  Looking up at me, he held the notebook up in front of him. “There’s a page missing here. Did you tear any out?”

  “No. That’s how I found it in Edwards’ safe deposit box.”

  “What about Nina’s sister? Any chance she took out a page?”

  I shook my head. “No. I saw the copies she had and none were about anything but Taylor and my father.”

  “Damnit! Why did she give those goddamn copies to Karl in the first place?”

  “Because I told her to.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want her or her family to get hurt. I knew if Karl found out Joseph Edwards had kept any notes from his investigation of Stone Worldwide, he’d go after her and Nina. I could protect Nina, but not Kim. So I told her to give him everything he asked for. Then I got her and her family to safety as soon as Karl left. If I didn’t, they’d probably be dead right now.”

  Daryl looked unimpressed. “I guess, but she’s made this much easier for Karl.”

  “She did what I told her to do. Not that she didn’t fight me tooth and nail. I could barely get her to speak to me at first. It was only when I told her what I’d found out about what Taylor and my father had done that she agreed to even talk to me about all of this. I guess I don’t blame her. She probably thought if two Stone men were heartless fucks, why wouldn’t the third be?”

  I sat back on the couch, tired from trying to convince myself that I wasn’t just like them. Kim hadn’t made it easy, and by the time I explained everything to her, I still didn’t think she believed I wasn’t just what she’d always thought I was.

  A bad man who shouldn’t be anywhere near her sister.

  Even when I promised to keep her and her family safe on the island where Nina and I were to be married, protected by guards and catered to twenty-four hours a day, she still looked at me like I was some criminal.

  “Well, speaking of that, the last time I checked, they were fine. The guards tell me that they’re enjoying a wonderful vacation on St. Vince and the girls love it.”

  “Good. Speaking of being happy, I’m to understand Nina isn’t, if her text is any clue to how she’s feeling,” I said, leveling my gaze on the one who’d convinced me the whole Nina and Varo plan was a good idea.

  “Nah, she seemed fine the last
time I saw her. She didn’t take to the Varo idea easily, but she seemed okay with it by the time I left. Not that I gave her much of a choice.”

  “Well, between the time you left and the time I received her last text, things obviously changed. She’s anything but okay now.”

  “Why? What’s up? She can’t pretend to like Varo? I guess we could have chosen West, but he’s got a weird vibe to him.”

  “It’s not the Varo part so much as the problem between her and Jordan. I guess Jordan liked Varo and Nina’s charade may have been a little too convincing. She moved out.”

  Daryl rolled his eyes and sighed. “So? I wasn’t feeling great about her friend there anyway. Too many players in the game makes this whole thing more difficult to manage.”

  I thought about how angry Nina’s text sounded. I’d asked a lot of her, but losing her friend was too much to expect. “Jordan’s like a sister to Nina. She’s upset about her leaving the house. I didn’t want that to happen. Maybe you could remember how hard this is on her.”

  “Tristan, I do understand the hardship of losing her friend, but losing her life or you would be infinitely worse, don’t you think? She and her friend can make up when all this is over. They can go shopping or do whatever women do when they make nice.”

  It wasn’t up to Daryl or anyone else to make up for all this. I knew that. I was the one who’d have to make amends for the mess of all this.

  “How did Varo take his new assignment?” I asked, trying to mask the jealousy that lingered inside me.

  Chuckling, Daryl stroked his beard. “Considering how it’s a step up from his regular job, he wisely smiled and happily moved his things into the house. It’s not like it’s a chore, really. He’s just adding devoted suitor to protector. He’ll be fine.”

  Devoted suitor and protector. I hated the way Daryl described Varo with those words. I was supposed to be that for Nina, not some bodyguard I’d only hired because of his size.

  “He shouldn’t get too comfortable in his new surroundings. I intend on being back in my own house as soon as possible.”