by Hazel Parker
“You’re fucking crazy,” I said.
“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” Kyle said with a smirk. “You should probably want to win, Jack. I’ll be balls deep in your woman if you fail.”
My fists clenched, but I reminded myself there would be no Lilly if I wound up in jail for throwing punches on camera. That reminder barely—and I mean just barely—worked.
“I won’t be hard to find tonight,” he said. “You know where to look. You’ll just have to think about it for more than half a second. If you can figure it out, then I welcome your battle.”
Then he glared right at me when he said his final words.
“If not, then someone will have to die. We can’t have a night without a little bit of death, right, Jack?”
He then erupted in laughter as he headed back to the car, doing some sort of stupid dance along the way. This time, Marcel was the one who had to hold me back, although with him, he only needed to put an arm up to prevent me from moving forward. He had figured out what I already knew the second Kyle had opened his mouth.
He had Lilly somewhere.
Somewhere, apparently, that wouldn’t be hard to figure out, but somewhere all the same. And that somewhere…
Kyle got in the police cruiser and drove off, still laughing, delivering a couple of middle fingers as the cruiser blasted in the other direction. I was so furious about everything he said I hadn’t even wondered how he’d gotten the cruiser.
It only seemed to further corroborate the idea that Kyle was going all-in on tonight. If he’d stolen a cruiser; if he was inviting us to come to him, hoping for one of us to die; if he had taken Lilly, then he was truly mad. He’d lost whatever of his mind remained. He certainly wouldn’t have his political career after this weekend.
“He’s mad,” Marcel said.
“He’s lost his mind entirely,” I said. “And because of it, I believe everything he just said.”
I would never have imagined that Kyle would be the one to fall into essentially suicide-by-violence thoughts, but here we were. Kyle really didn’t have anything left to live for; whatever Lilly had said or done to him had pushed him over the edge and turned him into someone willing to sacrifice everything for our deaths.
“This is just fucking unbelievable,” Marcel said. “Unfucking real. He probably has your girl at this point. He’s probably going to cause all sorts of nightmares. Probably going to be a giant bitch. Just fucking stupid…”
Marcel kept ranting. I pulled him inside long enough to then corral the rest of the officers across all the Savage Saints into the office. Marcel kept ranting, but at least now, I had all the decision-makers in place.
“We need to figure out where the hell Kyle is,” I said. “Any ideas?”
Marcel took over, which was a good thing because I got an idea for something I needed to do. It was of slim hope, but it was still something I needed to do just to try.
I called Lilly.
But, alas, she did not answer. At this point, as far as I was concerned, she was being held captive by the Bloodhounds and by Kyle.
“He said it would be somewhere easy,” Marcel said. “Somewhere easy for us to figure out. I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
“Something obvious?” Fitz suggested.
“What places is Kyle known to hide out in?” Trace said.
“Probably just hiding somewhere in the middle of nowhere,” Richard said.
“No, he’s not,” Marcel said. “He’s a coward, but he’s gone mad. It may make him braver in some weird, fucked up way.”
“That is fucked up, Jesus.”
Conversation continued. Someone suggested the old warehouse where we’d run into Damon. I immediately rejected that idea as extraordinarily unlikely; the warehouse was a smart place for a man like Damon, but not for someone like Kyle. No, Kyle was more likely to be in a place that held value to him or to us.
I doubted his office. It was far too public, especially for a man who seemed to crave death as much as—
It clicked instantly. I knew where he was.
“Guys, guys,” I said. “He’s not in any of those places. I know it.”
“You do,” Marcel said dryly. “Then where is he?”
I shook my head.
“He’s home.”
Chapter 18: Lilly
In a very odd way, Kyle had at least lived up to his word.
I was in the kitchen of an old, abandoned home in Astoria. The neighborhood around it was run-down, with only a few occupants that looked like the less they went outside, the happier they were. The only other people in the building were two guards, but they left me alone.
I was “safe” in the sense that I didn’t fear an imminent attack. I had my computer in front of me, Fires of the City open on my screen, although Kyle had taken my phone. No surprises had taken place. No one had jumped out to attack me, no one had destroyed my computer, and no one had tried to come over and gleam my work. In fact, one of the guards had even told me to use a different outlet, stating the one I had plugged my charger into sucked and wouldn’t last very long.
It was kind of surreal to hear him giving me advice. But it was even less surreal than the whole situation.
After the guards had trapped me outside, Kyle had taken me into a small Honda and driven me to the house, where a lone, abandoned police cruiser waited. Kyle escorted me inside, making small remarks here and there about how pretty I was. He had the good sense not to touch me, probably realizing that if he had, I would have smacked the shit out of him. But all the same, even if I had hit him, my life was not my own at that moment; I was completely dependent upon Kyle.
As soon as I got inside, he said that he had somewhere to be and left me alone, driving off in the cruiser. I overheard him telling the guards not to hurt me under any circumstances, but they didn’t need to worry. Unlike Kyle, I wasn’t going to do something incredibly stupid and suicidal. I was going to do what helped me live.
Naturally, though, no work was getting done on Fires of the City. Instead, I just brainstormed ideas to escape. The problem was, there wasn’t a storm strong enough in my brain to come up with anything that worked.
Physical violence? Please. Manipulation? Nothing that I was willing to do. Trickery? How? Where was I going to go that wasn’t watched by the guards and led me to safety?
Said brainstorming, though, barely lasted any length of time before I saw the police cruiser returning. Kyle looked like he was laughing and dancing inside of the car, cackling to himself like some sort of sicko. He had truly lost his mind, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could be done to bring him back from the brink. But you might as well try.
When Kyle entered, he was humming to himself, occasionally laughing at a joke that must have been in his head. He said something I couldn’t quite hear to the guards and then made his way to the kitchen, taking a seat across from me, utter satisfaction across his face.
“What did you do?” I asked.
I tried to keep my tone neutral, hoping that such a voice would encourage him to reveal information I might be able to use for myself. I didn’t have much hope, but it was better than no hope.
“I set things in motion,” Kyle said, looking mighty pleased with himself. “I went and saw my brothers. You know, your boyfriend.”
“He’s…”
I decided not to give Kyle the satisfaction of telling him I’d broken up with Jack, although I wasn’t against saying it later on if it saved my life. There just wasn’t a reason to do so right now.
“He’s going to make you pay, you know.”
“And that’s the point!” Kyle said, pointing at me for emphasis. “They’ll figure out soon enough that we’re here. They’ll come here tonight. And then peace will come to me, either through death or through my brothers’ death!”
He started to laugh again. My initial reaction was to call him insane and say he was sick, but that wasn’t going to help at all. He would just agree, laugh some more, and then
dismiss me for later. I hated to say it, but I had to empathize. I had to do the things I always made my characters do, the kind of thing that seemed easy in the novels but was much harder in real life—forgiveness.
“Do you think this is the only way you’ll find peace?”
I tried my hardest to make it sound like I was genuinely curious.
“I’m sorry?” Kyle said, the smile still on his face, but his tone one of confusion.
“You said you’ll either find peace through death or through your brothers’ deaths, right? What if there was peace some other way? What if, say, you moved away? Left all of this behind?”
“A noble idea. But a silly one.”
Kyle rose from the chair and raised his hands as if performing a grand speech before a captive audience.
“To run away would be to avoid the punches, but I would never avoid the punches in my mind,” he said. He sounded like the eighth-grader who was trying too hard to make metaphors work. “No matter how far I move away from Marcel and Jack, I will never be far enough away to escape their taunts and their words. No, I am tired of running away.”
You never really have run away, Kyle. He wasn’t just crazy right now; his entire sense of reality was being warped. And for what? Because I had chosen his stable and sane brother over him? Because I would have chosen almost literally anyone else over him?
I refused to believe this was my fault, but I vowed to myself that if I got the opportunity, I would do my part to help Jack get rid of Kyle. I prayed it didn’t end in death, but the more time that went by, the more inevitable that seemed.
“I will not leave. I have accepted tonight as my fate, one way or the other. I have embraced tonight, knowing that all of the torment of my mind, all of the trauma that I have gone through will finally find closure.”
“There has to be another way, Kyle,” I said. “Surely, there must be something that can be done to prevent this. Did killing your uncle help you at all?”
That Kyle’s immediate response appeared to be one of disappointment was all the answer I needed.
“Do you think killing your brothers will help? Your issues stem from within. And yes, I agree, you need to find peace. But there has to be something that can work. Something that can, I don’t know, ease your soul and your mind, as you say.”
Kyle seemed to take what I said to heart, looking at the ground, folding his arms, and digging deep into his mind—or what was left of it, at least. This most certainly was not the man I had met at the coffee house just a short while ago; that man, though awkward and traumatized, at least was a functioning member of society, perhaps even a contributing one. But now?
It was a tragedy, honestly.
Then Kyle looked up with a smile on his face. It was a creepy, unsettling smile—and also the exact same smile that he had given me at the coffee house. Back then, I had seen it as sweet, certainly a little off, but nothing more than just a quirk of his.
Now, though, it was outright terrifying.
“You are right,” he said, his voice sounding more and more uplifted by the minute. “You are right, Lilly Robertson. There is something that can be done instead of this.”
“What?” I said, even though I hesitated to ask the question.
He walked over to me, unfurled his hand before me, and tilted his head forward.
“Sleep with me, Lilly,” he said. “Make love to me. You are the woman of my dreams. You are the only person in my life who ever showed genuine interest. I know that the past few weeks have been confusing for you with my brother. I’m willing to look past the things that you have done if you will join me upstairs and pleasure me as I have so imagined pleasuring you.”
Icky didn’t even come close to describing how awkward this whole situation felt. Disgusting was an understatement.
And I wasn’t talking about Kyle’s words. I was talking about the fact that I even considered it all, wondering, in some way, if it really would prevent the violence that was all but inevitable. How sick was that? I was willing to sleep with the person who most disturbed me as some sort of bizarre sacrifice to save the lives of all the Stones.
But this wasn’t a book, where such a sacrifice could be made. This was reality. And even if I could rationalize sleeping with him, there was no way in hell my body could ever go along with it. It was a no, an absolute no, an unchanging no.
“Kyle, you can’t be serious,” I said. “You know romance doesn’t work—”
“I don’t care how it fucking works!” he said, exploding into my face and causing me to fall out of my chair. “I only care about you and me, Lilly. You are the rose petal of my life. You are the flower that puts the touch on my garden.”
What the fuck is he even talking about?
“All of this will disappear…if you allow me to show how I love you.”
Love? Love? Fucking love?
“This isn’t love, Kyle,” I said. “Love is what you build together, not separately. Love…”
I gulped. Fuck it.
“Love is what happens when you spend time together, when you support each other, when you know the other person better than you know yourself,” I said. “Kyle, you are still very capable of finding that love.”
Yeah, I was spewing some bullshit about his future prospects. But if I could make it sound authentic…
“You sleep with me right now, you kill your brothers, that’s only a temporary reward. You’ll still be unfulfilled. I’m sorry that you got dragged into this mess, and I’m sorry that Jack and you got caught in a love triangle of sorts. But I can promise you that if you put the effort in to find something real, something more…you can get it. But you won’t get it here. And you won’t get it on one date. It takes time.”
Kyle stared at me for a long time after that, and I almost wondered if the words had just gone so far over his head that he hadn’t even heard the last part of them. This wasn’t going to be that productive, anyways; it was a Hail Mary attempt of sorts.
“That sounds like something out of one of your books,” he said. “But I don’t care about other women. I don’t want a Stephanie, an Amanda, a Taylor, a Jackie, a Rachel, or anyone else. I want you, Lilly. So I’ll give you one last chance to pick better. Come sleep with me.”
“And if I do so, will you stop the violence? Will you tell Jack and Marcel that it’s over and that you won’t do anything more?”
Kyle snorted. It was enough to invalidate what he said next.
“Of course. The violence will cease immediately. And we will become one whole family again.”
Kyle’s last few words, of course, told me he was full of shit, but I already knew that. I took his hand and used it to lift me up.
And then I kneed him right in the groin and shoved him to the ground.
“You’re so full of shit, Kyle,” I said. “You think that you can just use sex for power? I feel so bad for you. You think tonight’s going to bring you peace. The deaths of your brothers would do nothing but bring you more heartache. You might think I’m full of it now, but when the moment comes and you realize that it’s going to be your last thought, you’ll know the truth. You wasted your life being an asshole.”
“Stupid whore!” Kyle roared.
He lunged to push me, but I easily dodged him. One guard had come to the entrance of the kitchen, ready to do whatever Kyle ordered, but Kyle seemed to prefer to keep the fight between us. Fine by me—it wasn’t like I believed I could win a fight against a man almost certainly over two hundred and fifty pounds.
“That’s the closest I’ll come to touching your junk, Kyle,” I said. “I liked you as a kid because I saw good in you. Even a couple of weeks ago, at the coffee shop, I liked you. You at least were empathic and were kind. Now? Now, I don’t know what to make of you.”
Kyle slowly rose from the ground, looked at me, and actually started to cry. It was a pitiful sight, honestly—pity was absolutely what I felt for him.
But then I felt fear that he was just going to lose
his mind entirely and kill me for what I had done. I looked at the guard cautiously; he was stoic and unmoving, his rifle pointed down.
“I loved you, Lilly,” Kyle said. “I loved you! And this is how you treat me?”
I didn’t say a word. Nothing was going to satiate him short of sleeping with him, and that wasn’t something I was going to do unless I had a gun pointed at my head. And even then, I would resist every step of the way.
“You…you’re just like everyone else in my life. Say you love me, and then treat me like shit. Leave me for dead. Jesus. All of you are the fucking worst. The fucking worst!”
He then waved me upstairs.
“Go,” he said. “Go to my room. You’ll know which one it is. And don’t you dare fucking leave until I tell you to. Go! Before I do something more!”
I made a dash for the stairs as I continued to hear Kyle sob. I was leaving my laptop behind and all my work, but needless to say, that was taking a hard backseat to my life right now.
I found Kyle’s room easily; it was the most decrepit, the most worn-down, the least adorned. It took me a second to put it together, but I realized I had wound up in Kyle’s old childhood home. I shut the door and tried to lock it, but the lock was jammed and wouldn’t latch shut.
But I was alive.
And for right now, that was about all I had going for me.
Jack…I sure hope you have something planned. Because at this point, it’s absolute. It’s going to be someone’s final night tonight.
Chapter 19: Biggie
“So you’re absolutely sure about this?”
Richard looked me square in the eye, standing before all of the Savage Saints in the United States. If ever there was a spot for me to question my intuition, this was it. If I was wrong, literally every single member of the Savage Saints would know.
But I knew I wasn’t wrong. I knew my brother too well. I knew that he wanted to make a point.