KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel

by Jackson, Meg

  Kennick gave Nal a nod, appreciating the words in his favor, and the way the crowd seemed to be swaying in his direction as Jenner spat on the ground and grumbled.

  “This is going to be something we all decide,” Kennick said at last. “I won't make a decision that could put any more of us in danger. I just won't. But nothing says guilt quite like running. We came here to clear my father's name. Not just my father; our rom baro. A man who always put the kumpania before himself. Before his own familia.

  If we leave now, not only have we not cleared his name, they'll throw even more dirt on it. And it won't just be Pieter Volanis anymore. It'll be Ana Volanis, and Baba Surry. And Nal Surry, and Peta Kristina. And Dago Tenniss. And our sons and daughters. If we run from this, every last one of us winds up stained with guilt.”

  Murmurs filled the silence as Kennick stopped speaking, and he looked out at the adults in his extended family, his clan, the people he lived for and would die for. If they chose to leave, he would neither blame them nor try to stop them. He had to admit he had more than a little bit of a reason to want to stay. Leaving Kim would render his heart immobile, useless for the rest of his days. But the kumpania would always come first.

  “What if they come after us?” Peta Kristina called out. “If they did burn the trailer, who's to say they'll stop there? Who's to say they won't loot our businesses, hunt us down, harm our children?”

  “We have the protection of the police,” Damon said, rising to stand beside Kennick. “They've promised not to hold back when they find the person who attacked us.”

  Damon's gaze fell, pointedly, to Jenner, who was burning red with frustration.

  “The police? You can't be serious,” Dago scoffed. Damon's attention shifted to Kennick. It was no secret that cops and gypsies had rarely gotten along, and many in the kumpania had already felt the sting of police questioning.

  “I don't think,” Kennick said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “that we need to fear the police here in Kingdom. I know some of them – they are good men. When my nephew got in trouble for stealing, they didn't use it as an example of what it would mean to have gypsies in their town. You don't have to take my word for it, but...”

  “But we should,” Baba Surry said, standing up now. As one of the oldest members of the kumpania, Baba Surry was like everyone's grandmother, and despite her failing mind her word went a long way. Kennick hadn't dared to hope she might take his side, and when she stood to address the crowd he tensed in anticipation.

  “Pieter Volanis led us for many years,” she continued, gazing with near-blind eyes at the crowd, all the faces that she had watched grow from babies to adults. “He was a good man. One of the best. A rom baro that I never once doubted.”

  Kennick noticed Jenner's growing agitation as his own grandmother rose in defense of his worst enemy.

  “Kennick is our leader now. We should trust him. He has Pieter's blood. And he is as good a man as his father.”

  At that, Tula Volanis, Kennick's cousin and a true seer who shared his grandmother's gift of foresight, stood up.

  “I stand with Kennick,” she said. “Not just because he's my blood. You all have trusted me, in the past, to see your futures, what lies beyond the veil. I wish I had seen the fire before it had happened. I wish...”

  Her voice trailed off slightly as her face grew troubled.

  “If we leave, the trouble will not,” she said. “I mean – it follows. There are bad days coming, I can feel them. But we won't avoid them by running. They will find us wherever they go. My cousin is right. I was afraid to say it before, but the worst things that are going to happen to us...they will start amongst ourselves. There is something bad lurking within our own clan. I can't see what, I can't see who; I just feel it. We ought to stay.”

  She nodded firmly, then sat down in a hurry. The crowd began its slow, low murmuring once more. Baba Surry's words carried a lot of weight. So did Tula's visions. More than one member of the kumpania had seen her predictions come true. Kennick's heart began to race slightly as one by one, all eyes returned to him.

  “Let's sleep on it,” he said finally. “Eat, and discuss, and then tomorrow...”

  A car engine rumbled, drawing everyone's attention from Kennick. He immediately recognized Kim's car as it barreled across the trailer park; apparently, plenty of other people recognized it as well, because her name was whispered across the crowd. His fists tightened. This was poor timing indeed. The last thing he needed was for everyone to be reminded that his heart had a huge stake in the matter.

  “Unbelievable,” Jenner shouted as Kim parked. “Her again? See, this is why Kennick wants us to stay. For her. I don't know how he got Baba Surry to speak for him, but we all know that Volanis blood runs deep, and it wouldn't take much to convince his cousin to make up something to support his stupid ideas...”

  The slamming of Kim's door cut short Jenner's tirade; she looked with wide eyes at the gathered mass, clearly surprised to see everyone in one place. But then her eyes met Kennick's, and he saw so much inside her gaze that it nearly crippled his mind.

  “They....it was...my God,” she said, clearly trying to address the whole crowd but overwhelmed by being suddenly in the spotlight. Kennick hopped from the stoop and pushed through the crowd until he stood before her.

  “What is it,” he murmured, taking her arms in his hands. She seemed to gather strength from his grip, and drew herself up, matching him stare for stare.

  “Mayor Gunderson,” she said, her voice only cracking slightly. “He did it. He killed them both.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  She could not stop shaking. After three hours with the police, telling and re-telling her story, she was offered a ride to the hospital, where she might be treated for shock. Refusing that, she was offered a ride home, where she might drink some tea and try to get some sleep, and put the day’s horrible events behind her. Refusing that as well, she accepted an offer for a ride back to her car. Jimmy took her, and before letting her out, told her things that he wasn’t allowed to tell her. Things that didn’t help the shaking, but helped her try to begin to understand what she’d walked into that late afternoon.

  She sat behind the wheel of her car for a long time, watching the dwindling numbers of cops and investigators and CSI-style forensic teams loiter and then, finally, leave. She stared at the place she’d gone to work every day for five years. Five days a week, for five years, she’d walked through those ornate white doors and hustled joyfully towards the Mayor’s office, where she said a cheery good morning to a hungover man who, she’d believed, was utterly harmless.

  How wrong she’d been.

  How awfully, terribly wrong.

  When she closed her eyes, she saw a carousel of memories, the briefest of flashes. Mayor Gunderson smiling, drinking, raging at Kennick in the bar. His face, growing longer and harder with each passing day. Jessica biting her lip and shaking her head, and then Jessica smiling and laughing at something Ricky said while she lay steaming plates onto the table. Mayor Gunderson calling her Kimmy. The birthday cards, the Christmas cards, the flowers on secretary’s day. Being the best boss she’d ever had.

  The question she couldn’t escape, that she was sure no one would be able to escape, was why. Why had Mayor Gunderson – Tom Gunderson, ex-cop, friend-to-all, Mayor three times over – killed them? She wanted to believe it was for love, or honor, or righteousness. If he killed them because he was a sick man, there would be some forgiveness for not having seen it coming. But if he killed them because he could, because he was a cold-blooded killer with no remorse…

  The thought sent her to shaking again. How would anyone ever know? She thought of Bob Talkee, who’d been friends with Mayor Gunderson forever, and who’d dated Rhonda through high school. She thought of Pastor Hendrix, whose righteousness was vile and who played golf with the Mayor a few times a month when the weather was fair. Old friends from the force.

  Did they know? Had they suspected tha
t their friend played host to the heart of a killer?

  But the answers were not going to come any swifter by sitting in front of the Town Hall and white-knuckling her steering wheel to keep her hands still. She looked at her phone, absently, and saw reams of missed calls, mostly from Ricky and Tricia and Ed. She didn’t want their questions, their comfort.

  There was only one thing she wanted. And as night finally fell, giving rest to the long summer’s day, she made her way there, towards him.

  What if he’s already gone, she thought in a panic, dropping her foot harder against the gas. The way she’d felt that morning was like some distant memory, but now she felt loss rising up to choke her in a new and spectacularly awful way. She was losing everything, everything. In her addled brain, she imagined

  Kim told Kennick about finding Mayor Gunderson in his office, with the missing pages from the police report. She told him about what he’d said, what she’d had to do to fight him off, her voice catching and breath heaving as she relived those awful moments.

  She told him about the police questioning, about how Jimmy had pulled her aside at one point to tell her that they’d found traces of hair in Mayor Gunderson’s car that they thought belonged to Jessica, that they’d found other evidence on his person and in his office that was worth making a case. A pretty strong case. He told her this as a friend, but also because he knew that Kennick would want to know. He was breaking all sorts of rules, but in a small town like Kingdom, rules were more like guidelines.

  Kennick held her through it all, through her wailing and tears.

  “I worked with him for years,” she moaned, her hands shaking as they closed around a cup of tea. “Years, Kennick. He was always so sweet. He called me Kimmy. He called me…”

  When she began to cry again, he lifted his jaw to the top of her head and let her tears fall on his neck, stroking her hair. Finally, she fell to a deep sleep, the sort of sleep that comes only when one has experienced a shock and loss that Kim had felt that night.

  And, as she slept, he watched her chest rise and fall, her breath ragged through her stuffed-up nose. Her ruddy blonde locks spread across his pillow, and he remembered how, earlier, in his frenzy, he’d found her hair everywhere, and how it had tortured him. And he knew he wouldn’t leave her. He couldn’t leave her. If all of this hadn’t happened, if the kumpania had decided to leave, he knew that he would have played along until the last minute. And then he would have given it all up for her. Baba Tayti’s words rang in his head.

  And promise that you will take this love, the love God is giving you so freely. You will take it and treasure it. Treasure her. In treasuring her, you will treasure yourself. And me. It is my only wish, Kennick. Kumpania be damned.

  Watching her, he knew what his grandmother had meant. She was his treasure, his gold at the end of the rainbow. Without her, he’d be a poor man no matter how much money he managed to make. As much as he thought, all this time, that he was helping to repair her broken ego, it was work that indebted him to her in the end. From her amazing strength, her ability to look all her worst fears in the eye and spit, he gained strength of his own. Without her, he’d be a scarecrow, a cheap imitation of the man she inspired him to be.

  In that moment, he wanted to wake her and fill her and claim her, to lodge himself firmly in her center and stay there until she had his scent all over her, until anyone who looked at her would see who she belonged to, who would take care of her. And vice versa. He wanted her name tattooed on his heart, his tongue, his palms.

  But he wouldn’t wake her from sleep. Instead, he covered her and held her tight.

  When Kim had been sleeping soundly for an hour, Kennick slipped away. He found Cristov, Damon, and Mina in the kitchen of the trailer, sharing a bottle of vodka between them. They wordlessly poured him a glass and he sipped it, sliding into the booth beside his sister.

  “She’s sleeping,” he said by way of response to the unanswered question in the air. “For now, she’s sleeping. Had a hell of a night.”

  “We all have,” Mina said sympathetically. “Cristov and Damon were telling me about the meeting…and about Jenner.”

  “It makes me sick,” Cristov spat out, taking a generous gulp of his vodka. ‘We should burn down his trailer.”

  “And that’s why you’re not rom baro,” Damon offered with a gruff smile. Cristov stuck his tongue out, but seemed to lack the energy to have a full-on fight. Mina was still studying Kennick, her eyes probing.

  “You couldn’t have left her, could you?” she asked, mirroring the thoughts he’d only just been having. He shook his head.

  “That’s alright,” Damon said, leaning in to catch his brother’s eye. “If you’d stayed, we’d have stayed.”

  “You couldn’t have,” Kennick protested, feeling slightly sick about what he was admitting. He was admitting that he was putting something else about the kumpania. As rom baro, that was a cardinal sin. “I couldn’t have broken our clan up like that.”

  Damon grunted his disagreement but kept silent. It was Cristov who spoke up next.

  “You gonna marry her?” he asked, a smile flitting across his face. Kennick chuckled slightly, raising his eyes to the ceiling, feeling like he had fought a war with love, and love had won. He was holding his hands up. He was waving his white flag.

  “Probably,” he said, shaking his head back and forth. “Prob-a-fucking-ly.”

  Epilogue

  Kim clicked her tongue against her teeth and leaned backward in the chair. It squeaked. Had it squeaked when Mayor Gunderson occupied it? She didn’t know; she’d never sat in it then.

  She had wanted to get a new chair, new desk, new everything. She hated sitting in his chair, writing on his desk, at his computer. But the town budget wouldn’t accommodate luxuries like that. She would have bought them herself, but there were so many other matters to attend to that the thought was constantly slipping her mind. Now, as the chair squeaked again, she made a mental note to buy a new one post haste.

  It had been a month since Mayor Gunderson was rolled out of his office on a stretcher, and three weeks since the Town Council had appointed Kim as the interim Mayor, owing in large part to an impassioned campaign by Ed Kerry and a flood of calls and letters from Kingdom’s citizenry, all of which came as such a surprise to Kim that when she heard, she sat down so hard she bruised her tailbone.

  Tula’s prediction rang in her head whenever she thought about how swiftly her life had changed. And, of course, Kennick’s occasional bouts of “I told you so”-ing didn’t let her forget very easily.

  At that moment, she was studying some bids to finally fix the streetlights on Tudor Street, a project that had stalled since budget cuts gutted the town’s maintenance department. One particular flickering streetlight overlooked the parking lot of Sid’s Diner, where Jessica Bainbridge had breathed her last breathe. A memorial to the perky waitress who’d always refilled the coffee in your mug before you had to ask now sat in the lot where she’d always parked her car.

  Bob Talkee would have hated that Kimberly James was standing in as Mayor of Kingdom – and would likely remain in that position until the next election, since no one seemed particularly inclined to wrench the position away. He would have, but he had resigned his seat on the Town Council and moved away from Kingdom altogether. Before he’d left, when the Kingdom Times asked him about Mayor Gunderson, he’d sneered.

  “I knew he was jealous,” he said. “He was always asking Rhonda out behind my back. When she broke up with me, he was right there with flowers and chocolates trying to get into her pants.”

  Ricky told Kim how surprised she’d been when the man’s face fell, his tone dropping low and mournful.

  “If I’d known…I would have done something. I still loved her even though she split with me. I still loved her even when she took up with that gypsy. You know a man for fifty years, and you never think…you never once think…”

  He’d hung up after that, and as far as Kim knew, i
t was the last words anyone in Kingdom heard from him.

  Pastor Hendrix spent his days giving impassioned speeches about wolves in sheep’s clothing, and continuing to wage moral war over the gypsies, though Kim thought she detected a subtle defeat in his shoulders when he took his time to speak at Town Council Meetings. And, his wife left him.

  Mayor Gunderson’s trial had been short and clean; the hair in his car had, in fact, belonged to Jessica Bainbridge. His desk had contained more evidence: some notes in his handwriting, probably written while drunk, about why “it was for the good of the town.” Some old personal items that had belonged to Rhonda. And, of course, his drunken confession, which was inadmissible in court but which gave the police enough weight to force a real confession from him.