I stopped and looked him square in the face. His bright blue eyes shot darts as me as he folded his arms, lifted his chin up toward me in challenge, and waited for an answer. His mention of my old man didn’t send me to a place of rage. I was too busy thinking about Angel, and what she’d said.
“Why did she kick you out?” He repeated LeVan’s question.
“She just did,” I said roughly.
“Why?”
“Because!” I shouted.
“That’s not a fucking answer!”
I bared my teeth at him. “Let it go, Sly!”
“Why? To get yourself killed the next time you lock yourself in the box, just to prove no one can trap you again?” he shouted, taking the most direct approach ever known to man. “No fucking way!”
I charged at him. My anger spiraled out of control because he hit the nail on the head.
“Stop.” LeVan stepped between us. “Easy, big guy. We’re all friends here.”
“Like fuck we are,” Sly shouted past LeVan to me. “Bring it, motherfucker. This is the shit you want. I’ll kick your big, lumbering, caveman ass into next week if that’s what it’ll take for you to wake the fuck up!”
I spun toward him, fist raised as we both pushed LeVan out of the way.
“Okay, idiots. If you’re both ready to fight…” LeVan tapped his chin. “Have at it.”
“We don’t need no three-way fight,” Sly grunted. “Sit your ass down.”
LeVan ignored him. “Go on.” He angled his jaw toward me, then to Sly. “One free pass for each of you assholes.” He looked at Sly. “It won’t make you feel better.” Then he turned to me. “And it won’t fix things with Angel.”
“She told me to go, you son of a bitch!” I shouted. I fucking hated his ability to get right to the crux of things while I was still mad as fuck.
“What did you expect?” he shouted back, showing a temper that I rarely saw. “All you’ve done is hide who you are from her and push her away. Have you ever once told her about those feelings you have for her?”
“Fuck you.” I’d lose if I kept verbally sparring with this man. I turned away and shoved my hands into my hair. “Fuck both of you. Get the hell out.”
I spun around and swung out—but not at either of them. My clenched fist plowed straight through the drywall. When I pulled it out, bits of dust and debris clung to the fresh blood on my knuckles.
“Son of a bitch. I broke into her place, all right? Told her there wasn’t anything between us but the baby and sex. Fuck…”
Silence reigned as the two of them waited.
They knew me too well.
“Then she told me she was in love with me and kicked me out,” I finished, my voice nothing more than a hushed breath.
“Good for Angel, putting your sorry ass in its place,” Sly said, then let out an impressed whistle under his breath.
I turned and glared at him. “What?”
“She’s a straight shooter. And she’s got balls.”
“I hate to agree with orphan Annie over there, Mac, but…”
Swinging my head around, I looked at LeVan. He nodded. “Sly’s right. Your showy bullshit is only good for one place. On stage. You’re shitfaced over her. Just accept it and move on. You’re so scared to step up, it’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to call you a coward. This shit’s gonna eat you alive if you try to bury it away like D—”
He stopped short of bringing up Danny, Tante Didi and Micah.
“I’m not the kind of guy she needs,” I said.
LeVan wasn’t buying it. “Why? Because you couldn’t save your baby brother when you were seven? Or because you couldn’t save your baby sister when you were twelve?” He came over to me, prowling in a loose-limbed gait. He shook his head at me. “It wasn’t your job to save them. That was your dad’s job, and he fucking failed. Your big brother’s a sick son of a bitch. And instead of him seeing that, Douglass Knight chose to believe that you lied.”
“Don’t.” I didn’t want to hear it. Hearing it would make it more real than any vivid nightmare I had.
“He chose to believe your baby brother’s drowning was an accident even when you and your mom said otherwise. Then he chose to believe his five-year-old daughter could get up to the roof of that big-ass house all by herself, despite the fact that you told him what Danny had been doing. Your dad was the adult. He needed to open his eyes. But he didn’t. He fooled himself into thinking you all got hurt all by yourself, time after time. That you locked yourself in closets, fell down flights of stairs. They wouldn’t acknowledge what Danny was.”
“Stop. I don’t fucking want to hear this right now.”
But LeVan kept pushing. “He didn’t want to think the kid who looked like his spitting image had a problem. He denied what Danny did to his own younger siblings. You and I both know your big brother was a psychopath. So fucking deranged that he murdered Micah and Colleen while you tried to save them. And what I hate most is that you don’t just torture yourself from the guilt—”
“Shut up!”
“You wrestle with whether or not you’re capable of turning into someone like Danny.”
He fucking said it and I wanted to kill him for it.
“But you’re not. You’re not your brother. And you never will be. So don’t fuck this up with Angel.”
The echo of his words sucked all the air out of the room and stole every ounce of energy in my body. Throat tight, I backed away from him and slumped into the nearest seat, turning to look outside. The city spread out like a blurry, sprawling carpet of gemstones and sparkling toys. My eyes were watering up.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with this, LeVan.”
“Like hell it doesn’t. It’s the reason you never let anybody or anything close to you. You probably went down to Mexico determined to shut her out. Hell, I’m surprised you went down there at all. After she left Vegas, you’d all but cut her out of your life.”
“You really did,” Sly agreed.
I flinched, avoiding the truth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you’ve been ignoring your phone.” Sly took a seat and cracked his neck. “Last week, you were going over the timing on the new devil’s torture chamber you wanted to try. She texted you, and I picked up and saw the message. That reminds me, you should really put a password on that thing. Anyhow, I read a few of her texts, dude. I saw those cold ass replies. You just iced her out. You’ve done that to us before, so we know what it fucking looks like.”
“I didn’t push her out.”
I thought about what I did at the airport. I wanted to ask her to stay. I just didn’t find the right way to say it. Then I fucked shit up.
“Fuck, okay I did push her out. This love shit’s hard.”
“For real, dude. It makes you sick inside.”
I would’ve expected a statement like that to come from LeVan. He’d been in love with one woman for his entire life.
But Sly was the one who said it. And he did it over his shoulder on his way out my door. A moment later, it closed behind him.
“I love Angel...and I hate what that means.” I muttered the admission.
LeVan took a seat facing me. “You fucked it up. I get that. But she left you an opening. All you have to do is un-fuck it up.” He stopped then and shook his head. “Mac, she needs to know who you are. All of it. The good and the bad. The dreadful crap and the tragic, fucked-up shit...because that’s who you are. Start there. Then get on your knees and grovel if that’s what it’ll take to get her to forgive you. You’re Devin Knight, one of the best men I’ve ever known, a kick-ass illusionist, and one of my best friends. So what, you ran away from your family. No one can blame you for that, not after everything. But maybe it’s time you stopped running away from yourself.”
Then he left.
27
Angel
I used to look forward to Mondays.
This one sucked.
With legs fe
eling like they were encased in cement, I dragged myself home and tried not to think about the papers I had to grade, or the assignment plan I hadn’t completed.
A week passed since Mac left.
I hadn’t seen or heard from him. After asking him to leave, I didn’t expect him to reach out, but I hoped tough love would shake him into making the right decision. I thought he’d at least check in on Bump.
A huge part of me wanted to text him, call him, do something, beg him to come back so we could talk this out. But that was the weak part of me. I had a baby on the way. I needed to be strong for Bump.
And I was in the right. Deep in my gut, I knew that.
That was what made all of this so much harder.
This part sucked. The part where I slowly came to grips with the fact that I’d fallen in love with a guy I never stopped to truly get to know. Because everything about him felt right, I went with it. Everything about him was like coming home, so I talked myself out of going deeper.
But Bump didn’t need a mother who’d settle.
She needed me to be strong. To protect her. To give her a childhood that she could look back on and smile about. To fill her days with wonder and her nights with vivid dreams about how great life could be.
I wasn’t going to settle. I guess I was too damn spoiled for that. Sniffling, I fought back the urge to cry as I dug my key out of my purse. I’d get inside, sit down, and get off my feet for a little while. After I did that, things wouldn’t seem so bad. But I knew they’d feel a lot worse before they’d start to feel better. As long as Mac wasn’t around, I could heal.
The door swung inward before my key touched the lockset.
But I knew I’d locked it this morning.
Nerves jittered, then began to sing.
“Hello?” I called out.
Wise move, announce to the robber that you’re here, I thought.
“Hi Angel.”
Shit. Again?
His voice made my heart lurch, then it started to race out of control.
“Mac.”
As he stepped forward out of the shadows, the strength sapped out of my body and I sagged against the doorjamb. “What are you doing here? Why can’t you use the damned phone? Or wait outside like a normal person?”
Never mind that a few minutes ago I’d been thinking about how I’d probably never see him again.
Right now, I sort of dreaded whatever…this…was.
It was feeling like a repeat of last Sunday night.
I wasn’t sure my heart could handle an encore.
“I came to see you,” he said softly, stepping aside. “Are you coming in?”
With the panic now diffusing from my body, I pushed past him. “I really love how you just sort of break into my home, Mac. It’s so like a magician to—”
The rest of the sentence died on my lips as I caught sight of my home. It had been transformed. Candles flickered and gleamed on every flat surface. My simple, utilitarian table had been covered with a tablecloth. A vase filled with pure white roses sat on top, the crystal reflecting the soft glow of candlelight.
“What’s this?” I asked thickly.
“A lot of things,” Mac said from behind me. “Have a seat.”
I wasn’t so certain I wanted to but the ache I’d been carrying around all week was an anchor.
Huge, heavy and suffocating.
I took a step toward the table.
“Not there,” he murmured, catching my hand. “Not yet. We…I have some things I need to tell you. It’s complicated.”
Frowning, I looked over at him.
He wasn’t looking at me.
He was staring at the couch. More specifically, his eyes were locked onto a spot on the coffee table in front of the couch. Glancing at it, I wondered why. I looked more closely and saw several pieces of paper spread out on the table. One or two looked like newspaper clippings. Really old ones.
I let him guide me to the couch and we sat down together.
“I knew the first time I saw you that you came from money,” he said softly. “When you grow up with it, you kind of learn to recognize it.”
“That’s a really strange opening to the conversation I was expecting.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I had no idea where he could be going with this.
His mouth twisted in an effort to smile, but didn’t quite make it. “This won’t be like any conversation you’ve ever had, Angel.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“My legal name is Devin Xavier MacKenzie Knight. My father’s family owns Knight’s Chemical Industries.”
I stared at him as I made the connection between Mac and the huge, billion-dollar conglomerate that was a household name for most people in the western world. I was more than a little surprised, but tried to hide my reaction.
“I can tell that you’ve heard of it.”
“Um. Yes,” I answered. “Everyone’s heard of Knight’s Chemical. Also, my father had a chance to do business with them just before I left for college. I remember because the company was all over the news, which made its way to our dinner table. Dad backed out of the deal because of ...well, you know how the media can be. I don’t know much about the subtleties of why, but—”
“If anything, it was my father. Douglass Knight is an ass and a reprobate. Yours isn’t, and I can’t see him working side by side with an outright degenerate if he could avoid it.”
“What’s this about, Mac?”
“A lot of things. My family…father. He’s a manipulative, controlling bastard, and he did everything he could to control me, my brothers, my sister…”
Mac looked away. A strange, stilted sound escaped him. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought it was a sobbing noise, but there were no tears in his eyes.
“I had a younger brother once. And a baby sister. Micah and Colleen. Now all I have is an older brother. His name is Danny, but I don’t acknowledge him.”
“Why not?”
His eyes finally returned to mine. The miserable hell I saw there made me want to retract the question. I’d regret asking…I knew I would.
“Because when I was seven, I watched him kill my baby brother—and when I told my father, the mean son of a bitch didn’t do shit about it. He’s also responsible for my sister’s death. But fuck it all, my father wasn’t going to do shit about that, either. He didn’t want to tarnish the family name, so he paid off whoever he had to. In the public eye, my sibling’s deaths were labeled accidents.”
“I…” I stood up, quickly moving away from him as my head started to spin. “I need a drink of water.”
28
Mac
Ten minutes later, she set down the first article on the coffee table.
“He drowned?” Angel whispered.
“Danny claims he was teaching him to swim. Micah was five…he hated the water. Danny and I, we were like fish,” I said softly, my face averted. I stared out the window, only distantly aware of her. “One day, Danny got it into his head that he was going to teach Micah to swim. He took him over the pool. Threw him in. Over and over. Micah could dog paddle, but that was it. I had just come home from ball practice, and my mother was so tired after picking me up that she went to her room to rest. My great aunt used to bring me home sometimes, but she’d died a few weeks earlier.”
You tell Tante Didi.
“Is her name Didi? So that’s what Tante Didi means? She’s your aunt?”
“What?” I pulled away from her, shocked and now suspicious of how she could know anything about Tante Didi.
“You said it in your sleep a few times, but by the time we woke up in the morning, I’d keep forgetting to ask you what it meant.”
I nodded. Crap. To think she’d seen me during a nightmare and didn’t mention it said a lot.
“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s her. She suspected the abuse was going on. Eventually, she got us to open up in spite of Danny’s threats to kill us if we ever said a word to an adult. My great aunt went to
my father, confronted him. Threatened to do something about it if he didn’t. I only found out about that part years later, when my mother came out to Vegas to try and reconcile with me. She tried to talk me into coming home to visit.”
“Did you?”
“No. I have no resentment toward my mother. She was sick a lot when we were younger. Still is. All her life, she’s been living with a rare heart defect that makes her weak and has her bedridden a lot. It’s probably a miracle she survived four pregnancies. Mom tried to protect us as best as she could when she was well enough. She got between Danny and me, Danny and Micah. Did that often enough that Danny struck her a few times when he got older. My father...he’s to blame for all of it. That’s why I’ll never go back there. I’ll never forgive that man. Not while my brother’s free.”
You tell Tante Didi.
I’d told her. She was going to do the right thing. It would’ve all stopped if she hadn’t been in that wreck.
“It wasn’t an accident?” she asked in a soft hush.
“No. Micah was too tired to keep trying to swim to the shallow end,” I said, remembering the panicked look on his face right before I dove in. “I hauled him to the side. Once. But when I got him out, Danny gave me a look of such…loathing.”
“Christ.”
“I tried to help Micah inside to get him away, but Danny...he was too big, too strong. He shoved me to the ground and threw Micah back in. Then he beat the crap out of me while Micah struggled and tried to make it back to the side of the pool. I passed out, according to my mother. By the time she forced herself out of bed and got outside, I was out like a light. Danny ran off somewhere. Then she saw Micah face down in the water...just...floating…that scream she let out was what woke me up.”
Ruin Me: Vegas Knights Page 19