by Angel Payne
After confirming my statement with a small nod, Carol went on. “With the weakened condition of Mr. Stone’s lungs, it wasn’t likely he’d have survived the fumes and smoke for even another ten minutes. Though the service stairs were blocked by burning debris, Mr. Klarke somehow found a way up that route, and brought Mr. Stone back to safety.”
My lungs tightened. My imagination swam as the logistics of her recount took over. If the old boiler in the south basement had blown, it would have torn apart the kitchen floor. Since Banyan—Dad—practically lived in the kitchen when he wasn’t attending to Keystone’s never-ending maintenance list, the blast would’ve likely blown right up his ass. Still, he’d found a way to make it to the service stairs, clear a path, and haul it up to the master study to retrieve Josiah.
My masquerade of a father, saved by the man who’d handed him the mask.
I had no idea how to react or to feel. I was ripped inside, my two halves like the sides of a parchment contract, ragged and unmatchable, confused and raging.
I turned from the women. Stumbled toward walls that were painted in designer sterility and decorated with cheap art, all designed to impart a peace I couldn’t be further from feeling. I glared at one of those prints, with its airbrushed words spouting bullshit about peace and wisdom and surrender and hope, debating whether to pull the thing off the wall before I put my fist through it, when someone said my name. Someone sounding like strength—and the understanding that only came from growing up together.
“Kil.”
I turned. Stared hard at the man standing there, looking tan and strong in his rugged Southwest desert clothes, before he yanked me into a firm embrace. I rebelled at once, shoving back at Lance. Like Carol and Kitty before him, he accepted my anger with a sympathetic look. I yearned to punch it right off his face. Why was everyone so goddamn understanding? Why wasn’t anyone pissed off as hell about all this? Didn’t anyone else see what I did? All the moments passed by. The time wasted. The feelings unexpressed. So many tomorrows taken for granted. A sham I was just as guilty of believing as all of them.
“I’m sorry,” Lance uttered. “Dammit, Killian, I’m so sorry. It shouldn’t have happened like this.”
I locked my teeth, clenched my jaw, and twisted my psyche harder around the rage. At least that felt real. Tangible. Right.
“Yeah,” I replied, lips barely moving. “Okay.” I jabbed my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. “What the hell are you doing up here? Who’s downstairs with—”
“Father?” He filled it in to my awkward pause. “Mom’s with him; don’t worry.” With a steady lift of his gaze, he continued, “But he knows you cut your trip short, and he’s asking for you.”
“Why?”
The guy pulled back his head and grimaced like he did when we were kids and I freaked him by flipping up my eyelids. “What the hell do you mean, why?”
I let the thousands of things I could’ve answered to that slip into a thick silence. Inside my chest, the parchment tore a little wider, and I didn’t even want to find glue for it. My sights found nothing but that lame point on the wall again, and I found comfort in again indulging the fantasy of ripping it down, driving my fist through the glass, and strangling the watercolor dove taking flight beneath the empty words of solace.
When I’d made my silence excruciatingly clear, Lance finally jabbed a toe at the floor and offered, “Mason’s already here, too—so you can cross all the legal concerns off your list.”
I wondered why his cryptic tone didn’t make me feel like more of a cornered animal. For the last three weeks, I’d traipsed across Europe in a constant state of lashing out at Claire for making me feel the exact same way. Now I just tilted up a scowl and gritted, “‘Legal concerns?’ That’s what we’re calling them now?”
Lance’s lips tightened beneath his beard, which seemed fuller than the last time I’d seen him, during his very quick stop home over the holidays. “I’m just here to help, smart ass. I’m also happy to stand here however long it takes for you to ask nicely for it.” He flashed a serene grin at a pair of older women who sat nearby, uncaring that they didn’t understand how the Fight Club tone he’d wielded since high school was the exact kick of familiarity I needed right now.
“Don’t you have a long walk to take off a short fucking pier?”
A soft smile took the place of his grimace. In the vernacular of the Stone brothers, family catastrophe or not, it was the closest to “nice” he was going to get. For at least a few bizarre seconds, things were back to normal.
“The staff on both floors have signed nondisclosure agreements,” he stated. “And nowhere on Ban’s paperwork is your direct relationship noted.”
My head jerked up and down. The details should have been on my mind but even acknowledging my mind existed was a torturous process. “Okay,” I managed. “Yeah. Thanks, Lance.”
“One more thing. Avoid the front of the building. We’ve corralled the press there. The doctors have already been out for a couple of press conferences but they keep demanding an appearance by you and Claire.”
“Of course.” I made the crack with a mixture of dread and pride. Though Claire detested the “public persona” part of being with me, she’d nevertheless captivated the press corps the same way she did me: with her humor, sass, and humility.
And open, direct, honesty.
The only thing she’d ever wanted from me in return. The one thing I’d withheld…afraid of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
I stopped running, Killian. Now it’s time for you to stop hiding.
I lifted my head. Extended my gaze across the waiting area to where Claire gently held Kitty, rubbing her hand up and down the woman’s trembling back—utterly unaware that for the first time, I really heard her words.
Lance’s boots made a couple of steady thumps on the tile as he stepped next to me again. His long pause indicated he followed the line of my sight. “You never told her,” he finally queried, “did you?”
I let a rush of air explode off my lips. “Not exactly the stuff of light dinner conversation, brother.”
“Not in the least.” His tone was infused with compassion. “Though the air between you two is thick as three auras gone sideways.”
I shook my head. “You seriously need to get out of Sedona more.”
“Or maybe you just need to come visit.” The jest eased things enough for him to yank me into a fierce hug. When he let me go, he murmured, “If you take the back stairs and keep a low profile, you two can probably make your way to the park across the street unnoticed. I’ll sit with Kitty. Don’t worry.”
I nodded and pulled him into another clasp, this one tight with my gratitude. Lance might have shared plenty of culpability with Trey for making my life hell as a kid, but he’d grown up into a damn decent—if fake—brother. The recognition provided a connection I desperately needed right now, injecting much-needed steel in my spine as I crossed back to Claire. As I approached, she looked up and started a little. Her stare scanned my face, likely wondering why I looked like the Killian Stone from sixty-seven floors over Michigan Avenue instead of the Killian Klarke who’d just wept out a final goodbye to my dad.
It was time she knew the answer to that.
It was time she knew everything.
I extended my hand down to her. “We need to talk.”
*
The holy shit look on her face only intensified with every step we took across the grass in the park. Once we arrived at a little picnic table under some trees, the shade didn’t diminish the anxiety in her eyes or soften the brackets of tension at her mouth. I tried to ease both once I sat her down, cupping her hands as I brushed her mouth with a soft kiss. “I love you, Claire.”
Her expression softened. She lifted the tips of her fingers to my face. “And I love you, too.”
I cleared my throat. “But you’re confused.”
“You think?”
We attempted to laugh i
n tandem at her crack. Best we could do was a couple of soft huffs, a commiseration about the fact that this conversation was happening too fucking late.
Reluctantly, I let her hands fall. “You deserve better than this for an explanation, Claire. You always did. And I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Her soft utterance matched the brush of knuckles she lingered over mine. The moment was such a sweet contrast to how things had been for us lately, seeming like a cease-fire to a long skirmish. Now if my gut would only read the message.
“You really mean that,” I murmured. “Don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” She frowned, her confusion apparent. “Killian, I’ve never wanted anything but your truth. I’m just sorry, not angry, it had to be like this.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Repeating the words permeated them deeper into me. Though I stepped back from her a little, I sucked emotional sustenance from the brilliant amber strength in her eyes. So open. Giving. Caring. Would she feel like being so once I spilled the complete truth?
I didn’t have a choice about that answer now. Hiding from her—from myself—was no longer a choice. If I’d come clean about all of this sooner, perhaps fate wouldn’t have stepped in to teach me the lesson in the shittiest way possible.
“You were scared.” Compassion formed a thick underline to her declaration. “And now I understand why, at least a little better.” She traced a little figure eight over my wrist. “I’m just astounded I didn’t see it sooner.”
“See what?”
“The truth. About you—and Ban.” She tilted her head to one side. “You’re so much like him, you know.”
I shot her a quizzical look—past a smile that began in the core of my chest. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah.” While she nodded, she assessed my face as if seeing it for the first time. “Talk about the truth hiding in plain sight.” Her gaze intensified. “Only now, I’m just wondering why you never…well, why everyone hid it from—”
“The whole world?” I jammed my hands into my back pockets. “That’s the thirty million dollar question, isn’t it?”
She pulled her hands back into her lap and regarded me carefully. “In the case of the Stones, that’s a pretty literal question.”
“Damn straight.” I turned, letting twigs crunch beneath my slow, defined steps. “And in this case, you’d be right on the money—pardon the term—to think so.”
I listened to her scooting away from the table. Her words came as cautiously as her steps. “I’m listening.”
Caution? No. It was more like suspicion…just as I’d expected. Claire Montgomery valued integrity like a nun prioritized chastity—which meant she hated where her logic progressed with my words.
Which meant this confession was going to be just as hard as I’d expected. Dammit.
I wasn’t aware the word had spilled from my lips before Claire came closer. “Kil…it’s me, remember?”
I let out a grunting laugh. “That’s supposed to make this easier?”
“Generally speaking, yes.” At the weighted silence I gave that, she took a long breath then persisted, “Okay. How about we start at the very beginning? I know that you’ve lived at Keystone at least from the age of three.”
The smile in her voice tempted one to my lips. The memory returned, vivid as if it were yesterday, of the day I’d given her the grand tour of the manor, including the “portraits” Trey and I had added in crayon to the corner of the grand gallery as toddlers. Mother had fallen so completely in love with our efforts, including my rendering of her as a queen atop a unicorn with flames for a mane, that she ordered a custom frame to surround the drawings.
As I turned back to Claire, grief snagged my heart—and a confession left my lips. “I was practically born there. And now—”
It’s gone.
“I know.” She reached up, grabbing the back of my head in order to pull me down and into her, cradling me through the wash of agony so deep I could only clutch her in return, digging my hands into her hips. The wind blew. The trees moaned. Leaves batted at our legs. The world went on but I was stopped—and knew that getting this truth out to her had to be the first start at making things go again. She’d been right back in Paris. I’d started turning her into my enemy. More than ever, I needed her again as my ally.
I finally pulled away. Stepped back once more. I needed the distance to find the memories—and the words.
“Everything was fine until a few months before my fifth birthday. That was about the time Stone Global jumped into the Fortune Five Hundred.”
“And…that was a good thing, right?” Her tone was careful and slow. Like the observant woman she was, she already knew that when things were rosy for the Stones, that didn’t mean a shitload of thorns weren’t growing beneath the blooms.
“Yes…and no,” I replied. I gave her a sideways glance. “You know a lot of the company history—and probably the fact that my father was able to grow it via funding from the traditional Chicago social circles in which his father first moved.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “All the evidence does point to that, yes.”
“Well, the expectations on that kind of debt run deeper than your standard country club membership and Assistance League fund raisers. To this day, there’s a certain…code…about grooming the proper heir apparent for an empire like SGC. A successor who can produce perfect children who will in turn take their turn on the throne.”
Her brows lowered. “And…Josiah and Willa didn’t see that heir in either Lance or Trey?”
I folded my arms and answered as gently as I could, “Well, not in Lance.”
Her stare darkened to the shade of fire against a night sky. Angry fire. “Because he’s—” Her jaw dropped. “Didn’t you just say you were all kids? How could they even tell at that age?”
“Because at Trey’s birthday party, they found him in the bathroom, charging each of the little girls a buck for a glam makeover.”
She clearly tried—but failed—to hold back a giggle. “Well, at least he knew how good an artist he was even back then.”
I gave in to a smile, too. It felt damn nice. “And he actually was.”
“Okay, that took care of Lance. But Trey—”
“Won’t ever be able to have children.” I paused to let her drop an expected gape. “Without getting too technical, his thrusters are able to fire, but there’s no substance to the lasers. They knew about it since he was a baby.”
I could practically see the gears in Claire’s mind working on all that information and arriving at a few crazy conclusions. The shitty thing was, likely all of them were right.
I decided to keep going. “By that time, I was pretty much a third musketeer to the two of them. The only time our parents couldn’t find us running around together was when I wandered into Josiah’s office. His spreadsheets were fascinating to me. I liked asking questions—and to my surprise, he liked answering them. Guess it didn’t take anyone very long to figure that if I was challenged properly, I could go places with my life.”
“So…Josiah and Willa just took you away from your dad?”
“Not exactly.” The laugh I twisted into the last of it was sparked more by discomfort than amusement. “It was still my mom and dad, actually—and I even remember that they involved me in the decision a little, too.”
“What?”
“I was a kid, Claire. It all seemed like some big game to me. I was told I’d get to sleep in the big house with Lance and Trey, and go to their school, where all the boys got to wear ties and ride ponies. In exchange, all I had to do was tell everyone my last name was Stone instead of Klarke, and pretend that Josiah and Willa were my dad and mom when we went to school events. Life changed for me, but not that much. I saw my parents every day, even ate dinner with them in the service dining room. In my view, life was pretty fucking awesome.”
A weighted breath left her. Now that I was on a roll, I wanted to simply push out all the rest. I clamped my jaw on another
half-minute of silence, knowing I’d just asked her to digest a whole bunch of wow.
Welcome to the rabbit hole, Alice.
“So…when did the veil come off your eyes?” she finally murmured.
Well, that one was easy.
“A month before my eighth birthday.” I hiked a hip onto the picnic table. “Mother and Father—Willa and Josiah this time—gave me a skiing trip to Aspen as a gift. We were getting ready to leave…when we learned my mom had beat us at the game.”
Claire scowled. “I…don’t understand.”
I pulled up my other leg and leaned my elbows on my knees. Didn’t help the thud of pain in my gut—or the realization that I’d never had to speak this truth aloud to anyone before. “The ski trip…it was a tipping point, I guess, for Damrys Klarke, my biological mother.” I stared down at the skin on top of my knuckles, stretched white from my painful squeezing. “She told Ban—Dad—that she couldn’t bear watching my life from the sidelines anymore. Though Dad begged her to stay—told her he’d talk to Josiah and Willa and return things back the way they were—she forbade him to say anything.” I unhinged one of my hands to brace my forehead against a curled fist. “So in the middle of the night…she disappeared.”
Claire took a stunned step back over. Stopped as if a train hit her. “Wait. She—she just left?”
I lifted my head. “One veil, officially removed.”
“And she never came back?”
“Ban thought she might’ve gone back home, found a decent village to blend into,” I said as the beginning of an answer. “She missed Ireland a lot.”
When her lips finally came back together, she stammered, “And you never tried to look for her?”
“Constantly,” I countered. “Sometimes obsessively, whenever Lance and Trey decided ganging up on the ‘kitchen boy’ was a fun way to pass the time.”
She snorted. “A game Trey never quite grew out of.”
“They both got pretty good at knowing the limits our fathers would tolerate. And of course, their teasing only made me more determined to kick their combined asses scholastically.” I rose to my feet again, facing her with squared shoulders. “I’m not going to lie to you, Claire. I liked growing up as a Stone. Sometimes, the mantel was damn demanding, especially when Josiah tried to force the fit, but the man also taught me a lot—and Willa, in her beautiful way, tried to fill the maternal gap in my heart. And Ban,”—I swallowed on a heavy sting behind my eyes—“Dad was there to remind me of how lucky I was to have it all.”