She swallowed and breathed a shaky sigh.
“You guys—you have each other. Really have each other, you know? You like hanging out together. You relax. You have fun. You unwind. Jason—he does the work of therapists and social workers. But he’s also a daddy.”
A tear splashed on my wrist and I held her a little closer.
“They never let me forget that I was an experiment,” she said, her voice tight and harsh. “They never let me in, not like that. I’ve seen their true faces a handful of times, when they thought I wasn’t around—their playfulness, their spitefulness, their emotions—but with me it’s all distance and full bank accounts and the occasional stern lecture.”
She trembled and my heart hurt. I wanted to smash whatever was causing her pain and I couldn’t. It just wasn’t possible. How do you smash a lifetime of loss?
I kissed the back of her neck and breathed slowly, willing my temper away. Her scent helped. Fresh and clean and homey, it anchored me.
Maybe there was a different way to protect her from her pain. I didn’t know what, but I was going to figure it out. Chris would have some ideas—he’s good at that.
Kennedy wiped her face and cleared her throat, then tipped her head back and kissed me.
“Should we go back inside?” she asked.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay out on the deck and drink her in one kiss at a time. The flash of protective adrenaline hadn’t gone away, instead it had transformed into a different kind of need to smash.
I kissed her again, deeply, moving with her as she arched and twisted into me. She gasped as I pressed against her, pressing back against me. Groaning softly into her mouth, my brain raced to figure out how I could get her around me without taking her back inside first. There were some dark corners on the deck…
“Hey, lovebirds,” Chris called with a sneer in his voice. “Come on, we’re starting.”
I growled, irritated, and it made Kennedy giggle.
Reluctantly—my entire body fought against me—I let her go and turned around to glare at Chris. He just smirked at me and sauntered back inside.
“Come on,” Kennedy murmured in my ear. “Bradley told me the best games happen after the kids are in bed.”
“The best games happen when we are in bed,” I shot back petulantly. She laughed like bells, chasing my irritation away. I squeezed her once more before I took her into the house. I could have squished her against me for the rest of time and been happy about it.
Julio, Eric, and Benjamin had beers in hand, with Chris scooting around them like a poorly-behaved puppy, begging. Jason came back into the room and popped Chris lightly on the back of the head.
“Few more years, kiddo,” he said.
“Aw, c’mon Jason! Dad? Just this once! Please?”
“Knock it off, Chris,” I said, draping my arm loosely over Kennedy’s shoulders. “You’re not gonna get anywhere.”
Kennedy giggled a little uncomfortably and I grinned at her as reassuringly as I could. Her own feelings of awkwardness were beginning to make me nervous. I wanted her to be comfortable here because it was the only place I’d ever felt comfortable, and if I felt at home here and she didn’t—
I shook the thought away because I didn’t know how to finish it. All I knew was that both Jason’s house and Kennedy felt like home to me, and that I’d been in enough broken homes to last me a lifetime.
Chapter Eighteen
KENNEDY
“Okay, the category is ‘Song Titles’ and the challenge is ‘Protest Signs’,” Julio read off the two cards. “Timer starts—” he flipped the tiny hourglass “—now.”
“Fuck the Police!” Chris shouted.
“For real.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, and I definitely hadn’t meant to say it that loud.
Chris and Gary both shot me startled, oddly approving glances. Rudy threw back his head and laughed. Julio gave me a thoughtful look, the kind of look that made it obvious that he was a therapist for a living. Benjamin chuckled down at the table. Eric frowned, looked from me to Rudy and back, then narrowed his eyes at me.
“I know why these chuckleheads hate the cops,” he said. “But what about you? You get in a lot of trouble?”
Ah, the protective big brother. I’d always wanted one of those.
I shook my head, feeling a little flustered and put on the spot.
“No—but I’ve only ever needed them once, and they weren’t exactly jumping at the chance to do their jobs. Or at least the one I talked to wasn’t.”
Chris snorted. “Pushing people around isn’t a job.”
“They aren’t all bad,” Eric said with a shrug.
I frowned at him, curious. He caught my expression and grinned.
“Wondering why I, of all people, don’t have a problem with cops?”
I shrugged.
“Sort of,” I said. “If you were innocent, I’d figure you’d have a grudge against them for holding you so long and targeting you afterward.”
His grin sharpened. “Way you phrased that makes me think—that you think—that I’m guilty.”
My heart leapt up in my throat. The room was dead quiet. I couldn’t even hear anyone breathe.
Eric’s expression was a little too brittle, like he could fly to pieces any moment.
Prickles shivered over my spine and my feet itched to run. I could feel the panic building the way it had in the trunk, right before I ran for my life. At least, I’d thought I was running for my life.
I took a deep breath. It hurt, my lungs pressing hard against the knot in my belly.
“Are you?” I asked. My voice was surprisingly steady considering how my heart was rattling my ribcage.
His manic expression shuddered into something so soul-tired and beaten that I instantly wanted to take the words and shove them back into my mouth. He hid it quickly, but its bitter aftertaste lingered in the corners of his eyes. He looked away from me.
“No,” he said after a long moment. “But it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been for Fitz. They were ready to put me away. All the way away.” He swallowed hard and turned glittering brown eyes back at me. “Yeah, cops suck. But some of them are still in it for the right reasons.”
I opened my mouth to stammer out some kind of apology, but he dismissed me with a languid wave of his hand.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ve heard the rumors. Hell, I’d believe some of them if I didn’t know me.” He gave me a wry little smile and shrugged. “But if you need help, maybe I can put you in touch with Fitz.”
I slid a glance at Rudy, who shrugged with a look that said, why the hell not?
Before I could say anything, though, one of the kids shrieked upstairs. Rudy was on his feet in a second, but Jason waved him back into his seat.
“Night terrors,” he said. “I’m probably tapping out for the night, kids. Be nice to the pretty lady, she’s been through some stuff.” He squeezed Eric’s shoulder in passing, a gesture which looked comfortably routine. Something in me ached enviously.
I hoped the interruption would change the subject for me. I wasn’t really down to open up about my terrible choices in friends in front of a bunch of strangers and frenemies, no matter how close they’d been to the action. But it wasn’t going to be that easy, of course.
Julio’s therapist gaze was still locked somewhere near my left earlobe, a nonthreatening invitation which bordered on insistence, and Eric was clearly waiting for a response though he was no longer looking at me.
“Go ahead,” Benjamin urged in a voice as soft and gentle as a spring breeze. “You’re safe here.”
It was almost enough to loosen my tongue. I don’t know how Julio ended up the therapist while Benjamin slaved away in a grocery store, but it seemed backwards to me.
I breathed a little easier for a moment—but the words got caught in my throat.
“How ‘bout a trade?” I asked Eric. “Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.”
He pondered that over a long pull of beer. It looked like he was going to go for it for a second, but then he shook his head.
“You’ve lived here a while, haven’t you? Long enough to hear the story from everybody and their sister. You don’t need my take.”
I rolled my eyes and huffed an exasperated sigh. “Well shit, in that case I should be running out of here screaming. According to the stories, you killed yourself, which I guess makes you a zombie? Or, if you aren’t dead, you definitely opened a sex trade hub in some border town somewhere. Or you’re shipping bodies to a lye pit somewhere for the Mexican Mafia—oh, and you definitely started killing women and girls in elementary school, and are helping Jason run a cult of lost boys who prey on unsuspecting girls.”
I paused for a breath—and because I could no longer hear myself talk over the howls of laughter ringing around the table.
Eric gave me a chagrined little smile and shrugged one shoulder.
Rudy threw his arm around me and kissed my cheek, making me blush in front of everybody. Damn it, Rudy.
“Okay, okay, point made,” Eric said through a chuckle when the table quieted down a little. “Didn’t think the rumor mill would keep truckin’ along like that with me gone.”
“You still got brothers here,” I pointed out. “And a lot of people who still remember where they were when the news broke.”
Eric frowned at his beer, his eyes soft and distant.
“I was in an interrogation room,” he said quietly. “Didn’t know what happened until they showed me pictures.”
My stomach turned. I wanted to tell him it was okay, that he didn’t have to keep remembering it, but it was too late. He was talking in a faraway dreamlike voice, the way people do when there’s too much hurt around the memory to speak bluntly.
“It was so stupid,” he said. “She was supposed to meet me at the mall at six. Seemed like every time we had plans, the Birds would make her work late. I thought she was cheating on me. It was just too convenient.” He shrugged and took a swig of his beer. “So when she stood me up again, I got pissed. I drove over to the house. Mistake number one, by the way.”
Chris snorted. “Nah man, mistake number one was getting tangled up with anyone who had anything to do with the Bird assholes.”
Rudy and Eric both glared at him flatly while I tried very hard to be invisible. Gary watched from under his lashes, grinning down at the table. Chris looked back and forth between them, then raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, my bad. Yeesh.”
“Ignore him,” Rudy said to me, his voice icy. “He was dropped on his head. Just not enough.”
Chris snorted. “Try it, dingus.”
“Hold on,” Eric said. “You work for the Birds?”
I looked over my shoulder, expecting him to be asking someone else, but he was definitely talking to me.
I shook my head. “No. Julianne is—was—my friend. I mean, we’re clearly not friends anymore.”
“Julianne?” Eric frowned, confused. After a moment’s thought, he snapped his fingers. “The little kid who was always following Sabrina around and snitching when she caught her talking to me. Cute kid. Irritating little shit, though.”
That made me laugh. A little bitterly, maybe, but it was a laugh regardless.
“Yeah. She’s still like that. Which I guess made it so hard for the cop to believe she’d—well, I mean, the fact that he’s her uncle or something probably factors into it.”
Eric made a face. “That family’s always had their fingers in everything around here. The woman—”
“Natalie?”
“That bitch!” Eric’s half-triumphant, half-furious exclamation made me jump in my seat. “Sorry,” he said, slightly calmer. “Oh, I hate her. I don’t hate a lot of people, but I fucking hate that bitch.”
I blinked at him and released a slow breath.
“Wow,” I said. “What’d she do?”
He gave me a flat stare.
“She cried,” he said. “Cried and screamed and pointed her bony fucking finger at me. That was all it took. No evidence, no motive, no weapon, no fucking nothing but a rich snob’s crocodile tears. And she didn’t let up, either, oh no. By the time I got out of jail, the whole fucking town believed her stupid story. Facts didn’t make a damn difference. I was guilty because her tears said I was guilty.”
“Not to mention all the times she would drop in on your dates accidentally and just happen to have something to talk to Sabrina about,” Benjamin added. “I think she was stalking you, honestly. It was weird. Like who cares that much about the love life of your maid’s kid?”
Eric shrugged but the gesture was too quick and rough to be casual. He was clearly still heated about it.
“At that point Sabrina was working for them too, but it still doesn’t make any damn sense.”
He shook his head and tilted his bottle back, then set it down, visibly disappointed, when he found it empty. He sighed and shook his head as if clearing out the cobwebs, then gestured to me with an open palm.
“My bad,” he said. “You were about to tell me what it was the little Bird did to you.”
I shrugged, trying to play it off as nothing, like it didn’t even bother me—even though I was still having nightmares about being stuck in tiny places and suffocating to death.
“She sort of kidnapped me and left me for dead,” I said.
The three older brothers all stared silently for a long moment.
Then the silence exploded.
Chapter Nineteen
RUDY
“She did what?!”
“Wait, are you being literal?”
“Okay, doll, look, I’m a pacifist and all but that’s bullshit, you should kick her ass.”
“And the cops did nothing?”
“I keep telling them we need to get back at her, but no.” Chris chimed in with our older brothers with a flippant hand and a roll of his eyes.
I gave him a piercing glare, but he just looked at me flatly.
“Chill, guys,” I drawled lazily. “She and her goon of a boyfriend know better now. I made sure of it.”
Kennedy’s eyes widened and I realized at that moment that I hadn’t actually ever told her what went down at Thomas’ place.
I rubbed her shoulder and hoped it was reassuring.
“I had a—talk with them,” I said.
She wasn’t buying it. Crap. Okay, blow past it.
“Anyway, the point is that the Bird family has the whole town under their thumbs, right? So going to the cops isn’t going to help. Hell, Kennedy tried and she got nowhere. We’re not going to get proof, so there’s nothing to do but keep Kennedy safe, right?”
Eric fumed silently.
Julio looked thoughtful.
Benjamin pursed his lips sassily, shot me a dismissive glance, and turned his attention to Kennedy.
“Listen, honey. I know bullies. Best way to deal with them is to corner them and make them out themselves, you know what I’m saying? Trick her into embarrassing herself or saying something villainous in public. Hear me?”
Kennedy snorted. “She would never. She’s always five steps ahead of everybody. And her reputation? She guards that like a dragon.” Kennedy shook her head. “I’m not conniving enough to get ahead of her.”
Chris opened his mouth and I shot a look at him. He closed it again.
Yes, we had some plans in the works—but I didn’t want Kennedy hearing about them. Not yet.
If everything went sideways she’d feel responsible. I didn’t want Julio knowing either. Eric learned to toe the line of the law, but Julio embraced it with both arms and went to sleep in it. Honestly, I was surprised he ended up a therapist and not a cop or something.
Benjamin, though, should be brought into the planning circle. I looked at him thoughtfully and he caught my gaze. The flicker of a wicked grin flashed across his face, then he leaned back in his seat.
“Who’s turn is it?” he asked.
“Mine,” C
hris said. He drew a card, and the game went on.
Later, during a break for snacks and drinks when Kennedy was busy talking to Julio about something or the other, I pulled Benjamin aside.
“They were her friends and I don’t really want her to feel bad,” I began in a rush. “I need you to help me figure out how to get back at these assholes without making it look like revenge.”
Benjamin tapped his chin with one finger, gazing thoughtfully at the ceiling.
“Any of them in theater?”
I shook my head. “No. Julianne is on the tennis team and the folk orchestra. Just basic classes and torture apart from that.”
He narrowed his eyes. “No way to sabotage tennis subtly unless she gets an, um—what’s the sport word for award?”
“Medal?”
“That’s the one. If there’s a ceremony or something you could get her worked up and frustrated before her acceptance speech—”
“Don’t think they have those in tennis.”
“Right, sporty shit. Um, let me think. Folk orchestra, what does she play?”
“Violin.”
“Does she sing?”
“Yeah.”
Benjamin narrowed his eyes. “Performances?”
“There’s one in December, I’m pretty sure. Right before winter break.”
“Do you know what she’s performing?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t exactly been paying attention—to her.”
Benjamin grinned. “Kennedy’s in that class too, isn’t she?”
I smirked. “How do you know?”
“Boy, you are so completely smitten with her. It’s all over you. You get all dewy-eyed when you think about her and let’s not get started on the way you look at her.”
I slugged him softly on the shoulder and he made a theatric performance out of recoiling.
He slipped back into his thoughtful stance, then paced a little bit.
“Okay, so here’s what I need. You need to figure out what she’s performing, if she’s having any trouble with any specific part of it, if she’s planning anything extravagant—like a bucket full of glitter or something—for her performance. Once you get all that, tell me.”
Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Page 10