Because I was watching the sky, trying to figure out what happened to the lights, I saw the flashing red and blue. I tugged on Rudy more insistently and he shrugged me off with a grunt. So I slapped him instead. Not hard, but enough to get his attention.
He whipped his head around and I could feel him glare at me through his mask. I pointed up. After a resentful second, he followed my finger.
Then we were moving. He grabbed my hand and practically dragged me through the hedges, making a beeline for the gardener’s gate. Well, as much of a beeline as someone can make in the hedges.
Thomas started bellowing for help as soon as we were out of sight. Just before we closed the gate behind us, I saw the gleam of a powerful flashlight sweep across the yard.
“Run,” I whispered hoarsely.
We ran.
Chapter Thirty-One
RUDY
We reached the end of the alley and I had to put out an arm to keep Kennedy from rushing across the sidewalk to the car.
I paused and crouched, pulling her down with me, and peeked around the fence. A police cruiser drove by slowly. Maybe it was adrenaline or paranoia, but I felt like he almost rolled to a stop next to my car.
My heart thundered in my ears and my sweaty palms slipped over Kennedy’s costume. Come on, come on, keep going.
The cruiser made it to the corner and turned. A gate opened far behind me. It wasn’t a stretch to assume it was Julianne’s, or that the person opening it was wearing a badge. I glanced up and down the street once more.
“Now!” I hissed, shoving her toward the car.
We dove inside and I put the car in gear, flipped a U-turn, and drove away as fast as I could without making too much noise. At the first stop sign, I ripped my mask off. Kennedy was still wearing hers.
“Take that off,” I told her. “We gotta ditch them.”
She took it off savagely. Her face was twisted in fury.
“What the fuck was that?” she demanded.
“Uh—cops breaking up a party?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. I attempted a grin. It didn’t go well. “Oh, you mean the um—yeah. Uh—that was—necessary?”
“Necessary? It was necessary to turn our mostly-harmless prank into felony assault?”
I scowled at the road ahead of me and kept driving in whatever direction I felt like turning, just as I’d done earlier when we were running from the cops Kennedy’s mom called. Fucking cops, swear to god they’re everywhere I need them to not be.
“I really fucking hate it when you start talking like a lawyer.”
She snorted. “And I really fucking hate it when you start shit for no goddamn reason.”
I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. Pro tip? Don’t do that when you’re driving an old car. The wheel might look nice and comfy but there’s goddamn steel under there.
I shook my hand as subtly as I could manage, trying not to grimace.
“You are the reason, Kennedy! The only reason! One look at his stupid face and all I could see was him grabbing you and laughing about it. You should have seen him when I showed up at his house that day. He was fucking laughing. He thought he’d killed you and he thought it was fucking funny. He doesn’t deserve to live.”
“You know what, I’m glad you brought that up,” she snapped. “You just about killed him that day, didn’t you? And Julianne too. Do you even think before you do shit?”
I saw red. “Yes! Of course I think! I think about you. I think about how much they hurt you and how much you deserve to be safe and goddammit I don’t care what it takes, I am going to keep you safe!”
“I’m not safe with someone whose first answer to every problem is to hit it! Because you know what, Rudy, if you get locked up, you can’t fucking protect me from prison.”
Her shout rang off the roof of my car and the echo hung in the air until it imprinted on my brain. The safety and security I’d felt with her for so long shattered and suddenly I was standing alone in a smelly lobby, counting the cracked tiles on the dirty floor, realizing that my mother wasn’t coming back for me.
“Rudy!”
I slammed on the brake an instant before we crashed into a sound dampening wall. Kennedy was smashed flat against the back of her seat, gripping the door for dear life, her face pale and tense.
I slammed the shifter into park and yanked on the emergency brake, then turned the ignition off with shaking fingers.
“I wasn’t trying to kill us,” I told her.
She moved like a puppet, stiff and jerky, as she turned her wild-eyed stare at me. “Then what,” she breathed, “were you trying to do?”
“Sorry. I thought that was our turn.”
She blinked at me slowly. A long moment passed as she stared at me, then she slammed her thumb on her buckle and stormed out of the car. A moment later, she ripped my door open and glared.
“Out,” she said. “Get out of the damn car, Rudy.”
If she was anyone else, I would have fought her. But she was Kennedy.
I unbuckled and stepped out, already mapping out in my head how I was going to walk home from there. I didn’t even know where we were anymore. Didn’t matter. If I picked a direction and ended up in the desert, I’d just turn around. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to get lost in Starline.
“Well?” Kennedy said behind me. I turned around, confused. She was sitting behind the wheel, looking at me expectantly. She cocked her head at the empty passenger seat. “Let’s go.”
It didn’t compute at first. I was so sure that that had been it, that she was kicking me out of her life and my car and driving off somewhere without me, where she could be happy and not have to deal with all this insanity all the time. I was so convinced, in fact, that I went around and closed the passenger door for her without getting inside. Irritated, she opened her door and stood half out of the car.
“Get in the car, Rudy. Please.”
I shook myself as reality snapped back into focus. She wasn’t leaving me. She was taking the wheel. She was Kennedy, my Kennedy, and she wouldn’t just take off on me like that. She’d talk it to death first and blame herself and cry a lot, she might rage and scream, but she wouldn’t just flip a switch and be gone. She was better than that. She was better than my mother. Fuck, she was better than me—by a lot.
I opened the door and slid inside. “Well, why didn’t you just say so?” I asked lightly.
She rolled her eyes. I figured that was a fair response.
We didn’t go back to my place right away. We drove around town for a while and stopped at the top of the gentle hill behind my neighborhood because both of our phones had been buzzing practically nonstop since we left the party. It would be better to know what we were walking into.
“Jason said the cops have been to the house three times today,” I told her as I scrolled through the sea of texts. “Once for you—I guess someone reported you as a runaway, and me as your enabler. He told the cops that we’re both eighteen and can run wherever we want. Well no, he said we could run to Vegas if we wanted to, but you know, whatever.”
She blushed slightly. I hoped it was the good kind of blushing and not the pre-rage kind of blushing.
“And the other two?” she asked.
“Uh, let’s see—a truant officer, who was informed that I was suspended. I guess the VP didn’t pass that information on to attendance or something. And the last one was just a little while ago—wanted for questioning in relation to a terrorist attack? The fuck?”
Kennedy sighed heavily. “Sounds like something Mrs. Bird would say. It was probably her brother doing the looking. Did he have a warrant?”
“No. Dad didn’t tell him that we were going to a party tonight, either. He just told him that I was out with my girlfriend.”
She cocked her head at me with a gentle little smile on her face.
“What?” I asked.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you call Jason ‘Dad’. It sounds
nice, I like it.”
I scowled at my phone. “Whatever. Labels.”
She snorted at me and went back to reading her own texts.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Yeah. Benjamin and the rest of them got away clean before the cops even got there. Cleared out when the bubbles started, just like we planned. Chris’ feed is still live, so they’re watching everything go down. I’ve been informed repeatedly that I’m an idiot.”
“Well, knowing is half the battle,” she murmured, her lips quirking in amusement.
I blew a razzberry at her, then looked back at my phone.
“Nothing from Eric. Julio caught wind that something was going down and he’s lecturing all of us. Literally, look at this.”
I showed her the group chat between me and my brothers and scrolled so she could see the many, many paragraphs Julio had sent everybody in the last few hours.
Kennedy whistled softly. “Damn. He sounds pissed.”
“Yep. Not going to be happy tomorrow.” She was frowning at her phone and I nudged her with my elbow. “What’s up over there?”
She shook her head and put the phone away. “Just my dad threatening to pull out all the stops. He wants me to come home. Said he left me fifty for gas and that’s all I’m getting until I come home and ‘take responsibility for my actions,’ whatever that means. Also mom guilt-tripping me about her lying to the police. Don’t know what she told them. And she says that you’re crazy and if I was bored and wanted a boyfriend I should have talked to her because she has friends who have ‘good boys’ that she’d like to set me up with.”
A flutter of fear rippled through my chest.
“Good boys, huh?” I said, trying—and failing—to sound unconcerned.
Kennedy sighed shakily. “Yeah. Boys that’ll do what they’re told, I guess. Or who will expect me to do what I’m told. Either way—” she ended with a shrug. “I don’t like that she called you crazy.”
I didn’t either. It’s been pointed out to me, though, that I don’t much like it when people tell me uncomfortable truths. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe her mom was really looking out for her best interests. Maybe all I was doing was making her life harder unnecessarily.
“What happened back there, Rudy?” she asked softly.
“Back where?”
She gave me a look. “When we were leaving the party. We were arguing, you were driving, then—it was like you just stopped. Your face—looked different. Sort of hollow? I don’t know how to describe it. Then we were driving toward the wall and you didn’t slow down and you didn’t turn and then after you stopped the car you said stuff that didn’t make any sense. Were—were you trying to kill us?”
“I already told you I wasn’t,” I said sharply.
“Yeah, unprompted.” Her tone was still soft, unresponsive to my defensiveness. It kept me off-guard, the way I felt when Jason would stay level while I was losing my shit. I didn’t like it much—but it was familiar, and current, and something I could hold on to.
“Because I figured you’d assume that’s what I was trying to do, and here you are, assuming that’s what I was trying to do.”
“I wasn’t assuming. It didn’t even occur to me until you said it. I’m asking, Rudy. What happened?”
I could feel her slipping through my fingers. Now that shit was hitting the fan and all the consequences of our relationship were coming to a head all at once, I knew it was just a matter of time before she saw what I saw—that I was no good for her.
I was already losing her, so what was the harm in telling her the truth? But I couldn’t make myself do it. I knew I was losing her—I just didn’t want to lose her any faster than I had to.
My phone vibrated before I could find the words to say.
“Jason’s asking us to come back. Says something important has happened and he wants to talk to us face to face.”
She moved to turn the car on, then hesitated. “Think he’ll have the cops there waiting for us?”
I shook my head. “If he was going to turn us in, he would have done it already. Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
KENNEDY
We stopped to dump the costumes on the way to his place. I wanted to press the question but I didn’t think it would do any good.
Rudy’s whole expression shut down when I asked about it, and every time I so much as looked at him I could see his walls come up.
Maybe he was trying to kill us. Maybe he was just trying to kill himself. The part of me that hurt most wondered if he’d been trying to prove some kind of psychotic point, but that didn’t feel right. Not with the way he’d been acting after he got out of the car, anyway. He’d seemed confused. Disturbed.
He didn’t seem that way now. His confidence—or his confident façade—was firmly in place as we drove up to his house.
“Driveway or curb?” I asked.
“Curb,” he said. “Easier to make a quick getaway if we need to.”
I shivered. “You think we’ll need to?”
He was looking all around, scanning the street and the house as if he was expecting cops to come pouring in at him from all directions.
I parked at the curb and he shrugged.
“I like to be prepared.”
“How can you be prepared if you don’t know what you’re preparing for?” I asked as I shut the car off.
“Practice,” he said grimly.
He had that look again, that hollow look, for only a second. Then he shook himself and stepped out.
I followed him inside, trying to keep the trembling in my core from making it to my outsides. We found Jason pacing the living room, running his fingers through his hair.
“What’s up?” Rudy asked.
Jason shot us both a look which seemed to assess, admonish, and accept us all at once. One of these days I’d have to get him to teach me how to do that.
“I just got off the phone with—”
Before he could finish that sentence, his phone rang. He held up a finger and answered it. “Jason Seymore. One moment please.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling beseechingly, then covered the speaker on his phone and looked at me. “It’s your father, for the fifth time. He would like to know if I know where you are. Do I?”
My stomach flipped and I winced. “Uh—I can talk to him if you want.”
Jason searched my face for a moment, then went back to his call. “She just walked in. What can I do for you? Mmhm. Okay. Certainly.” He handed the phone to me.
“Hello?”
“Kennedy! I’ve been texting you for hours, do you know what time it is? I demand you come home this instant!”
All of my energy drained out of me. I didn’t have it in me to fight with him, but I didn’t have it in me to go home and face him, either.
“Why?” I asked.
He sputtered. “Because I am your father and I said so!”
I pressed two fingers to my throbbing temple. “Okay? You’re acting like there’s some big emergency. Is there a big emergency?”
“Big emergency? Is that the only way to get you home these days, is with a big emergency? What’s gotten into you? It’s that delinquent you’ve been running around with, isn’t it? He must be rich as hell to keep you ignoring me now.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why, because you drained my account? No. He’s not rich. But he also doesn’t randomly disappear out of my life then show up in the eleventh hour and try to discipline my problems away. Go back on tour and let me handle my own life.”
There was dead silence from his end for several seconds. “What did you say to me?”
I sighed. “Look, I’m not rejecting you and I’m not defying you, all right? Things have gotten out of control and it’s too late for you to put your foot down. It just is. I don’t have time to play your power games and I don’t have time to get in the middle of whatever issues you and mom are having. I have to fix this.”
“Well you are clearly not mature enough to fix anythin
g or you would have done it already. You have exactly thirty minutes to get home before I cut you off for good.”
I knew he was serious. I could hear it. I just couldn’t find it in me to care.
Flipping burgers for hardly any wages and couch surfing for as long as it took to get on my feet sounded way better than going home and dealing with him.
“Then cut me off,” I said with a shrug. “I can’t deal with this right now. I don’t have time.”
I hung up the phone and handed it back to Jason, who was trying very hard to look like someone who wasn’t listening or invested in the conversation.
“You okay?” Rudy asked.
I shrugged. I was numb. The day was dragging on forever and there were only so many hits I could take before I just couldn’t register anymore. A bomb could go off downtown and I might only be able to work up a mild interest. I told him I was fine.
“Good,” Jason said. “Then maybe he’ll stop calling long enough for me to tell you—oh, for God’s sake.” He shot an irritable glance at the door, which someone had started pounding on. “Hold on, I’m coming,” he called. He waved me and Rudy back a step, out of sight of the door.
I reached for Rudy’s hand and he let me take it.
“Mr. Bird,” Jason said coolly as he opened the door. “How can I help you this evening?”
“You can hand them over,” Julianne’s dad said. “All of them.”
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to be more specific. What precisely would you like me to hand over? Oh, hello officer, didn’t see you there.”
“Just call me Kenny,” another voice said. It was the cop, Julianne’s uncle. I scowled in his general direction. “Not officially here, just doing my brother in law a favor.”
“And what favor would that be?” Jason asked.
“We need to talk to your boys,” Mr. Bird said. “Now, I’m not looking to start any trouble, Mr. Seymore, but my wife and daughter seem pretty damn convinced that your boys are responsible for the damage done to my property this evening.”
Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Page 20