Chapter 7
Alex
I hadno idea if Kat would leave or not. I was gambling that she probably wouldn’t—Kat was smart. She was safe at the hotel, because the room was under my name. At the moment, she didn’t have anywhere safer to go. She wasn’t usually the impulsive type.
But then again, she hated me.
She hadn’t always. The first time we met, we crossed paths at a party she definitely shouldn’t have attended, one that was far below her social grade. But Kat was a rebel, and as I was soon to learn, she didn’t like being told what to do—by anyone.
She’d liked me a lot that night. We made out, but nothing else happened—even at sixteen, I knew that messing with the slumming rich girl would be playing with fire. I figured she’d get her kicks, and I’d get to make out with the hottest girl I’d ever seen. Then we’d never see each other again.
Looking back, that idea was laughably pathetic. With that first kiss, we were both addicted. We found ways to be together, to sneak around to the shadier places of Chicago where Kat wouldn’t be recognized. Every time we got close, we grew more wild for each other. But we didn’t have sex.
It wasn’t because we were saving ourselves. Neither of us were virgins. Kat liked sex, and she was curious about it, which was one of the things that made her so hot to me. I’ve never been a guy who expects a girl to live up to some medieval idea of purity. I’d rather have a woman who knows what she wants, knows what she likes, and knows how to ask for it.
But still, at first I wouldn’t lay hands on Kat, except for our increasingly heated makeout sessions. I knew that she was miles above me, so far out of my league she shouldn’t even look at me. I knew that if her family ever found out who she was fooling around with, they wouldn’t just punish me—they’d punish her, too. Maybe I was fooling myself that she was just a fling.
So we waited. For what, I had no idea. And in the meantime, we kept seeing each other. And we got deeper and deeper.
I was living with my friends in those days. When I was a kid, my father hit me, and my mother wouldn’t stop him, so at fifteen I’d moved in with Aidan, Noah, and Dane in an apartment we rented under false pretenses. Four kids who didn’t want to go home, living in a rundown apartment near the South Side that smelled like sweaty socks and cheap deodorant. Aidan’s younger sister, Ava, was a regular there too, to get away from the mother who could do nothing but insult her. We all worked, and Dane taught himself computer programming, and somehow we got by.
They all knew I was nuts about Kat. It became an accepted fact of life, though I didn’t bring her around my friends too often. I didn’t want to get all of them in trouble, and besides, Kat was mine. We were always happier when we were alone.
I told myself we were just friends with makeout benefits, that this was a temporary thing. I told myself I could walk away whenever I wanted. Then her family took off for a week in the Bahamas, leaving Kat home alone, and we spent the entire week having sex in her bed, in her big bedroom, in her big, empty house. After that, I stopped lying to myself. Kat was it for me.
And then we lived happily ever after, right? Oh, so fucking wrong.
A week after I finished that magical week in Kat’s bed, we went to a party. And we ran into my brother, Damon.
Damon was two years older than me. He’d moved out before I had, because Dad had hit him, too. He was bigger than me, and more muscled, and he had dirty blond hair that was exactly like our father’s. He was already dealing drugs by then, but he was good-looking, and everyone thought he was a great guy. I knew better. I had always hated Damon.
Damon hated me, too. I could tell it by the look he gave me at that party. He’d looked at me, and then he’d looked at Kat, and something had started to smolder behind his eyes. Something that gave me a very bad feeling.
“Hey,” he’d said to my girl that night, his voice smoky like charcoal. “Do you want to dance?”
The sky wascloudy and gray as I parked on the street a block from Kat’s apartment. My phone had buzzed with texts—Patrick, maybe, or maybe my partners, though they thought I was on my way to Hawaii. I ignored it. I got out of the SUV and walked toward Kat’s building, holding the keys I’d slipped from her purse.
I’d told her not to go back to her apartment. I hadn’t said that I wouldn’t go back to her apartment.
She lived in a basic but clean rental building, her neighbors mostly single moms and immigrants with more than one job. A couple of kids shot a ball into the skeletal hoop on the lot at the side of the building and a woman watched me approach, a baby on her hip. Her look was not exactly welcoming.
“Good afternoon,” I said to her as I passed. She didn’t reply.
I took the stairs to the third floor and exited the stairwell, heading down the hall toward Kat’s apartment. Then I noticed her door was ajar.
I slowed my steps, going silent. I couldn’t hear any noises inside the apartment, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. Someone had come looking for Kat—someone who hadn’t found her at the hospital. Whoever he was, he might still be there.
I moved toward the door, listening, trying to see through the crack where it was open. I couldn’t see any movement. Maybe I should?—
Something hit me from behind—an elbow to the back of my neck. I heard the guy’s footstep at the last second and tried to sidestep it, but he still got a heavy blow in. At the same time he kicked the back of my knees, dropping me off balance. He kicked me in the balls as I fell.
Pain sliced up through my body, but I used the force of my fall to pull him down with me, dragging him with all my weight. I grappled with him and got a knee into his stomach, then punched him on the side of the head.
He was a white guy, skinny, but dark-haired—not the guy from the hospital parking lot. He had a mustache-and-goatee combo and wore a knit cap on his head. When he snarled at me, I could see his teeth were yellow.
“You’re a dead man,” he said, but it was an empty threat. If he had a weapon, he would have pulled it on me by now.
I may have been a rich guy running a venture capital firm, but the sewer rat in me knew how to fight. I didn’t give him a second to think or to breathe—I just pummelled him, mostly to the face, my jabs quick and hard. I got him in the eye and he spun away from me, getting to his feet with speed and agility that surprised me. Then he sprinted for the stairwell.
I had to make a fast decision. Chase him, or deal with whoever might still be in Kat’s apartment? I was fast, but he was faster than me. He also might be on something. And the vicious pain in my balls would slow me down. I decided to cut my losses and see what else I could find.
I got to my feet. A semi-pathetic groan of pain left my throat, though there was no way I would ever admit that. The guy had gotten a good shot in. My balls were trying to crawl back up into my body.
Taking a deep breath, I walked slowly toward Kat’s door. “I’m calling the police,” I announced as I pulled my phone from my pocket. “If you try something, you’re going to regret it.”
But there was no sound, and when I pushed open the door, I saw there was no one left inside the apartment. The place had been trashed, though. I walked cautiously through the wreckage, taking stock.
Kat didn’t own very much, like she’d said. Her furniture looked second-hand and her dishes were only a small stack, now smashed on the kitchen floor. She didn’t have many books or a big television. This was the apartment of a woman who moved often, who traveled light, who wasn’t home often enough to make a place her own. It was the apartment of a woman who didn’t have much money and didn’t spend much of what she made.
The rich, rebellious sixteen-year-old girl I knew was long gone, and as I looked around at her few belongings, I wondered why. Kat was estranged from her family, I knew, and wasn’t in contact with them. She obviously wasn’t accessing any of their money. There was no shame in the way Kat was living, but what had happened? Had they cut her off, or had she turned away?
I moved into her bedroom, which was small and spare, only a bed and a second-hand dresser in it. The sheets had been torn from the bed and the dresser drawers had been overturned, the clothes strewn onto the floor. Her laptop was here, thrown on the floor, the screen cracked.
It felt too intimate to be in Kat’s bedroom, which was strange since we’d been married once. Her panties were in a pile in front of the dresser, her bras half under the bed. I wondered if I’d see lube or a sex toy dumped from a drawer, or—worse—a photo or memento of a boyfriend she’d loved. Some detail that would give a glimpse of what Kat’s life was like, the details Patrick couldn’t call up on his computer.
But I didn’t see any of that. Kat had clothes, that was all. And not an excessive amount of them, either. Her closet had been ransacked, her few pairs of shoes thrown out onto the floor. At the back of the closet was an empty suitcase, probably the one she’d used to move here.
The bathroom told the same story: Some toiletries, a set of workaday makeup, a hair dryer and a few brushes. Whoever had come in here had pulled her tampons and lotion from under the sink and tossed them on the floor, along with a packet of birth control pills and a box of condoms. And suddenly I was fucking mad.
Kat may not have much, but these guys had come in here and trashed it all. They’d touched things of hers they had no business touching. They had violated her space, all of her things. And they had done this after they had done their best to violate her.
They weren’t looking for anything. I could tell by how the search was done—the space under the bed left untouched, the empty suitcase in the closet unopened, the laptop not taken. These guys had broken into her apartment and trashed it as a message. It was supposed to scare her into not talking.
Kat said she didn’t care about this place, but I was still glad she wasn’t here to see this. I was glad she didn’t have to contemplate the fact that the creep with the goatee had been touching her panties and bras a few minutes ago. I could save her from that.
But whoever they were, they weren’t going to scare her. They weren’t going to get any more of her. And they were going to pay. I would see to it.
I walked back to the closet, pulled out the suitcase, and opened it. Then I started packing her things.