Chapter Thirty-Five
KENZI
There was a huge part of me that didn’t want to believe it.
When we all walked out of the bathroom and heard the tail end of the conversation between the mysterious Luce guy and everyone.
And the force with which reality crashed down on me was enough to make me dizzy, causing me to stumble slightly into Enzo, whose hands rested on my shoulders for a moment to steady me.
I didn’t want to believe it.
In a way, it would have maybe hurt less if what the video showed was the truth.
Death, useless tragedy—that was almost easy to rationalize, to come to terms with, to get closure over.
It was senseless. It was heartbreaking. But psychos existed.
They hurt people who didn’t deserve it. It happened.
It was awful. But I would have grieved and moved on.
That was much simpler to wrap my head around than the fact that my best friend in the entire freaking world had laid out a long, detailed, flawlessly cruel plan to hurt me and steal from me.
There was no way to make sense of that, to get closure from a betrayal etched so deep.
It felt like someone reached inside my body and ripped out vital organs. It felt like torture. It felt like a wound that would never heal.
Inwardly, my mind raced through every single conversation she and I had had over the past few months, wondering how many of the smiles were fake, how much she was mocking me silently, how she might have been cataloging my shortcomings to use against me.
“Play that again,” I demanded to the room at large, everyone closer to the computer than I was. When no one moved to do so, I charged forward, pushing Barrett out of the way and sitting down, moving the video backward, studying it with eyes less shocked and horrified.
It was the small things at first.
The way she seemed to be playing to the camera, not trying to hide her face, not trying to make less of a spectacle of herself.
Then it was other intimate details I would never have thought to look for before.
Like the fact that Cassie was a freak about her pubic hair.
She had been known to shave both morning and night and refused to wax because it grossed her out to see any hair at all growing in.
And she was gone for over a week. And she was freshly shaved as ever.
Then, last but certainly not least, when the man’s hand raised with the knife, his sleeve slipped up, and I saw a hint of a thick gold chain.
Cassie loathed that chain.
She used to bitch about it all the time.
Not only was it lame for a man to wear a bracelet at all, she would rant, but then he had to go and get some godawful, gaudy, thick gold chain?
That was the chain.
I had seen it a dozen times.
I had heard about it a thousand times.
“That son of a bitch!” I snapped, slamming my hand down on the desk, which finally managed to make Barrett’s carefully placed coffee cups jump, two of them dropping to the ground with a whack and a whooshing noise as the shards went to find new homes, sure to stab a bare foot four months in the future when everyone forgot the broken mug event even happened. “Those selfish, conniving, assholes!”
“Kenz, you’re gonna need to let everyone else in now,” Enzo demanded, his voice calm, but firm. Like he always was when I got in a rant, a snit, or an emotional breakdown.
“That’s Santi!” I almost shrieked, waving a hand at the screen.
“Well, if no one is using the bathroom,” the Luce guy said, sneaking off, clearly not the least bit interested in our very convoluted, ridiculous situation. Which, if I weren’t so pissed off and betrayed, I might have found odd.
“Santi?” Alex repeated.
“Santino. The guy in the video? That’s Santino, Cassie’s boyfriend. That’s his bracelet. She used to bitch about it all the time, said it made him look like a wannabe mobster. Which it totally did. And he’s wearing it in the fucking video. And… her vag was shaved!”
I had never seen a room of men look so uncomfortable at the mention of pussy before. I swear every set of eyes went to their shoes for at least a second. Only Alex and Jstorm kept their focus on me. So I said it to them.
“She was gone a week and she has no stubble?”
To that, they had to nod.
“We weren’t looking that, ah, closely,” Brock admitted, looking sheepish despite being the biggest ladies’ man in the room, and likely intimately acquainted with all types of pubic hair styles and growth levels.
“Well, duh, because we thought she was being raped and murdered,” I scoffed, my own saliva tasting acidic and awful.
“Ah, Tig…” I was vaguely aware of Sawyer saying, nodding his head toward me.
“Kenz, honey,” he started, only to be interrupted by Enzo.
“No fucking shit,” he hissed, shaking his head, making my eyes snap in his direction.
“You’re involved with my little sister, and you didn’t think to A—tell me that, or B—tell me she was in danger.
I can’t say I’m all that fucking happy with this situation.
I know Rhodes has a lot of respect for you, but I can’t… ”
“E,” I cut in, brow raised. “Who I do or don’t fuck stopped being your business when, well, I was legally of age to make those choices for myself. He didn’t call you because I explicitly told him not to. Same for Paine, for that matter.”
“Oh!” Reese’s voice squeaked, drawing everyone’s attention because they all likely forgot she was even there.
It was something that often happened to her that I knew she both took comfort in and really felt insecure about, like she wasn’t worthy of everyone’s attention.
She was frantically patting down her pockets.
“Ree, calm the fuck down,” Paine demanded, his tone soft, as it always was when he talked to her. “What are you looking for?”
“My phone. We have to call Mom. She’s probably having a stroke.”
Reese, always the good daughter.
And I was okay with that. Because it gave me a longer leash.
Paine handed her his, and she moved toward the front door, followed immediately by Enzo because it didn’t matter how old we were; he was always like a watchdog.
“Kenz,” Tig tried again, his voice low and soothing, trying to be the antithesis to my loud and livid.
“Why don’t we get out of here?” he suggested, moving toward me, towering over me, blocking most of the others from view.
“You’ve had a fuck of a day. You need to relax in a—what was it?
—medieval filth cauldron, have a glass of wine,” he said, leaning closer, his lips touching my ear to tell me the last part, “and come until you can’t think straight anymore. ”
Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I thought I watched my friend be brutally murdered, that I had gotten sick, that I had sobbed a part of my heart out, that I found out it was all for nothing because I hadn’t lost a friend to death, just betrayal.
It didn’t matter that my mind was racing with all the ways she had gone behind my back in planning the attack.
She had been the one to screw with the security cameras, to rip apart the store.
Then there were all the implications of her actions to mull over as well—needing to get her name off of every single file in the store, changing the store security codes, changing my locks at home; hell, I even needed to change the bank account the store used and the code on the safe.
Sure, she got a ton of money from me, but there was always more to take.
I had to call every last vendor and tell them to not talk to my old business partner.
Thank God I had taken my mother’s advice and not put her name on the lease, the paperwork for the company, the bills, or anything important.
She had bad credit, and my mother said it was smarter to keep her on as a partner in everything but paper.
Despite all those things rolling around in my head, most definitely requiring attention and soon, there was the unmistakable and overwhelming shot of desire through my system, strong enough to make me sway slightly on my feet.
It had only been a day, but it felt like a lifetime since I felt his hands, lips, and tongue on me, since I had him inside me.
So maybe all those things could wait until the morning, after I had decompressed, gotten some objectivity, had a chance to settle into the betrayal, and, as Tig suggested, come until I couldn’t think straight anymore.
That sure sounded like a plan to me.
“Okay,” I agreed, feeling compelled to lean forward slightly and rest my forehead on his strong chest, something wholly unlike me but it somehow felt right to lean on him.
“Okay,” he agreed, his hand resting at my lower back for a second before his lips pressed into my temple and he moved away.
“We are going to head out,” he told the room, a little unnecessarily.
I was pretty sure all of them knew we were heading out to go get it on.
And I couldn’t have cared less as Tig’s hand reached for mine, his strong fingers slipping between mine, curling, and squeezing tight.
“Yeah, I gotta get back to Riya,” Sawyer agreed, his eyes going soft for the barest of seconds at the mention of her name. “Guys…” he said to the group of computer geeks who had checked out again and were on their laptops. “Come on, there’s nothing…”
“This bastard isn’t getting away with it,” Alex said, shaking her head. “I am going to find him.”
“Babe, it was Cass and her…” Sawyer started to object.
“No. No, it wasn’t. I mean, it was, but the shit they did was amateur. The security cameras, the wrecked store—that takes no finesse. These videos, the uploads, the demands—this shit is sophisticated. This work was farmed out, and whoever did it is fucking good, and I want to find him.”
“Just to be clear,” Brock cut in, a smile pulling at his lips, “do you want to find him because you want to take him down, or because you want to start a fan club for him?”
The look on Alex’s face said it all. “I haven’t decided yet,” she admitted.