Chapter 90
Chapter Ninety
Kit
The phone rings like a scream in the dark.
It cuts through sleep like a blade—brutal, jarring. A sound that doesn’t belong in the stillness.
My heart crashes against my ribs, ribs that suddenly feel too small for the rest of me. I jolt, gasping like I’ve surfaced too fast from a deep dive. The room’s still dark but spinning—subtle, wrong. Like the world's axis has tilted, and no one warned me.
I reach for the phone on the bedside table, my hand knocking over a glass of water. It splashes over wood and my books, but I don’t stop. Don’t care.
I answer mid-breath, voice groggy. “Hello?”
There’s silence. The kind that vibrates with something awful. Just for a beat. Maybe two.
Then Bernice speaks, and her voice is brittle, “Kit . . .”
My gut drops. My mind kicks into gear, sluggish but alert in a way that feels wrong. What happened? I sit upright, sheets tangled around my legs like restraints.
“Yeah?” My voice climbs a notch. “Is everything okay?” I try to inject annoyance into it—some false bravado. “If this is about one of the starlets, I swear I’m changing my identity and relocating to a planet without telephones.”
She doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even pretend.
“It’s your father. He had a heart attack around four this morning. The nurse tried CPR until the medics arrived, but . . .”
There’s a long pause. A hitch that lands in my chest like a punch I don’t see coming.
“They couldn’t bring him back. He’s gone.”
The words float in the air like smoke—thick, impossible to hold. I blink at the wall. They don’t fucking make sense.
My brain won’t let them in.
Not yet.
“He . . . he’s dead?” I ask, but I’m not truly asking. It’s just a sound leaving my mouth because I can’t do anything else. My voice is someone else’s—someone far away, composed, and numb.
“I’m sorry,” she says, too soft, too late.
And then everything stills. Not spins. Not breaks. Just stops.
The hum of the world, the warmth of the room, the space between thoughts—gone.
My body forgets itself. No breath. No pulse. No direction.
I sit there, frozen, with the phone still pressed to my ear. Her voice grows smaller, like she’s being sucked into a tunnel I can’t follow.
My father died today. And I . . . I’d just told him I hated him.
Told him to rot in hell. That I never wanted to see him again.
And now—
Now I never will.
My mind claws at the memory, plays it on loop, like a cruel director watching a scene unfold from ten angles.
I don’t want to see you ever again.
“Are you sure?” I ask, because something in me still thinks this is a mistake. That she meant to call someone else. That in a few months, when he recovers, he’ll walk in with his signature scowl, asking why I’m crying like a child.
That this isn’t real.
“Yes. Sorry for your loss,” she says again, as if the words matter.
And, sure, maybe I lost him today. But the truth is, I lost him years ago.
When Mom died—or maybe before that.
It’s hard to find the exact moment.
Everything else blurs—blows out, muffled and shapeless.
The past. The hate. The things we never said. The things we did.
I don’t remember hanging up. I just sit there, staring into the far corner of the room, where the darkness feels like it might swallow me whole. The phone slips from my hand to the floor. I don’t move. I don’t even cry.
Hours pass. Or maybe days.
Eventually, I remember that death demands things.
Calls. Forms. Signatures.
Decisions.
Grief . . . if that’s even what I should call it, can wait a few more days.
The next morning, I’m going through the motions like a goddamn machine. Filling out paperwork with shaking hands. Answering questions that don’t deserve answers. A stranger in a beige suit asks if I want a viewing, and I almost laugh. Actually laugh.
A viewing? For him?
The idea of people gathering to mourn Connor Dempsey as if he were some kind of legend. Like he wasn’t the man who broke more than he built. Like he didn’t damage everything he claimed to love—including me.
“No, cremation,” I say. “There won’t be a service. He doesn’t deserve a eulogy or flowers. Definitely no flowers.”
Let the fire do what it does best.
Let it erase what’s left.
I walk into the agency a week later, and the air feels wrong. Off. Like everything is still holding its breath, waiting for him to appear and rip the silence wide open. It’s been waiting for him since April when he had the stroke.
The thing is that he won’t be coming back. It’s over.
Bernice is behind his desk, sitting like she doesn’t belong there. Her blouse is starched, pristine, but her eyes are rimmed in red and her hands won’t stop twisting. She stands when she sees me, but she remains where she is.
What stretches between us isn’t just space—it’s grief lodged between bones, blame caked into the walls, and every conversation we never had because silence was safer.
It’s years of pretending the cracks weren’t widening.
It’s my mother’s legacy buried beneath Connor’s empire of manipulation and polished smiles.
It’s all the lies Bernice swallowed because she believed in him more than she ever believed in herself.
Because she made herself small to fit inside his world, his rules.
Because loyalty, in her hands, was blindfolded and bound to a man who taught her that pleasing him was the only way to survive.
She swallows, and I can almost taste the bitterness on her tongue. The words inside her have turned rotten from too many years locked behind clenched teeth.
“What happens to the agency?”
Her voice barely rises above a whisper, frayed and tattered, as if she’s already played out the conversation in her head and hated every version of it.
And it doesn’t surprise me—this quiet pivot back to business. There’s no “How are you holding up?” No “I’m sorry about your dad.”
I’m not surprised. Bernice stopped asking how I was the moment I left Serena in New York and said I was done with the agency.
And if I’m being honest, she probably stopped caring long before that.
Everything with her has always been about Connor—keeping him calm, keeping him satisfied, keeping him from lashing out and taking the whole room with him.
She lived in his orbit like a moon tethered to a dying planet, and she never even realized she was burning up on entry.
The one thing she could never forgive was disobedience. Especially when it came to my father. Especially when it came from me.
I don’t answer right away.
I let the silence stretch. I take in the office—the clean lines, the polished furniture, the smell of wood polish and expensive ink.
I wonder, as I stare at the desk where my father manipulated deals like they were poker hands, if Mom ever knew what he was doing behind the curtain.
If she knew the way he twisted things to suit his narrative.
The way he stripped artists of their voices, their agency, their dignity—so softly they didn’t even realize they were bleeding until it was too late.
And maybe she did know. Maybe she chose not to look. Or maybe she believed the illusion like everyone else, because it’s easier to believe the man you love is complicated than it is to admit he’s cruel.
I close my eyes for half a second and force the memories of her back into the light—where they belong. I won’t let his rot eat her memory.
Instead, I focus on Connor. The grooming he dressed up as mentorship. The way he promised the world to people and then caged them inside it.
“We’ll figure out how to help the clients,” I finally say, every word rasping across something raw in my throat. “We might sell this to someone who gives two fucks about the artists, but I’m not staying. This place needs to burn.”
There’s no venom in my voice, no raised pitch. Just exhaustion and finality.
She nods once, her shoulders still high, as if she doesn’t know how to breathe without being told it’s okay.
And then I ask the question that’s been eating through me like acid since Barret told me the truth.
“Did you know what Connor did to Roderick and the guys from Dead Moth Parade?”
Her eyes shift. It’s quick, almost imperceptible—but I see it. Not surprise. Guilt.
“Yes,” she breathes.
The air in the room changes—not temperature, not volume, just the atmosphere inside my body. Like something in my chest folds in on itself. Like my ribs press too close to my lungs, and there’s nowhere for the betrayal to go except deeper.
Of course she knew.
“Of course you knew,” I say, my voice gone flat, stripped of anything except what’s real. “You’ve been covering for him since he hired you, right?”
She doesn’t reply. Not with words. But her silence—this time—admits more than denial ever could.
I move toward the desk, not fast, not threatening, just with purpose. Because this is the moment where the veil doesn’t just slip—it dissolves.
“You want to know why he never made you an agent?” I ask, something dark settling low in my chest. “I think I know. It wasn’t because you weren’t smart enough or qualified.
You were both. You are both. But you were too useful right where you were.
You were his buffer. His fixer. His fucking accomplice.
And he needed you in the trenches with him, not standing on your own. ”
Her breath stutters, but I don’t stop.
“You watched him destroy people. You handed him the tools. You filed the contracts, made the phone calls, and looked the other way while he gutted people from the inside out. You didn’t stop him.
You didn’t even try. You just let it happen.
And I hope—God, I hope—that when you close your eyes at night, you see their faces. ”
Her shoulders finally give out. There’s no sob, no scream, no last-ditch defense of her loyalty. She just slowly sinks into the chair behind the desk like something inside her finally gave up—like the scaffolding holding her upright couldn’t carry it anymore.
Her shoulders collapse inward, her spine curves, and she disappears into the seat without resistance.
She’s not crying. Not begging. Just . . .
vacant. Cracked open and left there. And it’s almost worse than if she screamed, because at least then I could yell back.
But this? This quiet unraveling? It feels like defeat, and .
. . I have no energy to even try to figure her out.
This woman could’ve been something better if she hadn’t tied herself so tightly to a man who never deserved her loyalty. And maybe that’s what’s so fucking tragic about all of this: she could’ve helped people. She could’ve used her power for more than just smoothing out Connor’s messes.
“I’ll make a list of every client,” I say, my voice shaking with everything I haven’t let myself feel until now.
“If any of them come forward, if they want to sue, to speak out, to burn it all down—I’ll help them.
I’ll back them. I’ll testify. I’ll hand over every file and every detail I can find.
I’ll make sure what you and Connor did doesn’t disappear into a polite obituary. ”
She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t even acknowledge me anymore. And maybe her silence is the closest thing to a confession I’ll ever get from her.
I turn and walk out before she remembers how to speak. Before she starts spitting out excuses she’s been rehearsing since the day Connor first used her as his accomplice.
Outside, the sunlight hits me like it’s mocking me. It’s too alive for a day like this. For a world that keeps spinning after a man like Connor Dempsey dies without consequence, without reckoning, without ever having to say a single goddamn word of regret.
He got to die quietly in a recliner, with no one to hold him accountable, no one to force the truth from his mouth. He took every secret with him like a thief escaping in the dark, leaving the rest of us to sift through the wreckage with nothing but assumptions and rage.
My father is dead.
And last week—just last week—I told him I hated him.
I told him to go to hell. I told him I never wanted to see his face again, and now I won’t.
He’s gone. He’s fucking gone. And I should feel something more than this—more than anger clawing at my ribs and guilt pushing its fingers into my lungs—but I don’t.
I just feel like I’m floating in a version of my life I no longer recognize.
I hope he rots in hell where he deserves to be forever.