Chapter 51
Kinsley
Chapter Fifty-One
I walked into the guest room and the first thing I did was kicked off my bloodied shoes. Thomas was nowhere to be seen since he got out of the car, but I guessed he needed some space to think everything over, so I planned to take a hot bath. I grabbed a clean set of pajamas out of my travel bag and crossed the hallway into the bathroom. I could physically feel my body aching for the clean, warm water. I turned the doorknob without knocking on the door first, and I froze in place. Thomas was sitting in the shower, his head dropped forward while water poured down his naked body. He seemed so…I couldn’t find the words. With every instinct in me, I wanted to go to him. He lifted his head, his dark eyes landing on me. I had never seen him look so lost and broken than in that moment. My heart twisted in my chest.
After twelve years, he’d finally discovered the truth, but at what cost? I swallowed hard, placing down my pajamas and stepping closer to him, unsure what he would like me to do. He gave me a desperate look, resting his head back against the tiles, and I closed the gap between us, kneeling under the pouring water. As soon as my knees hit the surface of the shower, he pulled me onto his lap, holding onto me as if he feared I would slip away.
“She came into the house.” His voice was low and hoarse as he spoke. “She came here after killing her.” My heart twisted in my chest as Thomas clung to me.
I sucked in my bottom lip. I was lost for words. I wanted to say so many things, but?—
Thomas’s shoulders shook, and my heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach. His arms were firm around my waist as he rested his head against my chest, and I locked him in my arms, letting the water soak me too. I wanted to give him comfort the way he gave it to me. I brushed the wet hair out of his forehead and smoothed over his back.
“What he said there…about you in the forest. I wanted to kill him, Sage. My brain was shouting at me to kill him. I should have…”
My stomach tightened. “If you had killed him, we wouldn’t be here. And it doesn’t matter.” I swallowed hard. “You came after me that night.”
He nodded, resting his head back against the tile, but he was still tense. He looked like he was at war with himself, until?—
“I love you, Sage,” he rasped, and I froze.
My eyes widened. “Don’t say that.” I shook my head. Not now. I was so scared his feelings were acting up. We just discovered the truth about his mother’s death, he must have been feeling a lot of things. He was probably confused, lost.
He tensed against me, getting a hold of my chin. “You don’t believe me?” he asked, and I bit into my cheek.
I don’t think I did. I was scared to. If I believed him, it would become real, and if it was real, he could take it away in a blink, and?—
“You don’t.” He rested his forehead against mine.
“It’s not about that,” I tried, my heart racing in my chest. “You’re…just not in the right mindset right now.”
A low chuckle erupted from his throat. “I have never been in a better one,” he replied, and I closed my eyes.
“I really do love you, Kinsley.” He lifted my chin up, forcing me to look into his dark eyes, the whites of them now red. “I’ve loved you in every moment of this past year. Every. Fucking. Miserable moment. Why do you think I stayed on campus after I got accepted into law school? Why do you think I sat in on a class that I had already finished a year earlier?” My eyes widened with realization. “I love your snark, your force, your brain. The way you scrunch your nose when you are annoyed or thinking. I will forever pay the price of being without you for this long.” He took a deep breath with desperation in his eyes, and I swallowed. “If you don’t feel the same, if you don’t want me…” He caressed my chin. “I understand that. I fucked us up before we could even begin. But if you do feel the way I do, just know that I will always want you, I will always choose you.”
I felt the tears running down my cheeks. I tried to stop them, I hated crying, but Thomas pulled my hand away. What he had said to me a few days ago flashed into my mind. There is nothing wrong with crying, Sage. So I stopped trying to block the tears and let them pour down on my face, mixing with the warm water.
Of course I felt the same, but I was also scared.
As if he had seen the uncertainty in my eyes, he gently placed my hand over his rising chest. I felt our hearts thunder to the same rhythm, and I swallowed, raising my eyes back at him.His dark eyes were like the black holes of the galaxy, pulling me in. I was always drawn to them, drawn to him.
I let out a shaky breath, the knot in my throat easing. “I would always choose you too.” And I meant it. I had already chosen him, that was why I was here, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter how much I wanted to hate him, I never really could. His eyes glistened.
“Sage,” he rasped, leaving small kisses along my jawline. “My Sage.” I leaned into his touch. “Do you remember when you said I wasn’t your boyfriend in the library?”
“I do.”
“I want to change that.” Warmness filled my chest, jolting over my body like electricity. “I want to be your mornings, your nights, your dreams.” He kissed the tip of my nose, and I held back my breath. “I want to be yours, Kinsley. And it may sound selfish, but I want you to be mine. I crave you. I crave every little piece of you. You are my brightness; my Antares, and I can’t live without you. It’s not worth living without you.” He brushed his thumb over my bottom lip.
My heart missed a beat, the water pouring down on both of our faces. Antares. The heart of the Scorpion. My throat tightened.
“I was never not yours, Thomas,” I choked out, and he cupped my face, kissing the drop of water off my lips. Saying this out loud felt easy and hard at the same time. “And I wouldn’t want anyone else to be my Scorpion.” He owned my heart like it was carved for him. Only for him.
???
After a proper shower, Thomas went ahead to his room, and I was about to follow him when my phone buzzed.
There were two messages on my screen.
CON
Come down please
And the other one was from Samantha. It was a reply to a text I had sent earlier.
ME
You didn’t switch up the directions, did you? You sent me into the wrong hallway intentionally. You wanted me to find the pictures. You wanted to help. Am I right?
SAMANTHA JONES
Goodbye Kinsley, and thank you.
I sighed and put the phone away before stomping down the stairs. Connor, Kevin, the chief, and Officer Maeve were all sitting around the kitchen island when I walked in. There was an empty chair waiting for me next to Connor and I sat down on it.
“Thank you for coming down,” Chief Miller said, and I nodded. “The boys here are having a rough time telling us every detail, so could you please tell us what happened?” he asked, and I nodded again, clearing my throat.
I tried to be very specific, and quick, as I knew Thomas was waiting for me upstairs.
“After we discovered photos in the Jones’s apartment of both Elizabeth Rhodes’s ring and Joshua Rhodes, we tried to make a plan. The last time Braxton threw a party, Eric, as we knew him then, the masked guy, showed up, so the Fourth of July party seemed like our best chance to lure him. At the party, we were keeping an eye out, trying to find them before they found us. When Cora sent me the text message that she saw Samantha, I forwarded it to Thomas, who then alerted everyone else. That was when Kevin called you for backup. I already suspected Cora, because I found dough on the surface of Lizzie’s ring. She loves to bake, but that wasn’t enough proof for me to be sure she was in on it…until she took me to the empty clearing. While I was talking with Cora, the others were doing their parts of the plan. Kevin called you, Braxton started a live video just in case anything went sideways, and Thomas followed me. We wanted to get the truth out of them before the police arrived,” I explained.“Eric broke into the house on multiple occasions. Leaving threats to us the same way his mother left threats to Lizzie. Well, it’s not certain yet. We still have to find something written by her to compare it to the old notes.”
Maeve wrote down everything I said.
“If I’ve understood everything you’ve said correctly, why would Elizabeth have gone to the flower shop if she knew that Heather had sent her the threats?” Maeve asked, her pen lingering above the paper.
That was a great question, and it bugged me that I didn’t have a straight answer to it. However, as unprofessional as it sounded, I had my guesses.
“I don’t think those threats could have been taken seriously at that time. A woman you see in town for years…I don’t think Lizzie expected anything serious out of it.” The chief nodded.
Connor cleared his throat next to me. “They went to that shop a lot, I think.” I glanced at him to see Kevin stroking his waist. “If that helps.”
“Right. If you go to a specific place a lot, it becomes a nice habit. Especially buying flowers. Nobody expects to get—to die at a place so familiar to you.”
Maeve and the chief nodded in unison.
“So, Cora Hale was on it too?—”
“No,” I interrupted before I could have thought it through.
“Yes.” Connor and Kevin turned to me, but I shook my head.
“She was blackmailed into it.” I gave them a wide-eyed look.
The chief cleared his throat. “All right, we will talk to her and get to the bottom of this. For now, thank you for your contribution.”
The chief asked Kevin to step out for a quick chat, and the three of them left the house, closing the front door behind them. Connor and I stayed there in the kitchen for a moment, processing everything that had happened in the last week. When I stood up to go to bed, Connor called after me.
“Kinsley.” His voice was weak.
When I turned back around, I saw that Connor’s cheeks were red, his usually bright curls were damp, and he looked tired. So tired. I had no idea how I had not noticed it before. I stepped back toward him and pulled him into a tight hug. As soon as my arms locked around his upper body, his head fell forward, and he cried into my shoulder. I could hear him choking on his own tears as I guided us into the living room. We sat down on the couch, his cries becoming more and more uncontrollable.
“I thought she left,” he sobbed.“I hoped?—”
I knew he did. He was here, and he had tried to help his brother, but I don’t think he thought that we would actually find something.
That we would find his mother.
“That’s okay.” I smoothed over the soft, sun-kissed skin on his arm. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have. Thomas did. And the worst part is, I think my dad did too.”
My brows shot up, and I waited for him to explain.
“I think it broke him. When Mom disappeared,” he said between sobs. “That’s why he didn’t try to find her. That’s why he let the police stop. I think a part of him knew that she wasn’t alive and he didn’t want to face that. I think he was more comfortable with the thought that she had left him—us—than he was with facing the fact that she would never have done that.” He wept and my eyes watered, too, as I dipped my head.
It made sense. Thomas always said that the only person Joshua ever loved was their mother. But a small part of my brain still asked: Are you sure he didn’t try to find her?
“He’s on his way up here, by the way. I called him,” Connor added.
Good. Someone had to call him eventually.
“I think Thomas will be grateful for that. They have a lot to talk about.”
Connor rested back against the couch the tears rolling down on his reddened cheeks. “They sure do.”
I watched him for a moment. He was grieving something lost so long ago, and my own chest tightened. Grief was a deep heartbreak. It ate you from the inside, and if you weren’t careful, you could get lost in the labyrinth of memories. Closing this case after so many years could mean that the boys could move on, heal, and make new memories while cherishing the old ones, but without the pressure of the unknown.
One thing everyone who’s looking for answers has to learn is that they all have a price.