6. Tino
I takea breath and knock lightly on her door. “Kenzie? You in there?”
She must be. I’ve not bumped into her anywhere, and no one has seen her. Everyone is talking about the fact she is back from the hospital.
I can’t get any sense of her behind the door, though, and no sounds come from inside. I’ve been feeling like the biggest motherfucker in the world for how we treated her. Sure, it was fun at the time, but we’d have acted differently if we’d known…wouldn’t we? I mean, she nearly fucking died.
I lean in close to the door and press my cheek against the dark wood. “You can hate me however much you want, but I still want to know you’re okay.”
Maybe we’d been idiots thinking we could just go to the hospital and apologize and everything would be okay again. How can things ever be okay? She hates us, and rightly so. And nothing has changed when it comes to Mack’s mother leaving. She’s still here, and Nataniele seems to have doubled down on his insistence that she stays and they redo the wedding—except this time it’ll be a private affair, just them and the witnesses, done in as much secret as possible so no one else gets the chance to fuck it up.
I place my palm against the door and turn slightly to rest my forehead beside my hand. My eyes slip shut.
I know how it is to have to live with something physical. Maybe it’s not the same, but I’m in pain every day, and I work hard to hide it from everyone. I don’t want them to see it as a weakness either. I understand what Mackenzie is experiencing, if only a little. I want to show her the bottle of pills I rely on every day just to function and try to make her see I can empathize with her.
She probably thinks I’m the least empathetic person in the world. Maybe she’s right, for anyone but her.
I straighten, opening my eyes, and try again.
Knock-knock.“Come on, Duchess. Open the door.”
A little farther down the corridor, a door opens, and Dom sticks his head out. I grimace at the sight of him. His left eye is swollen shut, and his lower lip is split. I don’t need to ask what happened to him.
Nataniele happened.
I don’t comment on his face.
“I don’t know where she is,” I say. “No one has seen her.”
He vanishes back inside the room and reappears a moment later.
“I have a key,” he says, holding it up. “Let’s check.”
Of course he does.
“I tried asking her mom if she’d seen Mack, but she said Mack’s not talking to her.” I chew on my lower lip. “We really fucked up their relationship.”
“We didn’t do that,” Dom growls. “We just told Mack the truth. It’s not our fault her mother is a fucking bitch. Isn’t it better she knows?”
“Sure,” I say, though I don’t believe it.
Sometimes not knowing is better.
I think then that maybe Mackenzie is right, and I do let Dom walk all over me at times. Not because I’m scared of him, but because he’s such a volatile fucker and half the time I can’t be bothered to get into it with him. In the future, I ought to say my piece more.
He opens her bedroom door to reveal an empty room. I step inside and blow out a breath. She’s not here. Just as I’d expected.
So, where the hell is she?
“Did she move rooms?” I suggest. “She might not have wanted to be so close to you all.”
Dom goes to her nightstand, opening drawers, rifling through her belongings. He makes no effort to hide that he’s going through her shit. Mack’s not going to be happy when she sees the mess.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply but goes to the bathroom. Through the open door, I catch his reflection in the mirror and wince. His dad really did a number on him. Maybe in any other world, it would be considered a terrible thing, but we’ve all come from families where the patriarchal men are handy with their fists. Kirill has never told us in any great details about how his father treated him, but I’ve seen the scars—the white stripes from a whip, and the circles that are cigarette burns. His father beat him since he was old enough to walk.
A part of me resents Dom.
I don’t want to—he’s like a brother to me—but I can’t help it. I know I need to take responsibility for my own part in what happened, too. I should never have told him about what I’d filmed when I’d been spying on Nataniele and Lucia. If I’d only kept my mouth shut, none of this would have happened. We’d all be playing happy families, wouldn’t we, and I’d have Mackenzie’s heavenly body beneath mine every night.
Except Dom wouldn’t be happy. Lucia and Nataniele would be married, his mom would have been permanently replaced, and Mackenzie would officially be his stepsister. I almost envy him a little for having had that as a possibility. To be tied to her forever.
But then I’d opened my big mouth and fucked everything up.
And Dom still isn’t fucking happy.
Asshole.
Dom turns back to face me. “Her toothbrush is gone, and so are most of her toiletries.”
“She probably switched rooms.”
He arches one eyebrow. “And only took a few of her things? Why would she leave everything else here?”
I still don’t understand what he’s getting at.
He lets out a frustrated sigh. “She’s gone, Tino. Gone, gone. She’s left Verona Falls.”
If he’d punched me in the guts, I wouldn’t have been more shocked. “Fuck, no. With Lucia? She can’t have. I only just saw Mack’s mom.”
He shakes his head. “No, she must have gone alone.”
Anger surges up inside me. “Then you got what you wanted, didn’t you, D? She left. Are you fucking happy now?”
I want to punch him, to add to the bruises and grazes and swollen lip.
“Yeah,” he says, not looking at me. “I got what I wanted. Her bitch of a mother is still here, but I doubt she will be for much longer. She’s bound to go after her daughter, and it’s not as though Mackenzie is small enough to be physically dragged back.” His voice is flat, lifeless.
“Her mother might not be able to physically drag her back,” I growl, “but I can.”
Dom twists his lips. “I put a tracker on her phone.”
I snap my head toward him. “What?”
“I did it one of the times I snuck into her room.”
Why is he telling me this? Because if he really doesn’t want her back, he’d keep this little piece of information a secret.
“I’ll send you the link to the app and the login details. Even if she’s not here, it’s probably a good idea to keep track of where she is, you know, in case it looks like she changes her mind.”
I stare at him. “Right.”
I wonder what Kirill is going to make of all this. He’s going to be really fucking angry. I don’t want to say I’m afraid of him, but sometimes he makes me nervous. It’s like a sheet of ice comes down over him, freezing out any emotion other than rage. Nataniele has already hurt Dom—would Kirill do even worse?
I war with my emotions. If I just go and find Mackenzie and bring her back, Kirill might never even need know. Would it make him even angrier if he didn’t find out? Knowing we’d deliberately hidden something from him? I don’t know what would be best.
I can’t believe I’d thought I could live without her. Seeing her convulsing on the ground had torn my heart from my chest. I want her. I want to be with her, and hold her, and kiss her. I want to make her better, though I know that’s impossible. I want to shelter her from the world and ensure nothing ever hurts her again.
Then what about us? What about Dom? Does he still want to hurt her? What if I bring her back and then I have to protect her from him?
The possibility twists my insides. We’ve always been in this together. I don’t want anything to come between us, especially not a woman, but she’s not just any woman. She’s ours. Everyone else has faded into the background.