9. Domenic
My bedroom doorslams open like it’s been kicked—which it probably has.
It’s too early for this shit, and I haven’t heard from Tino all fucking night. I’m fuming with him. The piece of shit is going to get a kicking when he gets back here. How fucking dare he go silent on me? He knows how worried I’ll be about Mackenzie.
My father storms in, closely followed by that bitch, Lucia. Her eyes are red, her skin blotchy. It’s clear she’s been crying. I don’t need either of them to speak to know what this is about.
I tongue the healing split on my lip, reminding myself of the pain. The swelling around my eye has gone down over the past twenty-four hours, but it’s still bruised, the color bleeding from red to the shade of thunderclouds.
“Where the fuck is Mackenzie?” he demands.
I carefully push myself to sitting, and then get to my feet. My side still hurts from where he kicked me, but I don’t think he broke anything. The muscles between my ribs are bruised, however, and every time I inhale, fresh pain stabs through me. “How the hell should I know?”
He glares at me. “You and your buddies always seem to know what’s going on with her. If you know something, you need to tell me. Now.”
I jerk my chin toward Lucia. “Shouldn’t she know? She is the girl’s mother, after all.” I place my index finger to my lips. “Unless Mackenzie doesn’t want to tell her anything because you know…she got her father killed, and all that.”
Lucia’s eyes glisten. “Please, Dom. You don’t have to like me. This isn’t even about me. Mackenzie is…vulnerable right now.”
“Because of her epilepsy. Yeah, I know.”
“She shouldn’t even be driving, and she’s taken my car.”
I hadn’t considered that. Is it safe for Mack to be driving? The image of her dead in a ditch, the car wrapped around a tree, flashes into my mind, and my heart clenches. I clench my fists. No, that won’t happen. Tino is bound to find her first.
“I’m sure she knows herself well enough by now that if she feels unwell, she’ll pull over.”
I want them out of here. I can’t bear to look at my father. One day, I’ll pay him back for what he’s done to me.
Lucia and my father exchange a glance. There’s something else in it, but I can’t quite tell what it is. Is there something they’re not telling me?
“What?” I demand. “What is it?”
A knot has suddenly formed in my stomach.
“Mackenzie might be in danger,” my father says.
I clench my jaw, and adrenaline shoots through my veins. “What kind of danger?” I’ve got the feeling he doesn’t mean from her epilepsy.
Lucia clears her throat and presses her knuckles to her lips. “She did something. Something bad. It’s the reason we came to Verona Falls.”
My gaze flicks between her and my father. Hadn’t they come here to play happy families? I thought Mackenize just got dragged along for the ride. What did it have to do with her?
“What kind of bad thing?” I find it hard to believe our Duchess is capable of anything that would require her running to this place.
“The reason we came here is because someone tried to assault Mackenzie.” Lucia’s words fall like stones in the silence of the room as I stare at her.
My hackles rise. “Assault her? What do you mean? Like, rape her?”
I instantly see red. What the fuck? Who did this? I swear I’ll hunt them down and kill them myself. The thought of another man holding her down, forcing himself on her…fuck. I can’t handle it. I actually think I might explode with fury, like my body can’t contain my anger, and I want to tear down this entire university and destroy everyone inside it.
My dad can see I’m about to implode, and he puts out his hand. “Calm down, Dom.”
Oh, now he wants to play the father figure, does he? Screw him to hell and back.
“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down.”
“You have to listen now, okay? If you want to help her, you need to understand what’s going on.” My father’s gaze beseeches me, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think there was an apology lurking in those depths.
I force myself to inhale deeply and exhale again. I’m not sure I have the self-control to hear this, but then I remind myself it’s Mackenzie, and it’s important. She’s important. How or why, I don’t damn well know. When did she go from being someone I wanted to hurt, to someone I wanted to fuck, to someone I want to possess? My feelings for her aren’t good or pure, but they’re strong as the foundations of this building. Hate, love, desire, it’s all a mind fuck with us and her.
Lucia sighs and runs her fingers through her glossy hair. “When this man attacked her, she tried to defend herself. She grabbed a pen from the nightstand and stabbed him in the neck.”
It takes me a moment to comprehend her words. I can’t make them parse. Our cool Duchess stabbing a guy. In the neck? That takes balls. It’s not something a lot of people could do, even if they were in danger.
I might need to rethink my view of Mackenzie.
A shot of pride burns in me, like a nice slug of whisky, warming me.
If she were here right now, I’d high five her. Fucking hell. Our little Duchess has some fire in her. Some fight. It occurs to me that we’re lucky she hasn’t tried stabbing one of us as well. I never knew she had it in her.
“Then what happened?” I ask.
Dad’s lips tighten. “Mackenzie believed she’d killed him. She called Lucia, and Lucia called me, and I got them both out of there and brought them here.”
My gaze darts between them. “Why? Surely it was self-defense?”
“Do you know how often rape cases are charged?” Lucia says. “Mackenzie has been in some trouble in the past, so she has a history. She knew this guy.”
I frown. “Knew him, how?”
“He was her professor at her college.”
This still isn’t making sense to me. “And he tried to rape her? How are the cops not all over this?”
Lucia shakes her head. “No, you don’t understand. They were already in a relationship. Mack said it had been going on for almost a year. They’d kept it a secret from everyone. But then she tried to break it off with him, and that’s when he turned nasty.”
“And she killed him with a pen?” This all sounds insane.
My father takes a step closer. “This is where it gets complicated.”
I almost laugh at that. Like this wasn’t already complicated. “What do you mean?”
“I sent a couple of guys to this man’s apartment to clean up whatever mess Mackenzie had left, and make it look like he’d just up and left for whatever reason, but when they got there, they didn’t find a body. There was one hell of a mess, sure, blood everywhere, but no sign of Professor Kassell.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, neither did we. But it looked like some of his stuff was missing, so he must have gotten out of there before my men arrived. I told my guys to carry on with the cleanup, so if the police did start looking for him, it wouldn’t seem so suspicious, but as for the professor, it was as though he’d vanished into thin air.”
“And where is he now?”
He bites his lower lip. “That part, we don’t know, which is where lies the problem. There’s a chance he’s trying to find Mackenzie.”
Ice runs through my veins.
“How have we not killed this fucker yet?” I demand.
My father counts on his fingers. “First, he’s an upstanding citizen, someone who is admired and respected. We can’t just kill him, okay? This isn’t something the police will overlook—there will be an investigation. Second, we don’t even know where he is. Maybe if we did, we’d be able to figure out how to get rid of him.”
I don’t answer my father’s point number one, but that’s horseshit. He has the means, and if not him, then someone like Kirill’s father, certainly. The Russian mob? They make people disappear all the time. Still, point two overrides point one. If we can’t find him, we can’t kill him.
I picture Mack, freaking out because she’d believed she’d killed this fucker. She must have panicked for her not to have checked properly.
“Weren’t you there?” I demand of her mother. “Didn’t you check this man was dead?”
She doesn’t meet my eye. “No. I just got Mackenzie out of there. Call it mother’s instinct, but all I wanted was to get her as far away from there as possible. I called your dad for help, and he stepped up for us.”
“Yeah, the fucking hero,” I mutter.
My father balls his fists, and I don’t even flinch. I want to, the instinct is there, but I won’t show him fear. I’ll bleed it out later, in private.
I suddenly understand why it’s so important that we find Mackenzie and bring her home again. “You think he might be out there, looking for her, then?”
“It’s possible, yes,” he says.
“How would he know where she is?”
“I’m not sure, but he might have his ways, his connections. We really don’t know much about this man at all. What we do know is that he most likely wants revenge. Why else didn’t he go to the cops after she’d stabbed him?”
“Maybe he knew he was in the wrong?” I suggest. “Figured the police wouldn’t do anything, or that he’d be the one who’d end up serving time.” It’s bullshit, and I know it as I say it, but I’m trying to find some hope to hold on to here.
Dad shrugs. “Unlikely. I believe it’s more likely that he doesn’t want anyone to know he has any kind of connection to Mackenzie, so when he finds her, and rapes and kills her, no one will point the finger at him.”
Fuck. I’m finding it hard to breathe. It’s as though I can feel my view of Mackenzie reshape inside my brain and heart. How has she been through all of this, and the three of us had no idea? I thought the information about her having epilepsy was as big a shakeup as I could expect, but this is on a whole other level. She believed she’d killed a man? That she’d been capable of doing so in the first place has thrown me.
Something else occurs to me. I hold up one finger. “Hang on. If Mack believes she killed a man, and that she had to come here to hide out from the police, when did you tell her that this professor isn’t actually dead?”
The two of them exchange another glance. They’re thick as thieves, these two. Each as bad as the other.
The truth dawns on me. “She doesn’t know, does she?”
Lucia clears her throat again, like a nervous tic. “We thought it best not to worry her.”
I bark laughter. “Not worry her? You’re fucking kidding, right?”
“Mackenzie is fragile,” she insists. “You know that.”
“So you thought it better that she carries on believing she’s a murderer?” I shake my head and drag my hand through my hair. “This is fucking unbelievable.”
She continues trying to fight her corner. “We didn’t want her to panic that he might be coming after her. We figured she was safe here, at Verona Falls. Once we’d dealt with him, then we’d have told her the truth.”
“Except you don’t know where he is. And now you don’t know where she is either.”
Lucia places her hands together in a prayer sign. “Please, Dom. If you know anything, please help us. We only want to make sure she’s safe.”
I feel like telling them to fuck off and leaving this to Tino, but now he’s out there, and he also has no idea what’s going on. What if he does something to upset Mackenzie and she does to him what she did to this Professor Kassell? I’d never considered Mack might be dangerous to us. I’d always believed we were the ones who could harm her. To my surprise, a tiny thrill goes through me that leads straight to my cock. I think of the times she’s slapped me, how she bit my chest while we were fucking. Yes, our Duchess has violence inside her, but we never truly knew how deep that well ran.
I turn and pick up my cell from where I’d left it on the bed after trying to get hold of the asshole last night, and then scroll to Tino’s number. I hit the green button to call, and then press the phone to my ear. It doesn’t even ring. The call just goes straight to voicemail.
I leave a brief message. “Hey, it’s me. Call me back, ASAP. It’s important.”
Then I end the call and bring up the app I’ve been using to trace Mack’s phone. It doesn’t only tell me her last known location, it also tells me what calls and texts she’s been receiving, plus what she’s been doing on social media, which, considering Mack thought she was hiding out from the police, is nothing. Right now, though, there’s only an error showing.
“What the fuck?”
Last known location was…? A gas station a few hours north from here. It should have updated again by now.
“Tino,” I growl. “Fucking Tino.”
What’s he done? Messed with the app so we wouldn’t be able to find her? Switched off his phone so we can’t contact him either? I know exactly why he’s done it. He wants her all to himself.
That son of a bitch. I’m going to fucking kill him.