9. Knox
Knox
Ella’s breathing steadily beside me while I stroke my cock, picturing Sawyer getting herself off.
I’m pumping inside her. Every slide of my fist is her tight cunt, every bead of precum is her soaking my length.
She’s in my ear saying my name, telling me I’m the only one who can fuck her, the only one who can fill her.
Harder and faster until it’s almost painful.
“Yes,” I hiss under my breath. “Come on.”
Ella stirs and I break my rhythm. What the fuck would she think if she rolled over to find me jerking off beside her? Actually, I don’t fucking care. And maybe a small part of me wants her to wake up. To hear Sawyer’s name slip from my lips. I’m sure she pictures Owen every time she comes.
“Knox?” Her voice is thick. “You okay?”
Not really. I’m holding my erection, thinking of the one woman I can’t have.
She rolls over and her hand lands on my chest. “Fine,” I manage. “Just can’t sleep.”
Her hand travels lower, slipping under the comforter, until she finds what I’m hiding. She doesn’t say anything, but a small sound escapes her. Surprise, maybe?
Fuck. I don’t want her. But as she replaces my hand with her own, I don’t fight it. I let her glide it up and down, squeezing around my tip.
And when she slides off her underwear, I reach into my nightstand for a condom, rolling it down my shaft.
And when she climbs on top of me, seating herself on my cock, I picture Sawyer rolling her hips, leaning down to kiss me, to feed me her tits.
And when I come, there’s only one name behind my teeth.
Sawyer.
Ella pretends to come with an exaggerated moan, then climbs off me to return back to the side of my bed she’s claimed.
“Next time, just wake me up,” she says, kissing my cheek.
“Yeah.”
I don’t know what else to say. I’m hollow and exhausted and dirty. Like a drink that’s been sitting in the sun for days, half evaporated, half curdled, nothing like what it used to be.
Moretti’s words from tonight play on loop as I toss and turn.
Why am I hearing that you’re spending time with that Thorne girl? No excuses. You can’t lie to me.
“Yes, sir.”
Do I need to remind you of our deal? Of the consequences if you step out of line?
“I remember.”
Good. Ella is unhappy. I don’t like when my daughter is unhappy.
“I’ll speak with her.”
You’ll do more than that. Remember your end and cut it off with the girl. You don’t want to see what happens to people who don’t hold up their end of a bargain. Trust me.
He paused, long enough to make sure I was still on the line.
Now repeat after me. I understand what’s expected of me.
“I understand what’s expected of me.”
Do you truly?
“Yes.”
Tell me she won’t be a problem.
“She won’t be a problem.”
Good.
He made it clear. Forget about Sawyer, go all in on this farce with Ella, or something bad happens. I’ve known he has my father by the throat—the company, the financials, the shit with David Thorne. But tonight was different. Tonight, it didn’t sound like only reputations on the line.
It sounded like our lives.
I stare at the ceiling until the shapes in the dark blur together. Ella’s still asleep beside me, one hand curled near my arm like I’m a comfort object. She has no idea what her father is…or maybe she does know, and that’s so much worse.
Either way, I made a promise to Vince Moretti tonight.
And I’m going to break it.
I’m on the stairs again.
Metal clangs and my heart thumps. I look up at never-ending levels and hairpin turns that don’t make sense. They climb impossibly high into the deep charcoal expanse above.
The clang isn’t coming from my feet. It’s cameras shuttering, it’s flashes blinding.
I look again and the stairs are the courthouse steps and the crowd is packed below, reporters and lawyers and judges mixed with happy families in Wonder World hats, all their faces turned up at once as they wait in line.
Sawyer’s at the bottom and her expression stabs at my chest. She’s looking up at me expectantly. Waiting for me to be something she needs. Something other than what I am.
I hear my own voice, flat and rehearsed, but loud enough to carry over the roar of the cameras.
Your family destroyed mine. Stay the fuck away from me.
I don’t mean it. Or do I? Both feel right deep in my bones and I’m filled with a deep sense of self-loathing.
Somewhere, a sound starts up. A faint rattle, tickling my ear. It sounds familiar. I look down and there’s pills, small and round, large and oval, white, blue, yellow. My mother’s there, the metal’s become her bathroom floor, and her hand shakes as she tries to open the orange bottle. “Mom!”
No answer.
“Mom, stop!”
I reach out, grabbing a fist full of pills that fall through the cracks in my fingers.
Click. Click. Click. It isn’t the pills. It’s the chain lift. We’re strapped into the car again, Sawyer’s beside me, and the rattle keeps going in the distance.
My father’s in the car ahead of us, so is Helen Thorne. He lifts a champagne flute to her, smiling, and it’s so fucking unnatural to see a smile on his face, my stomach roils. They don’t notice us, they’re too busy staring at each other.
The ride operator leans over, his baseball cap red and white with the Wonder World logo. He tugs the bar across Sawyer’s lap and gives a thumbs-up. Our eyes meet. It’s Moretti and he’s grinning wide. His eyes are the spiral swirls of Giggles the Clown.
“Let her off.” My voice doesn’t belong to me. It’s an unearthly pleading. “She’s not part of this.”
He smiles. “She won’t be a problem.”
Click. Click. Click.
We climb the tracks and the park shrinks—the lake, the lot, the highway. Her hand finds mine and I finally look at her, opening my mouth to give her the sentence the ride stole the first time.
“Whatever happens with Owen, I need you to know—”
We reach the top of the world. The words sit in the back of my throat as we hang there. “I love you.”
Then the rails aren’t under us, the tracks severing with a crack. Owen’s two rows back and his eyes find mine, and there’s the sound he made, the wail, and the car goes over the edge into nothing, and Moretti’s voice is the loudest of all.
“You don’t want to see what happens to people who don’t hold up their end.”
I wake with my heart slamming, the sheets soaked through.
Sunlight streams through the curtains and I realize I’m alone. Ella’s gone who knows where. Good. She’d only try to talk to me, to see what’s wrong.
I lie there in the silence, shutting my eyes and willing the awful images from the dream to dissipate until my pulse returns to normal and my breathing slows.
Reaching for my phone, I pull up my text thread with Sawyer, rereading our messages from last night.
I lost her to my own stubbornness, then to Owen, and almost for good on Velocity.
I’m not afraid of Moretti.
I’m afraid of how far I’ll go to keep Sawyer, and of who I’ll be when I’m done.
Aldrich Development is dead this early in the morning, which is the only reason I’m here. My father hasn’t come in before ten in years, and since the accident, he’s barely been in at all. I’m banking on today being no different.
It’s not a large building, just a warehouse filled with parts and a couple closed off offices inside.
We share the building with a guy who does car windshield replacements, and the smell of industrial glue permeates the walls.
Before the scandal, we had an entire building in the heart of Ashford.
Double the admin staff. Now it’s a ghost town.
My father has the largest office, but the room’s a mess. Old paperwork in piles. Garbage can perpetually full. Dust covering every surface. I guess that’s what happens when you can’t afford to pay the cleaning staff anymore.
I take a seat in his creaky leather chair, moving unopened mail and adjusting his laptop so it’s closer to the edge of the desk.
It wakes when I open it, the password prompt front and center. I sigh and type it in. KnoxandOwen. Like a password will win him father of the year. Such a fucking joke.
There’s no time to sit on all that bullshit.
I’m here this morning for more than confirming payroll and answering emails. There’s got to be something in here that explains why he’d make a deal with Moretti. Why he’s so afraid. I need the details Moretti mentioned…whatever he has on our family.
It’s laughable how terrible my father is when it comes to technology. He’s never been patient enough to listen to me about how lax his system is. His loss is my gain.
I go through his folders, quickly scanning, looking for the thing that doesn’t belong. Most of it’s nothing. Shit I’ve seen before. Tax filings. Vendor contracts. Purchase orders. Christ, he’s unorganized.
Closing those out, I drag the mouse over a folder with no name.
I click and scan the documents inside. It looks like bank statements of some kind. Not the business account I’m familiar with.
A name jumps out at me. Thorne.
My pulse picks up and I lean in, opening an email to send everything in this folder to myself.
“Comfortable?”
I hold my breath but don’t move. After years of his shit, I’ve trained myself to not flinch, not respond. It only ever makes him angrier that he doesn’t get to me. My hand stops over the keys, though, and I look up at him.
My father’s standing in the doorway in a rumpled shirt, no jacket or tie. He’s sober for now. I can tell because his hands are shaking and there’s a sheen on his forehead. I’d rather deal with him drunk, at least I’d know what to expect.
“You’re here early,” I say.
“It’s my office.” He shuts the door behind him. “My desk. My machine. You want to tell me what you think you’re doing in it?”
“I want to know the truth.” I lean back in his chair. “What you and Moretti worked out. Why you’re so afraid of him, you’d sell me to his daughter to make it go away.”
“Close the computer, Knox.”
“He said he has something on you. Something that proves you weren’t the victim of the scandal.”
For a split second, it seems like he’s going to answer me. It’s in his eyes, a lightness. But then it’s gone and he’s back to looking at me with disdain.
“Close it.”
“How much of it was you?”
“Close the computer.”
“Did David take the fall for—”
He crosses the room faster than a man in his condition should be able and his hand fists the front of my shirt as he slams me back in the chair, making the wheels skid until it hits the wall behind me.
He brings his face an inch from mine, heaving his sour breath directly into my nostrils. I can see the effort it’s taking for him to keep this up…his upper lip is moist, his collar is damp, and he’s trembling.
It takes a lot of energy to be a big tough guy when he hasn’t had his first drink of the day.
For some reason, I let him do whatever this is. I even crack a smile.
“You don’t get to dig in my personal business. Mine. Not yours. You think because you came home to play the martyr, now I owe you something.” His grip twists tighter. “I don’t owe you a damn thing. You were never the son I’d have chosen to be left with. Now get the hell out of my chair.”
He lets go and steps back, knowing I’m not going to argue. Richard Aldrich always gets what he wants.
I stand and straighten out my shirt, my fingers itching to wrap around his throat and squeeze until he’s no longer breathing the same air as me. Not because of what he said or that he put his hands on me. I’m used to that, it’s old news at this point.
But because I know he’s hiding something that involves the Thornes. Whatever mess he’s covering up is the reason I can’t be with Sawyer openly and that’s all I fucking care about right now.
He doesn’t know that I already sent myself that folder. That whatever he’s trying to hide in there won’t stay hidden for long.
I walk past him, balling up my fists at my side so I don’t do anything stupid. I know he’s waiting for me to leave so he can open up the bottle that’s in his bottom drawer.
“Knox.”
I stop at the door but don’t turn around.
“Whatever you think you found, leave it alone. For once in your life, listen to me. Do the easy thing.”
“Easy?” I scoff. “I’ve never had it easy where this family is concerned. Not even once.”
I leave him standing in his office, walk down the stairs and out into a morning that’s too bright for my shitty mood. I don’t pull out my phone until I’m in the car with the doors shut.
The folder’s there in my emails. I can go through it with a fine-tooth comb later. For now, I swipe it away and open my tracking app, finding Sawyer’s dot at the hotel where I knew she’d be.
I start the car.
The folder can wait. My father can wait. Right now, there’s only one thing in this town I give a damn about, and she’s eleven minutes away.