34. Kade
Kade
The first gift my consciousness brings when it finally comes back online is pain, which is the only reason I know I'm not dead yet.
My ribs are screaming. There's blood gone tacky down the right side of my face, courtesy of an airbag that hit me harder than my deadbeat dad ever did before he left, and I'm pretty sure a tooth went through my upper lip on the impact.
My wrists are zip-tied behind a metal chair and my ankles are lashed to the legs.
Someone was thorough.
Guess Todd's a better criminal than he is a senator.
I drag my good eye open and take stock of the décor, and honestly, it's the most insulting part of the whole night. Bare concrete walls sweating in the cold, a single bulb caged in wire and swinging on its cord. I knew Southside was cliche, but this is a little much even for them.
The door scrapes open and I'm braced for a goon, maybe the big one who hits like a pile of bricks, but what walks in instead is Todd Waterson in one of his overpriced yet poorly tailored suits. Takes a lot of money to look that cheap, I guess.
The goons are right behind him.
"Well," I manage in a voice that could grate cheese. "This is a plot twist."
Todd walks in, utterly unbothered, and takes in the scene in front of him.
"Aiden Winthrop," he says mockingly.
"In what's left of the flesh. You'll forgive me if I don't stand."
He pulls the folding chair out from the table and turns it around and straddles it, arms crossed over the back.
Like a fucking camp counselor about to lecture me for sneaking pot in.
"I had my people make some calls this afternoon, and I'll tell you what they found, because I think you'll appreciate it.
The Boston Winthrops are more than real.
Old money, from an old dynasty. A nice mansion on the cape, summers in Venice.
The whole pedigree lifestyle and all that comes with it.
Charming people, really." He pauses to give me a slick smile.
"Not one of them has ever heard the name Aiden. "
"Distant branch," I tell him. "We don't get invited to the reunions. Mom married from the wrong side of the tracks."
"You've been following me," he says, ignoring my smartassery. "I saw you on the cameras outside my office."
"Can't a man appreciate some civic architecture in his spare time?"
The hit comes from the bald one, because Todd would probably sooner die than get a fleck of blood on his suit. My head cracks sideways, the room swings, and my vision goes gray for a few seconds.
"Three weeks ago you appeared at my stepdaughter's elbow," Todd goes on, unbothered by the violence that would be shocking to him if he were half the man he pretends to be.
That suit's a pretty good disguise. "At the gala.
At the hospital. A polite, wealthy young man with a name that turns out to be a lie.
And now that same young man is following me through the city like he's collecting evidence of…
something." He leans his chin on his folded arms. "You can see why I'm curious.
So let's start somewhere easy. Who is Eleanor to you? "
Of course that's the question he chooses to open with.
Not who I work for, not what I know about his operation, or even what I've seen. He goes straight for Ellie, which tells me everything about what actually keeps him up at night. Men like Todd don't actually fear losing a fight. What they fear is losing a possession.
If my hands were free I'd take out his tongue for even daring to speak her name. I don't know exactly what he did to her in that house, but that's a problem I can remedy while I'm torturing him to death. A few missing toes loosen the tongue beautifully.
"She's a lovely dancer," I say instead, around the blood pooling in my cheeks. "We shared one waltz and I can't say a bit more. I'm a gentleman about these things."
"What does she know?"
"You'll have to be a little more specific, Todd, old friend."
Todd sighs through his nose and nods a bored little nod, and then both of his thugs go to work.
They take turns and they're patient about it, finding the ribs that already hurt and then the ones that didn't. Blow after blow, kick after kick, and my already crunching bones feel like they're being pulverized.
"You hit like a bitch, even through your goons," I say, spitting blood through my teeth. Because even though I'm barely clinging to consciousness, I can't help being a fucking smartass. It goes on long enough that I lose track of where one round ends and the next begins.
But every time Todd circles back with another version of the same question, which all center around Ellie, I give him the same answer, which is silence.
Insults and dead air and one inspired observation about his late mother that buys me a strike to the temple I feel behind my eyes.
Because every word I give him is a weapon he can use against Ellie and absolutely the fuck not.
I'll bleed out in this chair before I give him anything he can use to reach her again, happily.
"Stubborn," Todd says, from somewhere that's drifting further off. "I'll grant you that much."
"Runs in the family," I slur. "You'd really love my brother."
The last blow comes from the left, and the caged bulb smears into a long bright streak across my vision as the concrete tips up to catch me, chair and all. Somewhere between the floor and the black I stop even being in the room.
I end up somewhere so much worse.
Four Years Ago
The smell of weed is how I know I'm back in the old RV even before the picture sets in. It's soaked into the shitty sofa, along with the cigarette smoke from whoever left it first.
But there's still the lingering ghost of her strawberry body spray and shampoo.
If I close my eyes, I can pretend she's still here. Like she didn't pack a bag and vanish behind a set of wrought-iron gates in the richest neighborhood across town and leave the rest of us standing in the wreckage of everything we built around her.
The letter's in my hand. Pink paper, her looping handwriting, the little flourish on the capital E and that print of her lipstick at the bottom like a seal, and I've read it so many times tonight the words have stopped meaning anything.
Now they just hurt.
I've outgrown all of you. I read those words for the first time out loud in front of all of them, and I've read them a thousand times since.
I don't even remember how they reacted really.
Just the silence that came after. Pretty sure Cyrus left the RV first, and Jinx followed him.
Tank stayed a little longer, but eventually, he left too.
Probably tried to sign something and I ignored it because I couldn't do anything but stare at that fucking letter.
Kade, we both know the only place you're going to end up is a jail cell or six feet under.
It's nothing I haven't heard a hundred times over from everyone else in my life. Nothing I don't tell myself every time I look in the mirror. I just never thought it would be her saying those words.
I don't know where any of them went and I can't make myself care, because I'm holding a can of lighter fluid in my other hand.
I've been setting fires since I was seven, so it comes naturally. Even this. It doesn't take long to soak the couch where she used to fold her legs up under her, the patch of floor where Jinx used to sit and braid her hair.
I pour the lighter fluid over every surface that ever held a piece of the only good years I got handed in this life.
And when it's done I sit down on the couch while it burns.
I don't decide to die, exactly. The flames are already climbing the curtains she hung when we were twelve, and the question of whether I get up and walk out just isn't one I have the strength left to answer, so I don't answer it.
If the place where I was happy is going to burn, then it can take me with it, and the two of us can go together. The heat reaches my left arm and crawls up it and the pain finally eats into the numbness.
It hurts like a motherfucker, and I'm pretty sure I scream as I struggle out of my own burning shirt. It's just instinct because dying of smoke inhalation is one thing and roasting like a goddamned marshmallow on a campfire is another.
Then the door comes off its hinges.
Tank tears through the smoke, gets two fists in the front of my shirt and hauls me up and through the fire. A snarling sound tears from his throat as we both land in the dirt patch outside the RV, but I won't be able to fully translate it until later.
Don't. Don't you dare leave me too.
I push him off me, my arm singing already.
I know what dead nerves feel like. The burns aren't extensive, but they'll serve as a nasty reminder of today.
And I'm glad, because I don't want to forget this feeling.
I don't want to ever let the walls I let her past crumble ever again, because I know without a doubt the next thing will kill me.
We end up flat on our backs in the dirt watching the only childhood either of us got burning down to the frame. Neither of us says a thing, because one of us can't and the other one's got nothing left to say.
I close my eyes and drift between the memory of that horrible day and the concrete floor of that Southside shithole.
Whatever Todd's freaks do to me, it's nothing compared to the pain I've been carrying with me ever since and the worst wound wasn't even inflicted by her leaving. It's the fact that I failed.
And it's knowing, every day since, that I shouldn't have accepted it.
I should have driven to that mansion and climbed the gate and stood under her window the way I did when we were kids, made her look me in the eye and say it to my face. I should have fucking fought for her instead of torching the only proof she was ever here.
And most of all, I should have given her a reason to stay.