Chapter 37
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
STEFAN
I returned to my own house like a burglar.
The driveway told me Amelie’s friends were leaving. Caden’s rental idled at the gate as Rose spoke to Amelie.
Good. I needed to speak with Kai, and it was for the best if Amelie was occupied during the conversation.
I realized I was still holding the bag—a little cellophane zip with white powder, lighter than it had been a few hours ago—and I put it in my jacket pocket.
The pocket was shallow. Some sober part of me noted that putting a bag of cocaine in a shallow pocket was a bad idea, but I overlooked it.
My heart was going a million miles an hour.
The papers I’d studied told me I had been right to suspect Kai.
The powder had been telling me I needed to act.
My hands wouldn’t stay still. I’d been grinding my teeth since sunrise, and my jaw ached like a bruise. On the way through the kitchen, I caught my reflection in the patio glass—wild red eyes, a man the old me would have crossed the street to avoid—and I didn’t slow down.
The patio door stood open, and it smelled like ocean salt outside, the day obscene in its niceness.
“Bella. Boys. Go inside,” I barked, chest heaving.
Three heads came up. Bella’s face was still blotchy from laughing. “But we are making hamburgers.”
“You can eat it later.”
Jamie squared his shoulders. “I don’t want to—”
“Inside. Now!” It came out with an anger I couldn’t seem to put out.
Bella stomped her foot. “Kai said we could—”
“I don’t care what Kai said. I’m your brother, and you will listen to me. Go inside. Now.”
Kai set down the tongs. “Careful.” One word, and it was enough to feel the ice behind it.
Bella’s bottom lip wobbled, and the twins hugged her on instinct, August with his hands on her shoulders, and Jamie glaring at me with an expression I had never seen on him before.
They were disappointed in me. I’d been gone, and now they saw me as the stranger threatening their happy life inside their own home.
They eventually left. August steered Bella by the shoulders, her lip still wobbling. Even through my anger, that wobble snagged at my chest and tore a little as it went past. I’d apologize later. I filed it with everything else I’d fix later.
Right now, I had more pressing matters to address. Jamie slid the door shut, and then it was the two of us, the smoking grill, and the ocean minding its own business at the bottom of the sky.
I didn’t beat around the bush. “Your parents killed mine.”
The document the private investigator had uncovered was forty-one pages long, and I’d read each page so many times by now that I could recite it by heart.
An inquest report from New York. Two vehicles, black ice, a curve.
Four fatalities. My parents’ names on two of the death certificates.
I never found out anything about the people in the other car.
Because the man in front of me had made it so.
The file uncovered the date Kai Cavendish’s parents died. It happened the same night. In the same county. At the same crash site.
Kai’s parents killed mine, and he had covered up the fact. He had known it every single day he’d lived in this house. And he was currently in my backyard, flipping burgers for my siblings, wearing a ring to honor his commitment and fidelity to my wife.
He didn’t blink at the accusation, didn’t breathe differently, either. “Yes,” he said. “Technically.”
He closed the grill lid and turned it off without hurry, the way a man moves a meeting along to its next item.
I had read the document from front to back, but it had never once sounded real. From his mouth, it sounded like the truth.
“You’ve known the whole time, and you’ve—” The words were arriving out of order. “Is this some sick game to you?”
“On the contrary. I lost my parents, too. They were driving to NewTech University, just like your parents. It was a coincidence they hit their car.”
I was visiting Amelie in New York, and my parents asked to tag along.
They had never been to the East Coast, but for once, they wanted to splurge on a vacation because it was their silver jubilee anniversary.
Dad took Mom out to dinner while we babysat.
They were on their way back to Amelie’s dorm to pick up the kids when their rental car was run off the road by Kai’s parents.
My ire should be focused on that. Instead, it was on the other thing he had revealed. “Why were your parents driving to NewTech University?”
“They were meeting me.”
I sneered at him. “Because you were at NewTech to stalk Amelie.”
There was no shame in his voice. “I was.”
My back teeth found each other and ground down on the ache that had been there since I read that damn file. Amelie had always been his end goal. He had watched her for years, all the while spinning a tale about some phantom woman from his past.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that our parents’ deaths were just that—an accident. No one was at fault.” A pause, measured. “Whatever private investigator you hired should have disclosed that to you.”
My laugh came out wrong. “What about the financial damage you caused us? Did my private investigator get that wrong as well? The unexpected IRS bill. The lapse in our insurance. The loans that were requested to be repaid immediately. You ruined us before moving into our lives. At least admit to it.”
“The crash was an accident,” he repeated. “Everything else you said—yes, I did all those things.”
The admission should’ve soothed my anger, it was validation that I wasn’t crazy. Instead, he had just poured oil on the fire.
“Why?” It tore out of me, raw and loud. “Is this your sick way of punishing me because you think my parents were at fault for killing yours?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why did you do this to me?”
“You were standing in the way of the only thing I ever wanted.” He straightened his sleeve. “Everything else that happened to you was collateral damage.”
I didn’t think, I swung.
The first one he slipped like weather, my knuckles skimming his jaw, and his counterpunch landing in my ribs. I barely felt it. It was the cocaine. Adrenaline pumped through me, and I didn’t register any pain.
“You’re high.” He said it without heat, an observation. “Does Amelie know about this habit of yours?”
“Don’t—” I swung wild. “—you don’t get to say her name.”
“I’ll say my wife’s name whenever the fuck I want.”
I fought back, my movements fast and chaotic. He fought like he did everything else, his movements organized, patient, and thorough.
I was shouting, or trying to, the sentences kept breaking apart on their way out. “Months. You’ve lived in my house, with my family, for months. Every single day, you knew and you fucking lied to us.”
I got him against the farmhouse table and split his lip with an elbow, and the blood came down to his chin. I felt joy, actual joy, seeing him hurt. He put two fingers to his chin and looked at the red like he was adding that to my bill.
Then the world rotated, and the same table pressed against my cheekbone. I got up. I kept getting up. Somewhere under the drugs, my body was keeping score of the pain in my ribs, cheekbone, the knuckles I’d opened on his jaw.
“Stay down,” he said, and the almost-gentleness of it was worse than anything he could have built to insult me. “Consider it the only favor I’d ever do for you.”
“Fuck you.”
I got up and swung again and again.
Though we were both banged up and bleeding, I could not take him down. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t knock him off his feet. He merely absorbed everything I threw his way.
My breath was tearing in and out of me. His hadn’t changed. Somewhere under the drugs, I realized one of us was at his limit, and it wasn’t the man with blood on his chin.
We broke apart, both panting, the grill smoke drifting between us like a referee.
Then he stopped. Mid-guard, mid-breath.
His eyes went over my shoulder and fixed on the middle distance, and every line of him went to stillness. And I wondered, absurdly, why he was admiring the ocean view in the middle of a fight.
I didn’t care.
I charged. I hit him square in the jaw, twice, with everything I had left.
Unlike the rest of the fight, he took the assault without complaint. Then he waited a beat. One beat, deliberate, and then Kai Cavendish, whom I had not been able to knock off his feet this entire fight, fell to the ground.
Behind me, Amelie screamed.
The sound went through me the way no punch had. I knew every register of my wife’s voice, and I had never heard this one. It took me a full second to understand it wasn’t for me.
It came apart in my head with terrible speed. He hadn’t been looking at the ocean. He’d been looking at the side gate, at my wife coming through it, and he had stood there and let me attack him so that what she saw was Kai taking a beating from me and going down as a result.
He made sure she saw me when I struck him like a maniac and had intentionally chosen not to fight back.
She went past me like I was scenery. My hand went up as she passed and closed on air. On her knees in the grass, the scarf off her neck in one pull, pressed to his lip, her hands moving over him fast and sure, nurse’s hands. “Kai. Oh my God, Kai. Are you okay?”
“Amelie. He—he provoked me.” I heard how it sounded even as it left my mouth, a boy’s sentence, and I said it anyway. “You don’t know what he’s done.”
She didn’t bother looking at me or assessing my wounds. It wasn’t that she was ignoring me. It was worse. I had stopped transmitting on any frequency she received.
“Our money problems, Am. Our debt. He was behind it all. Kai intentionally tried to ruin us.” I was scrambling for a way to make her believe me. To help her understand that I wasn’t the bad guy.
But she was in a different world, only concerned with Kai’s injuries.
Not sure what else to do, or how else to explain it, I blurted, “His parents killed mine! His parents were driving the other car when the crash happened. That’s how they died. He hid it from us.”