36. Chapter 35
Chapter 35
Griffin
When the work slowed down and it was time for others to do their part, I was left with nothing to do but feel.
Breathing feels like a chore. Chewing feels like a chore. Even taking a drink burns. At least it involves a bottle of Crown Royal. I found a taste for it when I spent a month in Calgary in my early twenties. It was the first kind of whiskey my brother and I would drink with. When I miss him…now her as well, it brings him closer. It keeps me anchored, even if it’s at the bottom of the bottle.
I haven’t slept more than a couple hours in two days. Every time I close my eyes, I see her, especially here. I lost myself in my work for a while. The hostile takeover was absolutely hostile. I spent a lot of time on guard for and with my mother as she led the charge to erase my father’s essence from Orion as completely as she could. I’ve never seen her so resolute and determined.
Her fight was back after so many years.
Mine is completely gone.
I spent so much time defining who I was in Joseph’s shadow, then without him. After that it was just the work I needed until a certain blonde upended my life in the best way. She’s still the best thing in my life, even if it’s better for her without me.
Now, what I have are memories that bring me bittersweet pain.
I woke up from a wicked nap on the lounge to a pounding headache. It wasn’t a headache that a couple of pills could cure. It was the kind of ache only a fool could have from being na?ve to think I could keep Kaitlyn safe and that love between us would be enough.
I’ve been sitting, ever since, at the conference table in the middle of my apartment drowning myself in amber liquid while metal music rages through the sound system around me. The volume is so loud, the glass rattles with the bass. Each dark metal song blends from one to the next. “If It Doesn’t Hurt” by Nothing More repeats for the second time this session.
As the lyrics begin again, I scatter the dozens of drawings of houses, hills, architecture, and nature aside. What hurts is not touching her. What hurts is not seeing her. What hurts is I brought her pain. While I mentally beat myself raw, I find myself sketching pieces of Kaitlyn. Her lips. Her hand. Her eyes. First they come from memory, then the camera roll of my phone.
I pull the nearly thrice empty glass of Crown to my lips, letting it pass by them as I stare at one of my favorite pictures of her. Her face is turned just slightly over her shoulder as the sun backlights her beautiful face. Her smile could stop a man’s heart. I know it has mine.
If I’m being honest with myself, I’m not even sure what day it is anymore. All I know is the more I drink, the more numb I become, and the more numb I become, the less I want to punch a hole in the wall the size of the hole in my chest.
Fuck, I even miss that damn cat.
I never thought I’d miss a cat.
I tip the glass back and swallow the last few drops before shakily standing and going on the hunt for a fresh bottle, but I pause when I think I hear something.
Knock, knock, knock.
I’m not expecting anyone, I don’t think. Fuck, I’m likely delusional anyway, so I ignore it and keep walking. Then the pounding starts again. The floors are concrete and there’s no one above me. I’m in the goddamn penthouse. The music isn’t going to be turned down anytime soon so get used to the fucking concert.
A few minutes later, fresh bottle in hand, I hear the knocking again. This time I realize it’s actually knocking on my front door. They’re pounding so hard I can hear it above the music and from the other end of the hallway. “FUCK OFF,” I holler before sitting down at the table, staring across at my personal gallery.
I open the new bottle and before I can refill my glass to blind the rest of my thoughts, it’s swiftly taken from my grip. I whirl my head to my right. It takes my eyes a few seconds to catch up with the rest of my body. As they start to focus, and the double image in front of me becomes one, I find Tobias standing silently staring at his clearly disheveled best friend. Only, he’s not alone. Jason Thorne, Kaitlyn’s brother-in-law, is clearly pissed off right beside him.
“Well, isn’t this just fucking fantastic. Come all the way to London to make good on your promise to kick my ass for hurting her? Well,” I hold my arms out in the air level to the table in submission, “do your worst.”
Jason cocks his head to the side slightly before politely barking his first order, “Thanks for the entry, Tobias. Would you leave us, please?”
“No, I need a witness. You understand,” I say, half laughing. I’m so done.
“I’d be happy to,” Tobias replies. “Leave, that is.” He crosses the room and claps a hand on my shoulder. “Drink some goddamn water, eat something, and listen to what the man has to say. Don’t be a drunken arsehole. And you, don’t kill him.”
“I make no promises,” Jason growls.
I simply stand here and slowly watch Tobias leave, and soon I’m alone with Jason Thorne.
His hands are in his pockets and he stands stoically about ten feet from me. “You should put that down.” He motions to the liquor in my hand. “By the looks of it, I’d say you’re a few bottles in.”
“Care for a glass?” I ask, holding up the bottle.
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
I wave him over. “Are you going to sit before killing me?”
“Absolutely not.”
Jason winds back and, with little warning, cracks me right across the jaw. Stunned, I stumble back a couple of steps. When my eyes attempt to focus, I see him coming at me again. His fists take hold of both sides of my shirt. “Is that all you’ve got?” I slur.
“On the contrary, I haven’t even begun.”
My body is flung against the wall outside my kitchen. The glassware hanging over the bar rattles, one glass even falls to the countertop, shattering into pieces. One of the things my brother taught me was how to fight. I know I should have my hands up to protect my face. I also know, him beating me is giving me a different pain to focus on.
My hands that were once up, palms out to resist, fall to my sides in resolution. Jason shoves against my chest with all his might. The force blows me back onto the kitchen tile. The back of my head hits the floor with a thud. The stars I was seeing before from the alcohol have now multiplied.
“Fight back, you piece of shit,” Jason growls.
With little air in my lungs, I manage a reply, “No.”
He grabs my shirt once more, part of the fabric giving way, tossing me through the other entrance to the kitchen and back into my entry hallway. Stumbling from side to side, I finally catch myself with a hand on the console table. I’m frozen by the image I see in the mirror above it. Blood trickles down the corner of my mouth. My shirt is in tatters. My eyes look like they’ve been dragged open by sliding face down through a desert. If this is what little more than a week without her looks like, I can’t imagine a month or a year.
“Bastard. I did the one thing I promised my wife I wouldn’t do, even though I knew I couldn’t keep that promise. I asked you to do one thing. Just one.”
“I know!” I yell. “Don’t you think I fucking know?”
While I’m holding myself up, barely, at the console, it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to ask about her. I want to ask if she’s okay. I want to know where she is. I want to know what she’s doing. Has she been eating? Is she taking care of herself? Has the media stopped harassing her and her family? I mean, that was the whole point of letting her go. I don’t open my mouth though.
My legs use what little strength they have left to pass him to enter back into my dining room. The music feels ten times louder than before. Maybe the rest of the alcohol is kicking in. Maybe it’s the growing knot on the back of my head. Maybe it’s all of it. Does it really fucking matter?
The weight of my body collapses back into the same chair Jason dragged me out of. A couple of the drawings I’d made of Kaitlyn have fallen to the floor. I pick them up carefully like their precious, fragile things and hold them in my fingers. As I watch them, even through blurred vision, I can almost feel her skin, hear her laugh, and see the glimmer in her eyes.
The hard soles of Jason’s shoes appear in my line of sight at my side. “If you’re going to hit me again, make sure you knock me out this time. I want to stop thinking.”
“Cut this shit music off, would you, so I can hear myself think?”
I sigh heavily and sit back, leaving the bottle on the table. I pull my phone from my pocket and I feel sick immediately. A picture of Kaitlyn lights up as my background. Fuck, she’s beautiful.
I shake off the impending nausea and press the pause button on my music. The entire flat falls eerily silent. I haven’t allowed it to be silent since she left because it reminds me all too well of how empty everything feels.
“Now that I can focus,” he mutters.
“Why are you here? I can’t believe you’d fly all this way just to beat me senseless,” I say bluntly.
“Then you don’t know me very well. I always follow through. Also, I wanted to see what you’d do. Honestly, I’m surprised. That rarely happens.” As I reach for the bottle again, Jason stops my hand with his firm grip and a stare that could freeze water. “Enough.”
I flip my phone over so I can’t see her eyes judge me before I make a second attempt for the fresh bottle in front of me. Jason’s sober reflexes are far superior to my sloth-like ones and he reaches the bottle first. The legs on his chair scrape back across the tile. The sound rattles through my body as he brushes by me to the kitchen sink. I watch him as he stares me in the face as he pours the whole bottle down the drain before smashing the bottle. “Fucking hell,” I holler. “Seriously, stop breaking my shit.”
“It’s either that or your being. Take your pick.”
“I’d prefer it to be me.” I sink farther into my chair. “I’d fucking deserve it. This is all my fault.”
He leaves the pieces of the empty bottle in the sink before stalking back to sit across from me. “I know where you are,” he says simply. “I know what’s going through your head.”
I scoff, “You have no idea what is in my head.” I can’t hold back my curiosity any longer. “How is she?” I whisper.
“She’s…surviving. She left New York, at least for now. She’s with Sam. We tried to get her to come to Boston, but she didn’t want to.”
“Surviving? She deserves better than that. She could have survived with me.”
“Why isn’t she then?”
“You know why!” I yell. “Do you know what it was like to know I caused this? Who I am, who my father is, all this drama and bullshit. I brought this to her. She was so riddled with anxiety and shame; it made her sick. I did everything I could to reassure her. We literally tried to be normal and we couldn’t even leave these walls. What kind of life would this be for her?”
“One of her own choosing. You chose for her.” He leans forward and rests his forearms on his knees with his hands together, like in prayer, in front of him. “Let me ask you a question. Was this all part of your plan? Your contract?”
“Don’t you fucking dare accuse me of doing anything to hurt her on purpose. I’d rather throw myself into a pit of vipers before I’d hurt her on purpose.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”
“Vipers are later. It will be alcohol until the snakes arrive.”
“I see you still have some sense of humor. Listen, you daft prick, she loves you. God knows why, but she still loves you. You can push her away because that’s what you think is best for her all you want, but in the end, it’s what’s hurting you both. Did you think she wasn’t strong enough?”
“She’s stronger than me.”
“You don’t have to tell me what I already know. Did you get cold feet?”
“I asked her to marry me, that’s hardly cold feet. They fucking recorded our most intimate moments for everyone to see.”
“Yes, they did. It was disgusting and horrible. There were things said that no human being deserves to have said about them. What you should have remembered is ‘the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”
My brain freezes. At first, I think it’s the alcohol. Then Jason’s words start to roll around in my brain like a core memory. Jason’s voice becomes Joseph’s in a second. “Where did you hear that?”
“Lit Class, first year at Uni. It’s an Oxford thing. Stuck with me and it fits you like a glove… and me.”
“My brother used to tell me the same exact thing. Well, maybe not exactly. He was an Oxford man too.”
Jason slides forward in his chair, his forearms resting on his knees with his slightly bruised knuckles folded like a prayer in front of him. “I want you to know I’m taking care of her, even though she’s at the farm. I have a private detail that’s quietly surveying everything and keeping the loathsome arseholes out of the way. I’m also part of the team that’s suing the shit out of every organization that printed false stories or posted the photographs. That photographer…”
“What? What did you do?”
“It wasn’t one of my finer moments, but let’s leave it as he’s alive and he gave up his employer.”
“Who? Who was it? I want them prosecuted.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“They violated Kaitlyn. I want their balls in a jar on my desk.”
He leans in, lowering his voice. “It was your father’s right-hand man. The orders came from your father.”
I am able to process those words for about two seconds before I’m on my feet and heading toward the door. I barely get a few steps down the hallway before Jason grips the back of my shirt, halls my ass away from the door, and presses me against the wall again.
“Let me go!” I shout, fighting against him, but it’s messy and uncoordinated. “I’ll fucking kill him.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” he says, pushing me even harder into the slatted panels. “You’re too fucking drunk to go anywhere right now. I can’t let you kill him. It would kill Kaitlyn. Sit your ass down and listen to me. One thing at a damn time. All right?”
I’m shaking with anger. If I had my way, I’d drive to wherever my father is and beat him to within an inch of his life. I slide down the wall until my drunk ass does finally hit the tile floor. How fucking dare he do this to me? To Kaitlyn?
“All right,” I growl, anger still coursing beside the Crown flowing through my body.
Jason slides down the wall to sit at my side. “I spoke with Tobias and your mother at length before I came here.”
“Do they know what you just told me?”
“Yes.”
I sigh. “All I wanted to do was protect her. I couldn’t get that right.”
“Sometimes, all the best intentions in the world can’t keep the ones we love safe. You can do everything right and it still crumbles around you. Don’t waste time.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
Jason looks down at his hands, specifically at his wedding ring. “I am. Second chances don’t come along every day, especially when you excel at self-sabotage. Clearly, you love her.”
“Without question.”
“I’ll handle your father and all that goes with it. Trust me. Now sober up and I’ll take you to her.” Jason looks back at me. “You hurt her by choosing for her then pushing her away.”
“What if she won’t forgive me?”
“You’ll never find out sitting here on your arse.”
After one of the best, yet worst, showers of my life, I passed out on my bed for about six hours. I think I heard Jason now and again on his phone, he was talking, and at some points yelling, to someone on the other end. My drunken dreams came to an end when Jason woke me to say it was time to leave. It took me a moment not to only realize where I was and what was going on, but also realize I’m moving. My feet, although sluggish, are moving. I have purpose again.
I’m the walking definition of lipstick on a swine as I slide my sunnies on when we hit the lobby of my building. The sun nearly makes me sick because of how bright it is. Jason chuckles as he climbs behind the wheel of the driver’s seat after slamming the boot so hard I feel it in my eyeballs.
“Was that necessary?” I ask.
“No, but it was fun.” He chuckles under his breath.
I recline my seat to catch a few more minutes of sleep on the way out to the airport. As we approach the gate to the private field, Jason nudges me. “Shaw. Your code.”
“Oh, right.” I sit up straight and adjust my suit coat as we pass the guards onto the strip.
My hangar is deep in the field. As we approach, I see Tobias climbing down the stairs from inside. My hangover subsides long enough to get out of the car and approach him in a semi straight line.
“Glad to see you’re somewhat alive.”
“No thanks to you, arsehole.”
“Right. I’m the arsehole. Take down your glasses.”
“Why?”
“I need to make sure you look good enough to do what we need to do next.”
I look over at Jason curiously. “Don’t look at me. I’ll be waiting on board. We’ll depart soon as you’re finished inside.”
My gaze pans to my right, finding our hangar bay open with rows of chairs filled with reporters. Some I know, some I loathe. “What the fuck?” I whisper close to Tobias’s ear.
“Trust me. Trust Bianca. Stand at her side. She’s got this one covered.”
Somewhere over the Atlantic, I startle awake. I don’t know how long we’ve been in the air. Jason is quietly napping in a seat across from me. My thoughts are finally free from the amber liquid I used to dull every emotion I have. Somehow, right now, things feel clear. Tobias asked me to trust him and my mother. I did. Now, I need to trust what my gut is telling me. I’m going to follow her advice, and she knows it. I hope it’s enough.
Down to my right and embedded in the shelf next to me is the satellite phone system I often use on my hops across the pond. I have this overwhelming need to make a call. One of a very personal nature.
The phone dials out and within five rings, the person on the other end picks up.
“I wondered when you’d call.”
“Hello, Father.”
“The student became the teacher. If I wasn’t so angry, I’d say well done.”
Normally, I’d take his bait, today is different. Something is different. I feel…free.
“I didn’t call to argue with you or berate you for all the utterly terrible things you’ve done to me, especially with Kaitlyn.”
“What I did to you? Son, that pales in comparison to the thievery you and your mother pulled.”
“You would think that. You don’t need to talk. I want you to listen so there’s no misunderstanding what I’m about to say.”
“Good Lord, Griffin. So dramatic. Get on with it already.”
“Father, this will be the last time we speak. I’m done. We’re done. Even if I could forgive all the times you made me feel like I was nothing because I wasn’t Joseph, I can’t forgive what you did to Kaitlyn. She is the most exquisite human being to ever walk this earth. The only thing that surpasses her intelligence is her purity of spirit. She makes everyone around her better simply because she exists. You broke that spirit by callously putting her body on display.
“I thought I wasn’t worthy of her because I let it happen. You made it happen. You. It may have started as a ruse, but I knew from the moment I kissed her it was going to be forever for me, even if it wasn’t for her. I’m going to get her back, no matter what it takes. You’ve destroyed enough and now you’ve lost what was left. Because you’re my father, I will always love you. Goodbye.”
I give him no room to speak, no room for guilt.
I hang up the phone and tilt back in my chair. My body feels riddled with anxiety, but lighter at the same time.
“Well done, Shaw. Brilliant.”
My head rotates slowly toward Jason’s voice. “How much of that did you hear?”
“Every word. I know you don’t need it, but you have my full support.”
“Good to know, because I could use your help.”