Chapter 11
Kai
“THANK YOU.”
Diana’s voice cuts through the static in my skull. I blink. I’m still shaking with rage. The man in the attic, he doesn’t have a name, but I can see him. My mind has given him a body, a height, hands. Hands I want to snap at every joint.
“Thank you for saying all that. I have never had that. Not from anyone. You are the first person I’ve shared that with, and I didn’t expect your reaction.”
The first. I’m the first person she has told about this, and she’s thanking me. She’s thanking me for wanting to kill a man who deserves killing. I don’t understand—
“It’s the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me. I want you to know that.”
What I want to do to the man in that attic is not generous. It’s the floor. The bare minimum. The absolute bottom of what any person who knows this should want to do for her.
“But Kai.” Her hand finds my arm again, fingers curling around my wrist. “I cannot have you carrying him around.”
Watching her mouth move toward the next word, I open mine, but she’s already talking.
“I think of it as a small dot of darkness in my life. One dot. That’s all it gets to be. I won’t let it define me. I was young, and I was helpless. And it’s awful that it happened. But I’m not young anymore. And I am not helpless.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are clear. No tears. Nothing broken in the gaze that’s holding mine.
“I have complete control of my life now. I live the way I want. I earn what I want. I fuck who I want. And I will not allow one spot of bad experience to be my whole story.”
My throat is tight. Something is moving inside me, something heavy. I am looking at a woman who has taken the worst thing a human being can do to a child and compressed it into a dot.
“If that man were alive today, the greatest revenge I could ever take is just”—she gestures at herself, at the diamond studs in her ears, at the whole of her—“this. I wouldn’t need to lift a finger. He’d see what I’ve become and the shame alone would kill him.”
She squeezes my arm, and I see it. A loser standing in front of her. When he looks up, she’s there. Untouchable. Unbroken. Worth more money than he ever saw in his life, wearing it on her body, radiating it from her skin. Looking down at him from a height he can’t even comprehend.
“But this is older-woman wisdom.” A small smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “Take it or put it on a fridge magnet. But Kai.” She holds my gaze. “I hope you live your life to the fullest. No regrets. No wasted years chasing a man who doesn’t deserve the fire. Not for Jack. Not for my father.”
I can’t take my eyes off her.
This woman. I am looking at this woman and I am seeing her for the first time.
My rage. My precious, cultivated, years-old rage at a man who didn’t show up. Who didn’t call. Who didn’t want me.
That’s it. That is the sum total of my wound. A father who wasn’t there.
And she had a father who was.
A father who put his hand over her mouth so her mother wouldn’t hear. That is a father. That is what a father can be, and the universe handed her that, then handed me a man who simply couldn’t be bothered.
My hatred for Jack Rutherford, the thing I have fed and groomed and sharpened my entire life, feels so small right now. A child’s grudge held up next to a woman’s war.
This woman. This woman, who has experienced things I will never fully understand, yet she rebuilt herself into this. She didn’t do it with anger. She took every terrible thing that was done to her and she refused to let it win.
She didn’t let it eat her alive.
She didn’t build a revenge plot. She built her own life. She took every broken piece and turned herself into the most formidable woman I have ever met. The most brilliant. The most fearless.
She is the strongest person I have ever met. She is the strongest person I will ever meet.
And she is right.
The best revenge is the life you build after. The life that makes the people who hurt you irrelevant. Not destroyed irrelevant. Forgotten irrelevant. A footnote in a story that belongs to her. And she did it.
For Jack Rutherford. She is right, too. I can put him down.
I look at her, and I can feel the weight sliding off my back. Years of it. A lifetime of it. It’s been fading since the moment I met her, and now, in the space of one breath, it’s gone.
But her father.
Her father, I cannot.
I want to be the person she’s describing. I want to be her, the one who can let it all go. I want to stand where she stands. To think of the attic and call it a dot. But I look at her, and I know I will never get there. Not on this. Not ever.
Because the man in that attic, I cannot make him irrelevant. I cannot forget him on her behalf, and I won’t.
I refuse.
She can call him a dot. She bled for that right, and it’s hers. But in my head, in every part of me that belongs to her, he is not a dot. He was a man who did the most horrific thing a person can do to another person. To a child. To the woman I love with everything I’ve got.
So he lives in my head. And he will live there for the rest of my life. The rage I carried my whole life, the rage I thought belonged to Jack Rutherford, it has finally found the right man.