Chapter 25
MASON
Nothing will ever compare to the black rage that has lived in my soul since Toby died. I feed it, constantly and affectionately, to ensure it thrives. It has become the central nervous system that dictates each moment in my life.
Thus far, I’ve believed that I have no room in my life for anything else.
And yet, as I listen to the words falling from Keely’s lips, an expanse shifts within me, a cavern widening itself to accommodate the sweet agony of new, undiscovered rage.
She stops suddenly and flinches.
I jerk back into myself and realize my fingers are digging into her hip.
I let go, flex my fingers, but I don’t feel right.
This rage is different. It drills into me with a relentless single-mindedness that makes thinking an impossibility.
I can’t catch my breath, and it slowly dawns on me that I’m not as calm as I was when I set out to avenge my son’s death.
My vision is blurred with red rain, and I can’t tell whether I’m sitting or floating.
Warmth seeps into my cheeks. “Mason?”
Fear and apprehension infuse my name, and I battle to pull myself back from the edge. I blink and focus on her. Her beauty is compelling enough to ground me a little. Her hands on my face reel me in just that little bit more. Enough to formulate a single thought.
I place my hands over hers and shift one palm to kiss it, before I ask, “What happened after that?”
Anguish and despair contort her face and her shoulders slump.
“I don’t know,” she whispers raggedly. “I’ve never been able to remember. I woke up in the hospital three days later. According to the police, I was pumped full of sedatives and dumped somewhere on Mulholland Drive. A couple on a morning run found me and called the ambulance?—”
“Stop.” The black roar in my head makes saying the word difficult, but I need a break from the influx of rage eating me alive.
She purses her lips and nods, before her head drops to my shoulder. A tiny wounded sound pipes from her throat and slays me.
I surge to my feet with her in my arms. Her hands grip my nape and her breath washes my face as I stride with her to the bedroom.
Silently, I undress her and carry her to the bathroom.
She doesn’t need a shower and neither do I.
In fact, I like smelling myself on her to the point where I wouldn’t care if she never showered after I fucked her.
But I need action, and while my preferred mode would be to fuck, I don’t trust myself not to visit a sliver of my rage on her. Memories of what I did to Cassie in the year after I lost Toby filter through my mind and for the first time in forever, I experience a tinge of shame and regret.
I turn on the shower and guide Keely beneath the spray. She hasn’t said a word since I stopped her from speaking, and I feel slight panic that I may have shut a door I didn’t intend to shut.
I smear gel over her body and wash her silky skin beneath the water. When she reaches out to brace her hands on my chest, I cage the flames leaping through my blood and force myself to continue.
“What’s his full name? The guy who invited you to the party.
” My voice is a shiny scalpel, intent on honing the new rage inside me.
To achieve that, I need names. Faces. Histories and vulnerabilities.
Because I don’t intend to stop until I’ve achieved the same results I did five years ago, right before I exiled myself to Roraima.
“Tell me his real name,” I urge calmly when I sense her reluctance.
Keely’s beautiful green eyes flicker and her cheeks, already pale from recounting her ordeal, whiten a little bit more. I gentle my fingers, let them slide over her skin, when all I want to do is rip out throats and piss on severed heads.
“His name was Leo Brummer.”
My fingers tense against her spine. “ Was? ”
She nods. “He was found in his apartment, overdosed on coke six months after that weekend.”
The scalpel freezes midair. “He’s dead ?” The thought brings me no satisfaction whatsoever. In fact, I feel intensely aggrieved at the loss of prey.
She nods. “The detective who was handling my case called and told me.” She laughs, but it’s a bleak shadow of a sound that makes me want to bare my teeth. “I think he was convinced it’d bring me some sort of closure.”
There is no closure. Not when something this precious is ripped from you.
I turn her away from me so she doesn’t see my regret over what she has to live with for the rest of her life. “Besides Brummer, was there anyone else there that you knew?”
A new tension tightens her spine. When she remains silent, I glide my hand to her nape and massage until she sighs. She knows without me having to insist that I’m waiting for an answer.
“My psychology professor was there that night.”
I sense something more. “And?”
“And in relation to what happened to me, I can’t say whether he was involved or not. Leo is the only one I can state with any accuracy who meant me any harm that night.”
“Everyone in that godforsaken place meant you harm. You were taken there for the sole purpose of being taken against your will,” I snap.
She flinches and I tug her into my arms. “Dammit. I’m sorry, kitten.”
She rests her head against me for a minute, then she steps back and reaches for the soap. “My turn.”
I allow her the mundane task of washing my body, and we leave the bathroom a few minutes later, clean but still tarnished with our dark pasts.
My arms open to her the moment we’re in bed, and her readiness to crawl onto me helps me contain the rattling cages.
I slide my hands up and down her soft body, unable to get anywhere near enough to touching her. The distance I sensed in her earlier today is gone, for now. I bury my face in her hair and breathe deep.
When I sense her disinclination to further our talk, I want to respect her need for an end to the subject, but I can’t let it go. Not yet.
“Tell me about your professor. Did he see you?”
Again, she tenses. “Yes. He was the one who took me down to where Leo was. But I don’t know whether he was involved personally.”
I grip her hair and angle her face to mine.
“You were drugged. How would you know?” Her eyes cloud over and I feel like a big shit.
“Keely, I hate to state the obvious, but he knew you were there. He knew what would happen to you when you were taken to the east wing. And he still let it happen. Whether he was involved or not, he was culpable.” And now on my list. “What was his name?”
“Elliot Harding.”
The way she says his name makes my senses burn. “What aren’t you telling me, Keely?”
She blinks a few times before she says, “During my first semester, I thought Harding was coming on to me. He would ask me to stay after class, or ask me to come to his office. He always had a legitimate reason and he didn’t do anything sleazy, like stand too close or leer down my top.
But… something in his eyes made me feel uneasy, like a subliminal promise of filth and pain that felt a little too, I don’t know… raw?”
“Kitten, let’s dispense with the graphics, okay?”
Her eyes widen at the violence in my voice and she swallows. “Okay. Well… anyway… I confronted him about it one day.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say, by the time I left his office, I felt like a piece of fossilized shit. He didn’t raise his voice, or threaten me in any way. But I knew if I dared to repeat my suspicions to anyone else, I would be finished.”
“But you were right to trust your instincts and confront him then.”
The look she gives me is full of self-recrimination. “I was right. But what good does that do me now? Deep down, I knew going into that basement would end badly. But I went anyway. For god’s sake, would you ride an elevator with a guy who calls himself Moriarty ?”
“Yes. Because I’m better than Sherlock.” My joke falls flat when the corners of her mouth turn down.
“I wasn’t. I lost three days of my life because I ignored my instincts.”
I flip us over so she’s lying beneath me and slide my fingers into her hair until she has no choice but to look at me. “This is why you tried to throw yourself in the ocean,” I seethe. “You think killing yourself is the answer?”
Her mouth quivers before she firms it. “Since there’s only one way to answer that definitively and I’m still alive, I guess I don’t know.”
I kiss her hard, and roughly, trying to infuse her with fuck knows what. All I know is that I can’t let her think ending her life is okay. Never mind that I may have contemplated the same path. Never mind that I forsook that path because living was a far better punishment than dying.
I kiss her until she moans, and her nails dig into my back in a plea for either oxygen or fucking. I don’t grant either. Not until she’s out of her frantic mind.
Then I flip us back around, tuck her into my side, and pull the covers over her body.
“Go to sleep, kitten.”
She exhales in astonishment. “Mason. You can’t leave me like this.”
“I need you to have something to look forward to tomorrow. Even if it’s only the prospect of being fucked to within an inch of your life.”
I snap my fingers in a timed sequence and the room darkens.
Her arm jerks around me, then her hand heads south to grip my rock-hard cock. Her body undulates against mine and I thicken in her hand.
“God… Mason, please. I need you.” Her voice quivers with her need and I almost waver.
“I’m not in a good place right now, baby. Let’s get some sleep. I promise I’ll give you double of everything you need in the morning.”
Although my whole body is on a razor’s edge of need, I infuse enough steel in my voice for her to heed my request. She strokes me a couple more times, before her hand reluctantly returns to curl against my chest.
Sleep isn’t on my churning horizon anytime soon, but I fake it until she settles, soft and pliant around me, and her breathing deepens.
In the darkness, I let my furious growl loose.
The name Elliot Harding pounds through my brain until it fuses into my neural pathways.
“Seven, switch to silent computronic mode,” I murmur.
A green light blinks from the device on my dresser to signal compliance.
“Commence full search. Subject: Elliot Harding. Professor. UCLA, California. Full history—financial, medical, academic. Current location. Cross reference with Leo Brummer, same parameters including next of kin. Also search for dwellings with extensive underground development in Hollywood Hills, California. Specific dates of interest, first half of 2009. First report by zero six hundred.”
The green light blinks three times to signal message received.
I exhale and tangle my legs with Keely’s. She murmurs softly in her sleep, and I’m about to pull her even closer, bask in her warmth, when another device lights up, this one right next to me on the bedside table.
Cassie’s name is backlit in blue neon on my phone and the tiny sense of peace I felt a moment ago vanishes. I let it buzz, not trusting myself to be civil to a woman whose only sin against me is the blue blood that runs through her veins.
I was indifferent to Cassandra McCarthy long before I married her for the sake of consolidating our families’ financial power. Unfortunately, it took three years of mind-fucking cruelty for me to recognize that I was punishing her for being a carbon copy of my mother.
But more than detesting her for taking what I doled out like a meek, pearls-draped, upper-class lamb, I detest her for giving me the son I grew to love more than I ever believed I was capable of loving another human being.
She tore open a heart I didn’t want to believe I possessed and filled it with hopes and dreams, magic and endless possibility, for a senselessly brief time.
The day I lost Toby was the day I came within an inch of killing my ex-wife.
I divorced her the day after I buried my son, for her own sake as well as mine.
That compulsion hasn’t abated.
She knows better than to contact me. So I know she has a good reason for contacting me now.
I wait for the beep that tells me she’s left a message. It never arrives. I place the phone back on the bedside table. Three calls in one day. Three calls with no messages.
My ex-wife has either grown brass balls.
Or something is very wrong.