31. Kara
31
KARA
G rayson’s kisses left my lips tingling. I ran my finger over them absentmindedly, a happy smile pulling at my mouth as I stared out the window. Hayley Jade was still happily occupied in the back seat with my phone and a YouTube video, and Grayson’s hand on my leg was oddly thrilling for such a simple touch.
His thumb stroked my thigh, his hand reassuringly warm through the fabric of my leggings, despite his dip in the freezing ocean.
I didn’t know what this was. Or how on earth I was going to tell Hayden and Hawk. Maybe I wouldn’t. What I had learned from being away from Josiah was that I didn’t owe anyone anything.
There was a connection between Hawk and Hayden and me. But they didn’t own me the way Josiah had. I was free to make my own choices.
Neither had asked me to be their girlfriend. Hawk hadn’t put me on the back of his bike, which I’d been told was the mark of commitment from men from the club.
Kissing Grayson had felt nice. I was attracted to him, and he clearly felt the same.
I’d been tied down so long, I didn’t want to cut my own wings.
Maybe Hawk and Hayden had recognized that before even I had. Maybe that was why they’d been so willing to share me.
I didn’t want to choose. Not yet. Not now.
I didn’t imagine I could be as lucky as Bliss and Rebel and have all of them agree to form a family with me.
I shook my head, rolling my eyes at my own ridiculousness. One kiss from Grayson, and I was already planning to include him in a new family unit? I was completely delusional. One kiss didn’t mean anything.
Though the way he rubbed my leg spoke volumes of him wanting to do more than touch me in such a PG manner.
I shivered at the thought.
Grayson glanced over his shoulder at Hayley Jade in the back seat. “She’s crashed out.”
I blinked, twisting to look at my daughter’s sweetly relaxed face, her dark eyelashes fanned out across her pink cheeks in sleep. “I wish I could pass out that quickly,” I said enviously. “We haven’t even gotten off the beach road yet.”
“You didn’t spend all afternoon running around.”
“Plus she’s been at school all week. She’s been sleeping like the dead every night. But I think it’s good for her.”
Grayson nudged me. “You’re doing all the right things. You know that, right? You’ve given her stability. A home. A big family who all love her.”
Logically, I knew that. She had safety. Endless amounts of food. Toys and games and the chance to go to school. Most importantly, the club had given her the protection and love of an extended family who doted on her endlessly.
Especially Queenie and Hawk.
I lowered my voice. “But she’s still not talking.”
“She will when she’s ready.”
Tears pricked at the backs of my eyes, and I turned away, so desperate to believe he was right.
A red pickup truck caught my eye at the end of the beach lot.
For a second, I couldn’t work out why it was so familiar.
Until a lanky young man stepped out of it, stretching his arms above his head and twisting side to side like he’d been inside the cramped vehicle too long and his limbs and joints had paid the price.
My heart thundered.
“Grayson, stop.”
He glanced at me. “What?”
We were about to pass the end of the beach lot, and then we’d be on the road up to the bluffs where it would be miles before he could safely turn around.
In that time, Kyle could be gone.
“Stop!”
Grayson stomped down on the brakes, slowing the car enough he could steer us over to the side of the road, a few hundred feet away from Kyle’s truck.
I slammed my way out of the car. “Kyle!”
But my voice was whipped away by the wind stirred up by the incoming storm.
Grayson’s door closed behind me. “Kara! Who is that?”
I spun around, my chest heaving, heart thumping too fast, and blood rushing in my ears. “The man who killed my sister.”
Grayson caught my arm. “Wait, what?”
I yanked it free, terrifying adrenaline filling me at the sight of Kyle. He’d been missing for weeks. Had he been here all along? Still in Saint View? The cops had said they couldn’t find him, and yet he was right there in front of me, watching the ocean like he didn’t have a care in the world.
While my sister lay dead in a morgue somewhere, the authorities still refusing to release her body because of the graphic nature of her death and their lack of investigative results.
Red hot anger rolled through me.
Alice had been with Kyle the night she’d died. He’d lied to us. Pretended to help us. Only to be the one to pull a cord around her neck and end her life. It was the only thing that made sense to me.
He was Josiah’s little errand boy, and it had me so murderously angry I couldn’t stop myself from screaming into the wind, cursing him for what he’d taken from me.
I didn’t care he was probably still in Saint View because he hadn’t finished the job.
He hadn’t killed me.
All I cared about was that he go down for what he’d done to Alice.
“You took her from me!” My voice was hoarse from the lump in my throat. “You lured her out of that house and ended a life that had barely begun!”
Kyle turned.
His eyes widened and he rifled through his pockets, pulling out his keys.
“No!” I screamed.
He couldn’t get away. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed answers. Needed to hear him admit what he’d done. Admit what he’d run away from.
I wasn’t going to be fast enough. The gap between us was too big. The distance too far. “No!”
Grayson sprinted past me, barreling across the parking lot at twice the speed I could have even hoped to run, his still-damp shirt open and flying out behind him. “Hey!” he bellowed, then called back to me, “Kara, stay with Hayley Jade!”
I stopped dead in my tracks, realizing he was right, backing up and putting myself between the monster in front of me and the daughter I’d do anything to protect.
Kyle noticed Grayson coming and dropped his keys. He bent to retrieve them, fumbling amongst the grass growing through the sand at the edge of the parking lot, but it was the seconds Grayson needed. When Kyle straightened there was barely a hundred yards between them.
Not long enough for Kyle to get to his car, and all three of us knew it.
He turned and fled down the beach, long legs pumping across the dunes.
Grayson was faster.
A scream of fear caught in my throat as Grayson threw himself at Kyle, crash tackling him to the sand. They rolled, the two of them grappling for the upper hand.
The thought of Grayson being hurt because of me turned my stomach. I knew what Kyle was capable of. He’d proved it that night when he’d lured my sister to a club and strangled her to death. He’d shown, despite his boyish face and age, he had the ability to be a cold, callous killer, leaving Alice’s body in a city alley like she was trash.
There was nothing I could do except stand there and watch them fight, terror gripping my throat when Kyle came up on top.
A second later, Grayson switched their positions, pinning him down.
The wind changed directions, as wild as the dark clouds threatening to dump water over the entire beach.
Their shouts filtered back amongst the crashes and thundering of the waves, garbled and unintelligible.
I didn’t start breathing again until Kyle let out a scream of pain, Grayson pushing his arm behind his back.
Hayley Jade napped peacefully in the car, zero idea of what was going on outside it, as Grayson hauled Kyle to his feet and dragged him back up the beach.
With every step they drew closer, my head swirled with everything I wanted to say. Everything I wanted to scream.
But when Kyle stood in front of me, forced in place by the vicious grip Grayson had on his arm, words failed me.
I slapped my palm across Kyle’s face with all the strength and anger that had been building for all the years Josiah had kept me down. The rage was set free, every hateful feeling exploding from inside me, culminating in the blow I’d delivered to Josiah’s disciple.
Kyle’s head jerked to the side, Grayson never easing up for a second, despite the way Kyle’s shoulder seemed ready to pop right out of its socket.
Good.
I hoped it hurt.
I hoped it hurt even half as much as the pain he’d caused my sister.
“How could you?” I asked Kyle eventually, my voice so broken I barely recognized it. “She thought you were her friend.”
To my surprise, when Kyle finally lifted his head to look at me, it was with tears in his eyes. “I was her friend!”
My face screwed up in disbelief. “How can you say that, after what you did? You killed her! You put a cord around her neck and pulled it tight while she struggled to breathe!”
His eyes widened. “I didn’t! Please, Kara. You have to believe me. I didn’t hurt Alice. I would never. I was in love with her! I still am! Even though she’s…”
I scoffed, but his words hit a chord inside me, and I remembered the way he’d gazed at her that day we’d escaped. It had been sweet. Tender. So full of awe and amazement at everything she said and did.
So quickly that sweetness had turned to malice.
“So what?” I accused. “She danced with someone else, and you got jealous? Or was it just you’re so ridiculously brainwashed by Josiah that when he told you to kill her, you did it anyway? Killed the woman you loved because you were too weak and gutless to stand up to him?”
Kyle shook his head miserably, wincing when Grayson yanked his arm again. “I haven’t talked to Josiah’s since we left. I swear it, Kara. I didn’t kill your sister. I wanted a life with her. I was going to marry her, if she would have me. That’s why I left with you. I would have waited. Waited through as many men as she wanted to dance with, or date, or whatever she wanted. I would have waited for her for a hundred years if that’s what it took for her to be ready.”
I paused at the depth of anguish in his voice. At the pain in his eyes.
At the truth I heard in his words.
For the first time in weeks, I considered that maybe I was wrong.
“Why did you run then?” Grayson asked gruffly. “If you were so innocent?”
“I was scared,” Kyle practically whispered, every inch the man-child he was at nineteen. “I lost track of her in the club. When I couldn’t find her, I went up and down the other clubs searching for her, and then eventually I went back to the truck, assuming she’d come back when she was done partying.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. “She wasn’t partying.”
Kyle nodded miserably. “I know that now. I fell asleep in the truck waiting for her. When I woke up, the entire block was crawling with cops. I asked some people what was going on, and they said there’d been a body found, right outside that first club we’d been at…”
“And you knew it was her,” I said softly.
“I didn’t want it to be.” His pain ate up his words, agony in every one. “So I fought my way to the front of the crowd, praying she’d just gone home with someone else because even knowing she was with another man would have been a relief.”
“But she wasn’t,” I filled in for him. “It was her, dead in that alley behind the club.”
He nodded miserably. “I watched them put her body into a bag.”
The words gutted me, my brain conjuring up images of what that must have looked like. Bitterness crept onto my tongue. “And then you ran.” I knew the story from there.
Regrets filled Kyle’s eyes. “I knew the cops would blame me, the same way you did. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t go back to Ethereal Eden. Josiah would kill me on sight for helping you leave. But I had nowhere else to go. My parents have been calling me nonstop since it happened. I haven’t answered, but their voicemails are frantic, asking me why the cops keep coming to their home, searching through all my belongings. I want to talk to them so badly, but I don’t want them to have to lie for me either.”
My heart squeezed at the lost-little-boy expression on his face. He was barely a man. Not even old enough to drink. The terror in his eyes and the tremble in his bottom lip reminded me of the way Hayley Jade had looked when we’d escaped.
Desperate for someone to tell her everything was going to be okay.
“I didn’t hurt Alice, Kara. Please believe me. Please help me. I don’t know what else to do.” A sob spilled out past his lips, and his shoulders hunched.
Grayson glanced at me.
“Let him go,” I said softly.
Grayson hesitated. “He could be lying. Acting. Psychopaths are extraordinarily good actors. Trust me, I speak to enough of them to know.”
“And do you think Kyle is a psychopath?”
He sighed, letting his grip on Kyle’s arm drop. “No. I don’t. I believe him.”
I did too.
I stared at Kyle, taking in the patchy scruff on his cheeks, his dirty clothes, and now that I wasn’t so wrapped up in my anger and grief, I noticed how badly he smelled. I peered past him at his pickup, noticing pillows and blankets stacked up on the back seat. “Have you been sleeping in your truck?”
“Yes, ma’am. Or on the beach if I need to stretch out for a night and I can get warm enough. I stayed at the homeless shelter twice, but I got paranoid the cops would find me there, so it seemed smarter to stay away.”
It had been weeks. He was just a stupid, scared, out-of-his-depth teenager who had nobody to turn to. Nobody to care for him.
He reminded me all too much of myself when I’d left Ethereal Eden the first time. How I’d thought myself big and brave enough to take on the world, only to find it quickly chewed me up and spit me back out, a shell of the cocky teenager I’d once been.
I hated Kyle had to learn the hard way, the same as I had.
I glanced back at Hayley Jade, still sleeping soundly on the back seat, and knew I’d do anything in my power to stop her from experiencing that sort of pain.
I sighed heavily. “Get in your truck. Follow us back to the clubhouse. We’ll get you cleaned up. Some food and fresh clothes. And then we’ll work out where you’re going to sleep tonight.”
Kyle lifted his head hopefully. “Seriously?”
“Kara,” Grayson warned. “I don’t know how Hawk and the others are going to feel about that.”
I shook my head. “It can’t go down any worse than me bringing Hayden back there, can it?”
Grayson seemed doubtful. “I suppose if it all goes pear-shaped I could just announce I kissed you. Then all the murderous rage would turn in my direction.”
I patted his shoulder as I passed him on the way to the car. “Maybe keep that one to yourself for now. No need to plan two funerals.”