I pause. His name rests inside my throat like I was born trying to say it. It’s the kind of inevitability I don’t dread even though I should.
“Baz King.”
She nods, urging me to go on and dig deeper. I close my eyes, and the pain is what hits me first. An all-consuming pain that takes my breath away. It rips my heart in half, breaking my already broken bones.
“Pain,” I whisper.
The next emotion that hits me is betrayal. Images of our naked bodies wrapped around each other burn the backs of my eyelids as I think about how deep his betrayal ran. Our web of lies was a wicked game I wasn’t ready for. He knew all along. He used me while I gave him pieces of me. The me I was never able to show anyone else. And none of it was real. Our entire relationship had been tainted by lies, and now, we were buried in them.
“Betrayal.”
The more I think about his betrayal, the angrier I grow. I feel it consuming me, spreading through my veins like wildfire. It fills my chest with an inexplicable tightness that has me gasping for breath.
“Anger,” I grit, as I think of all the ways I’ll get him back when I get out of here. He’s going to wish he would’ve killed me. They’re all going to regret the day they met me.
“Good. Very good, Mackenzie. Now, can you tell me what happened? When did it start, and when did it end?”
“When did it start?” I muse, letting the hurt fester as I recall the farce of our relationship. “Summer. In the summer, the monster ripped his way through my chest, twisted my heart until it became some deadened thing, and he buried it somewhere in the leaf-littered woods. Right next to my dead sister. He left no marker, no signs leading back to it. That was when it ended. The night he tried to kill me and failed. The night all his lies became my truths.”
Dr. Aster frowns, her lips turning down with sympathy as she regards me. “How many previous relationships were you in before…Baz, you said his name was, right?”
“One, maybe two that were serious. After—” I clear my throat, pushing past the sudden lump lodged there. “It was difficult dating other people and being happy. It felt like a betrayal to her and her memory. She wasn’t always the greatest sister, but she was my blood. My other half. She was the strong one, the one I looked up to.”
“And these previous relationships, what were the men like?”
“Well, the first guy was my opposite. He was everything I wasn’t. In a lot of ways, he was like Madison. I lost my virginity to him, and it was one of the things I regretted immediately after it happened.”
“Don’t we all,” she muses. “And the second?”
“He was a nice guy, maybe even nicer than I was. Much too nice for someone who had been through everything I had. I was angry and hurting. Angry that my sister had been stolen from me. Angry that my parents had stopped caring. And hurt…hurt because the second Madison died, that was when I died, too. In their eyes, they’d lost both of their children that night.”
She nods as if she’s deep in thought, processing. “What I’m hearing is, you felt abandoned by your parents. Have you ever expressed this to them?”
“How can I do that? They’re still the same way. They don’t care about me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Oh, really?” I scoff, leaning forward. “How many times have they called to check in on me here? How many times have they tried to visit?” I can read the answer to that question by the flash of remorse that enters her eyes. She feels bad for me, but she’ll never say that. “Exactly,” I breathe out, sitting back against the pillows.
She clears her throat, averting her gaze. “Back to what we were saying. What kind of man was Baz? Where did he fit in?”
He was a liar. That’s what he was. A damn good one.
My eyes slam shut as I feel the moisture pool there. It takes me a few beats to gather myself, and when I do, I push all thoughts of my ex-lovers out of my head.
“I’m done.”
For a second, I think she considers pushing for more, arguing and forgetting the agreement, but in the end, she nods begrudgingly and pushes to her feet.
“Thank you for sharing that with me, Mackenzie.”
I watch her and Gary leave, and when I’m positive everyone is gone, I let the tears fall freely, the pain enveloping me whole.
The air is charged in the upper level of the Kings. It’s been that way for the past few days I’ve been coming in to get work done, but today especially. I told the guys to meet me here, and I must’ve fallen asleep waiting for them in my office. Sleep hasn’t been my top priority lately.
There’s a sharp knock on the door, and Marcus pokes his head in. “The rest of the guys are here.”
We have shit we need to discuss. I need answers. There are things each of them has hidden from me and from everyone else.
That isn’t how this works.
Swiping my glass of bourbon off the oak table seated next to the chaise, I head into the lounge that overlooks the dance floor, where everyone currently is. I eye each of them. They’re sitting in different spots around the room. Our lawyer, and my friend, Noah, is hovering near the hallway, arms crossed over his chest in a no-nonsense stance. Zach is sitting at the bar, Trent is leaning against the glass that overlooks the dance floor, and Vincent is splayed out on the couch, a cast still covering his arm. Marcus is already seated on one of the chaises, and when our gazes lock, I see the cogs churning in his brain. He wants answers just as badly as I do, but as I look at these guys, my brothers, I don’t know who to trust anymore. I want to believe Marcus when he said he doesn’t know what’s happening, but he could be working with Vincent. Makes me wonder how many of the other guys are working with him, too.
Dan’s reported findings have shown me as much. We didn’t have an answer as to why he was in Ferndale, but one thing he did find that I found interesting was that Mackenzie’s paper trail showed her on her way to Ferndale a whole day before Vincent’s GPS system showed him out there. He claims she followed him, but I’m starting to wonder if he was out there for something much more sinister.
It’s plausible he figured out who Mackenzie really is. Who her sister was.
A name change and dyed hair might’ve been enough to fool me because I wasn’t there that summer after Madison’s death. I wasn’t a paranoid mess like Vincent was. Maybe his reasons for wanting “Scarlett” out of my life weren’t because he thought she was a gold digger but because she was a threat to his very existence.
I feel my temper rising the longer the silence drags on. It gives my brain more fodder to wade through. It gives me more time to confirm my suspicions of each of them.
Zach is the first to break the silence. “What are we doing here, Baz?”
“I still haven’t gotten the answers I want. That’s why we’re here. Feel free to fill me in on whatever the fuck it is you all are up to.”
“Us?” Zach drops his glass down on the bar top with extra force, and my jaw tightens. I clench my teeth together. These days, it’s getting harder and harder to rein in my anger. “Why don’t you fill us in on your fucking plan, Sebastian? Everything is falling apart. Someone is looking into the case, your girlfriend tried to run Vincent off a cliff, she broke into my fucking house, and you have the nerve to walk in here and act like everything is under control? You were supposed to fix this!”