Pretty fucking naïve.
There was only one way to make her understand, and that was to tell her everything. It was going to scare her half to death, and I didn’t want to do it, but if she didn’t realize all our lives were on the line, she was going to fight me the whole way, and I couldn’t have that.
If I was going to keep us all alive, I needed her to have my back. I needed to know she would be there with me, even if she didn’t like it, all the way through to the very end. With her on my side, I’d make it.
I shook the raindrops out of my hair and looked at the watch on my wrist. I had about twenty minutes to get back, and I was going to have to run faster to avoid being late. Adding tardiness to Raine’s list of my screwups would be bad. I raced along the shore, grabbed my shoes and socks when I got to them, and made it back to the condo just in time.
In my head, I told myself I could do this. One more fight. One more fight would get me my son—the only child I would ever have. All of that was much easier than explaining to Raine everything that was happening.
Focus. One thing at a time.
I took a deep breath and opened the door.
Raine was still there on the couch, looking like she hadn’t moved since I left. She glanced over to me, picked the remote up off the arm of the couch, and flipped off the TV.
“You ready now?” she asked.
She’d been crying. I could hear it in her voice, and it threw me off my game immediately. I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms and tell her everything was going to be just fine, but that was a bigger load of bullshit than I could have pulled off.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Raine said. “Where are you going to start?”
“Are you going to leave?” I asked. I swallowed hard as I braced myself for her answer. If she decided she was going to leave, everything else was moot.
“That depends a little on what you say next,” Raine said as she crossed her arms. “I’m pissed at you, Sebastian Stark. I can’t deny that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasted, and I have no idea what to think about your finding out you have a son.”
“You knew I had one out there somewhere.”
“But you never knew anything about him,” she said. “You didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl before, and you never talked about him at all. Obviously, something changed. Did you see that woman?”
I shook my head. I had seen her, kind of, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. The picture of Jillian with her brains blown out scurried around in my head until I pushed it away.
Raine raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked at the floor for a moment to gather myself before I sat on the couch. She turned toward me and tucked one leg underneath her. After a moment of silence, it became clear that I was supposed to start.
“I got drunk,” I said quietly.
“That much was blindingly obvious.”
I nodded and went with what I knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not going to happen again. I just…I just slipped.”
“Into a bottle of booze?” Raine uncrossed her arms and leaned back against the arm of the couch with her elbows. I shrugged in response. She stared at me a long moment before sighing. Her expression softened. “Please just tell me what happened. How did you find out about your son?”
Might as well get it over with.
“I saw Landon yesterday,” I told her.
“Here?” Raine’s eyes widened. “He’s in Miami?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s been here for a while.”
“Where did you see him?”
“We went to lunch at that place up Ocean Drive,” I said. “The one attached to a hotel.”
“You went to lunch with him?” Raine gasped.
I could just see the mental images in her head of Landon and me sipping fruity drinks at some beachside café. It was almost enough to make me laugh but not quite.
“He didn’t really give me an option.”
“Why didn’t you just walk away?”
My arms tensed and I gritted my teeth, which did nothing for my headache. This was the part I didn’t know how to approach. I wasn’t sure I could explain what it meant to be tied to someone the way I was tied to him.
“I’ve told you about him before,” I reminded her. “He’s not the kind of person who lets you just walk away from a conversation he intends to have with you. He asks; I answer. That’s how it works. He had shit to tell me, so he told me over food.”
“And he chooses now to tell you about your son? He had to have known about him before now.”
“He did,” I nodded. “It’s just…well, circumstances have changed.”
I took a minute to figure out how to continue, and Raine gave me the time. I turned to sit with my hands clasped together on my thigh. I twisted my fingers around themselves, wrapped them around my knee as some lame-ass support mechanism, and licked my lips before I went on.
“You know all about Jillian,” I started. “You know she got pregnant and then left with another guy. Well, they got married and were apparently raising my kid in Italy. Last week…”
I trailed off. I didn’t even know how to tell her this much. How was I going to get everything out? This was going to take a lot of talking if I kept stopping, though, and I had to get through it, convince her, and get prepared to fight. I couldn’t waste any time beating around the bush or whatever, so I just blurted it out.
“Well, they’re dead, and now he doesn’t have anyone.”
Raine bit down on her lower lip, and her forehead creased.
“What happened to them?”
“They were shot,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Murdered.”
She sat up a little straighter, and I could see both shock and sorrow in her eyes.
“Do they know who did it?”
It was just like Raine to be concerned about people she’d never met. Even if everything she knew about them was bad, she’d still be sorry something had happened to them.
“They’ll never know,” I said. “That’s usually part of being involved in the kind of business Jillian’s family runs. She’s related to Franks, so she grew up in it. She probably wasn’t expecting it to hit her like that, but the risk is always there.”
Raine eyed me.
“You know, don’t you?” she said. “You know who killed them.”
I took in a long breath and rubbed at my eyes. Apparently, I took too long to answer.
“Bastian?” Raine’s voice went soft, and I could hear the fear in her tone. “Did you…did you do it?”
“What?” I looked back to her quickly. “Fuck—no! Shit, Raine, when would I have gone to Italy?”
She scrunched up her face and glanced away before speaking so softly I could hardly hear her.
“You could have…had someone else do it.”
“Well, I didn’t!” As much as I might have hated Jillian, I wouldn’t have done something like that. The idea that Raine thought I was capable of taking out a contract on my ex pissed me off. “For fuck’s sake, Raine!”
I shook my head and let out an exasperated sigh.
“Well, who then?” she asked.
“I have my theories,” I admitted. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, they’re dead, and now Franks is holding my kid for ransom, basically.”
“He wants money?” Raine said, confused. “I would think he’d have plenty of that.”
“He’d always take more money,” I said with a humorless laugh, “but no, he’s not asking for any money from me.”
Raine’s face went pale.
“What does he want?” she said so quietly that again, I could barely make out the words.
She already knows.
I looked down at my hands on my leg. The words wouldn’t come at first even though they were right there in my head. As soon as they were said, I wouldn’t be able to take them back again. When I looked back at her, I could see she had h
erself braced for whatever impact the statement I was going to lay on her would have, so I went with it.
“He wants me to compete again,” I said. “He wants me to fight in another tournament.”
Her eyes flew open.
“He wants…he wants…he wants what?” She pushed back with her heels against the cushion and pulled her legs up to her chest. Her mouth stayed open like she was going to say something else, but no words came out. Her face said it all. Whatever she had been expecting, this wasn’t it.
Okay, so maybe I misjudged that one.
“I have to fight in one more tournament,” I repeated. “Just the one, and then he’ll give me my kid.”
“You mean…you mean like…like killing people?”
Ah shit, this was going to go even worse than I thought. It wasn’t that I expected her to take any of it well, but she was flipping out.
“No,” Raine said. Her eyes widened again. “No, Bastian! You can’t do that! You can’t do one of those…those death matches again!”
She stood up and took a step closer to me. With her fists balled up on her hips, she glared down at me.
“No way, Bastian!” she yelled at me. “If you decide to fight again, that’s it. We’re through, drunk or not! I can’t be with someone who would do something like that again!”
The focal point I had managed to find disintegrated. Tingles of dread crawled over my skin as her words sank in. Maybe she’d forgive a single misstep when it came to drinking, but this was too much for her. The idea of me killing again wasn’t something she would be able to handle, and she’d run.
I couldn’t do this without her. If she left, I was dead.
If she left, she was dead, too.
My greatest fear was actualized. At least for now, I was going to speak without thought.
“I don’t have a fucking choice, Raine!” I bellowed. “It’s not like I’m itching to kill people off! If I wanted to do that, there are plenty of people in this fucking building I’d like to see dead!”
Well, shit. I knew I was going to fuck this up, but part of me thought she would guess as to the nature of my meeting with Landon. None of his words had really surprised me. They weren’t expected, but as soon as they were out of his mouth, I had accepted them.
“Don’t say things like that!” she yelled back at me.
“Well, it’s fucking true!” I had already lost the focus I had managed to collect on the beach. I was full of adrenaline at this point, and I was resigned to make it all worse with my stupid mouth.
I should have stuck with the profuse apologies.
“Some of them fucking deserve it!”
“For the love of God, Bastian!” she cried. “You aren’t like that anymore!”
“I might not act on it,” I growled, “but that doesn’t stop me from feeling it. I can only control so much!”
Every word out of my mouth was compounding the situation and speeding up the hurricane rotation inside my head. It was already bad, but if you want to make the worst of a bad situation, I’m the guy to invite.
“Apparently, you can’t.” She glared at me. “So did Landon get you drunk after telling you all this? Is that why you were trashed when I got home?”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. My anger faded slightly as sheepishness seeped in. It would have been nice, in retrospect, to have been able to blame it on Landon. I should have thought about that before I said anything. She probably would have believed it, too. “I did that on my own, after he left.”
“Jesus,” she muttered. She put her face in her hands and dropped back to the edge of the couch. “You can’t do this. Not again.”
“I have to.”
“No.”
“Goddammit, Raine!” I snapped. “If I don’t fight, they’re just going to walk in here and kill us both! What do you think is going to happen to my kid then, huh? If they decide to let him live, he’ll end up a fucking crime boss someday!”
“They can’t just walk in here,” Raine argued. “We’re in a secure building. There’s a guard downstairs!”
“Seriously?” I snarled. “Do you seriously think you can sit up here and be safe from people like that? Are you that fucking stupid?”
I regretted the word immediately, but I couldn’t take it back.
Open mouth, insert entire leg. Throw a hipbone and maybe an arm in there, too.
“Is that really what you think of me?”
“Fuck…no, of course not,” I grumbled as I tried to backpedal, “but when you say shit like that…well, it’s just not how it works. They can do whatever they want. That’s kind of the point. Besides, one of them has already been here.”
“What do you mean? Who’s been here?”
Ah shit. That wasn’t supposed to come out.
I tried to brush it off, but she wasn’t having any of that. I finally told her about the other day when I had the feeling someone had been there. Seeing the fear in her eyes centered me, calmed me, and I remembered how much focus I was going to have to maintain for any of this to come out well in the end.
If I lost focus, I was going to lose her.
“I don’t know who,” I told her, “but considering what Landon said, any doubts I had are gone. It could have been anyone from Franks’ group or even one of the other tournament players from the other mob organizations.”
“You really mean it,” Raine said. She wrapped her arms around herself and curled up into the corner of the couch as if that would somehow protect her from what was going on. “You’re really going to do this.”
I shoved myself off the couch and onto the floor. I knelt in front of her and placed my hands over her thighs. I hated seeing her so frightened, and though I needed her to understand there wasn’t a choice, I also needed her to know she was safe as long as she was with me and I followed every order they gave me.
“I have to do it,” I said for the hundredth time. “I don’t want to, baby—I have to. Nothing fucking matters more to me than you, and I’m not risking you.”
Her eyes grew wider as she stared at me.
“We could run away,” she suggested.
I didn’t have to respond. I could tell she didn’t believe it even as she said it. She was grasping—trying to find something to hold on to, something I might not have considered already, but there was nothing. I shook my head slowly.
“There’s nowhere to run.”
“There has to be another way.”
“There’s no other way, baby. I have to keep you safe, and if that means I have to fight, then I’m going to fight. I’ve done it plenty of times before. It’ll be simple.”
“Wait until you actually complete the task before you evaluate its simplicity,” Raine muttered.
“What?”
She shook her head.
“Something I heard from a professor.” She wouldn’t look at me, and strangely enough, I knew why.
Raine had never lied to me before, not about anything. Still, I knew she was covering something up. I rose up on my knees to look her straight in the face.
“Where did you really hear it?” I questioned.
Raine bit down on her lip and fiddled with her fingers before answering.
“A group meeting,” she admitted.
“What kind of group?”
With a tightened jaw, she finally looked into my eyes.
“It’s a support group for people living with alcoholics,” she said. “I don’t have a study group on Tuesday nights; I go to that group instead.”
She’d been telling me she was at a study group every week for the last couple of months and had apparently been lying to me about it the whole time. The revelation had taken me aback to the point where I didn’t know what to think, let alone respond.
What had she heard at this group? Was this organization trying to help people get away from people like me or how to live with us?
Pressure built up inside of me again.
“So, what?” I asked. “They tell you how to deal
with people like me? Help you get away from me?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, they sometimes talk about that, but that’s not why I went. I just thought they could help me understand you better.”
“Did it help?”
“Honestly, no,” she said. “I was hoping that it would, but it really hasn’t. It’s mostly people trying to one-up each other on who has had the roughest life. There were a few helpful things, and some really nice people, but no. Dealing with you is rather…unique.”
I let out a short laugh.
“I bet. You mean I’m a bigger asshole than the other alcoholics?”
“No,” she said, “you’ve got a better reason for it.”
I thought about that for a minute. Maybe I did have a good reason, and maybe I didn’t. Considering all the crazy shit in my past, she could probably top a big-ass cake with my stories, except she couldn’t tell anything to anyone.
She did realize that, didn’t she?
“You…you didn’t actually tell anyone…” I trailed off.
“No,” Raine confirmed, “of course not.”
Thank fucking God.
As I thought about it, I realized what a shit position I put her in. At least those other people had a place where they could vent—a place to explain what was happening with their lives, but Raine had nothing. She couldn’t tell people about me at all, which meant she had no one to confide in. Lindsay didn’t even know about all the shit in the past. Sure, she knew what had been revealed on television, but that iceberg could take out a fleet of Titanics.
I’m such a shit.
I stared at her as she went on.
“Knowing your reasons doesn’t mean I condone what you did,” Raine said. “I’m still mad about you getting drunk. I understand, though. I’m kind of wanting a drink myself right now.”
“I know,” I said with a nod. I was actually a little relieved to be back on the topic of drinking, considering everything else that still had to be said. “It’s not like I’m happy about it or anything—I feel like a total shithead. I don’t know what else to say about it. I fucked up. I won’t do it again. I can’t do it again.”
“Why not?”
My chest tightened.
“You’ll leave me,” I said. I felt pressure behind my eyes to go along with the tightness inside my chest. “I could tell when I saw you last night. If…if you did that, well, I’d still fight, but I’d probably lose. There wouldn’t be a fucking point to winning.”