9

9

KADE

My phone rings, pulling me out of the dream I wish I could erase from my memory. As much as reliving that night makes me want to smash everything in the room, it keeps me grounded when I’m in positions like I am now.

My mind always goes back to her when I lose control, blacking out, and when my body betrays me. Memories play out like fucking nightmares, mocking me for what we had and what she destroyed.

My phone rings again, my sister’s name flashing up on the screen.

Shit.

I untangle myself from two sets of arms and legs, naked and slick with sweat and God knows what else. Bernadette groans, but instead of waking and yelling at me to go back to sleep, she reaches for… whatever her name is and cuddles into her tits like they’re cushions.

Messages fill my screen, from Luciella and my mum. I have fifteen missed calls.

Luciella: Where the fuck are you? We leave for the airport in an hour!

Luciella: Base is here, and he said he hasn’t heard from you. If you don’t get home soon, I will leave without you!

Luciella: Answer the phone, you dickhead!

Mum: Your dad is happy you’re joining us; he hasn’t stopped smiling. This means a lot to him, sweetheart. I’m glad you’re putting aside everything that’s happened and coming to visit. I’ll see you soon.

Not going to lie, the last one hurt. Our last encounter ended with me flipping a table and storming out of the meeting area after him bringing up Stacey and our split.

Another text appears as I type a reply to Luciella, telling her to calm her shit. I read it twice and my right eye twitches.

Base: Get out of whoever’s bed you’re in and move your fucking ass before I track you down. I need to go pick up Stacey (high-five me if I get a kiss) but am I fuck going to America without you.

I scowl at the message. I read it again and again and again. Why the hell is he picking her up? His bracketed text fucks me off more than I’d like to admit. Stacey won’t kiss him for picking her up. Perhaps he noticed how I go silent and stare at her whenever she’s around, and he’s trying to piss me off?

I dodge a hand trying to wrap around my waist and sit on the edge of the bed. I read the text again and my thumbs start to type before my brain can catch up to what I’m saying.

Me: I’m heading home now. I’ll get Stacey on the way.

I fume at myself but don’t take the words back. She lives on the opposite side of town from Bernadette. But as I said, I’m an impulsive, controlling prick and I refuse to let him go anywhere near her if I can help it.

It’s a lie, I’d said while her hand was wrapped around my cock, and that alone was the biggest fucking lie.

I wish I could erase her from my life.

Even when I’m working in different countries, I’m checking her social media like a stalker, logging into the CCTV to watch her walk into the studio or around the manor, or asking Luciella about their weekend plans just to know what they’re getting up to. I even hacked my sister’s phone to read their messages once, and it was the biggest regret of my life.

Two years of obsessing over a girl who drove me to insanity.

I type back another response to Luciella, telling her that I’m en route before I tug my clothes back on and tuck my gun – which I slid under the bed without Bernadette seeing – into the back of my shorts.

Where the fuck is my hat?

Once I take a piss, noticing the scratches on my cheek and the multiple bite marks on my neck and chest, I soak my face in cold water and debate shooting Bernadette while she’s asleep.

Maybe I’ll suffocate her with a pillow and make it look like the other girl did it.

Too risky. As much as I’d love to end her, I can’t. I have too much emotional baggage to risk it. Maybe I should take a leaf out of my dad’s book and not give a fuck about anyone. Everyone seems to think I’m just like him – might as well prove them right by killing the head of the Scottish underworld.

Archie greets me halfway down the steps. “Morning,” he says, holding a coffee in one hand, a bowl filled with boiled eggs in the other. “She didn’t keep you up all night, did she?”

I scoff out a laugh and ignore him.

This man is deranged. A political leader who works with numerous charities for animals, schools and victims of all kinds of abuse, yet the sick fuck was perfectly fine with having a forced threesome with teenage me then abusing me after I passed out. He was fine with feeding me drugs and booze while I begged to leave the house.

He was fine with watching me kill. Watching me torture people who’d wronged them.

He was fine with weaponising me, a rage-filled kid desperate to keep his family safe, blackmailing me so I can’t ever stop. I did move to Stirling and buy an apartment with the money I earned from the contracts, in the hope they’d lay off me, but they still have their claws in me. Hotels rooms and yachts. Cars and clubs. Anywhere they can have me, they do.

I want to kill him the most. His time will come.

Here he stands with a smile, in a silk robe, asking me if his wife kept me up all night. I want to kick him back down the stairs and make him choke on his fucking boiled eggs.

My shoulder hits his arm as I storm past him, down the steps two at a time until I reach my car, where it takes me ten minutes to control my breathing.

I pull my phone out, open my secret folder and send Barry a message that I’m contactable for the next few days. He lets me know that two cars have been sitting outside, waiting for me.

Always waiting.

I might not fear much, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need my own security team. They’re always there. Out of sight but ready for anything thrown my way.

Bernadette doesn’t know about them obviously, because they’re there to protect me from her twisted games. She likes to play them when I piss her off – randomly sending someone to try to beat the shit out of me or shoot me somewhere non-fatal.

Everyone she’s sent so far has turned up dead, without the need to use my guards. If she didn’t want her men killed, then she shouldn’t have sent me away to different countries for intense training in weapons and martial arts.

My team doesn’t know how extreme it gets with Bernadette and her husband, and if I can help it, I’ll keep it that way. They’re my soldiers – one word that I’m abused, and they’ll open fire and lose their lives.

I have hundreds beneath me, but Bernadette has tens of thousands. I know the probability of surviving that kind of war.

I turn on my engine, still controlling my breathing and the need to go in there and put a bullet between everyone’s eyes. I’m pissed off more than usual, probably because of Base’s message.

After a night of hell and threats and unwanted sex, all I’m thinking about is what Stacey replied to Base. If he’s said he’s picking her up then, surely, she must’ve accepted his offer?

Fuck, I hope not. I’m in no mood for drama. Thankfully, Jason isn’t going to America, eliminating that issue. I’d rather drown myself than spend any time with him.

The sun is starting to rise as Stacey’s estate comes into view, and when I stop outside her house, I hide the gun back in my glovebox.

I look up at her window; the curtains are closed but for the small gap she usually leaves in the middle, so the sun can wake her. Despite what happened, I’m drawn to her so much that I’ve climbed up to her window four times over the last two years and watched her sleep. Even contemplated sneaking in once.

I could do it now, right?

Fuck, no. I need to repress all these impulsive thoughts.

I turn down my music, pull out my phone and stare at her contact details.

Freckles.

She’s been blocked for nearly two years. I doubt she even attempted to message me within that time period. She probably deleted my number and moved on to the next sad bastard to poison.

I stare at the last messages between us.

Freckles: She’s asleep now. Meet you at the pool house?

Me: I’ll race you.

Freckles: I always win, remember?

Only hours later, the messages went from cute and playful to desperate and pleading.

Freckles: Please answer the phone, Kade. Let me explain.

Freckles: I want to fix this. Please.

Loads of missed calls, and, a week later, she says:

Freckles: Luciella said you moved out. Where did you go? Please talk to me. I love you.

That last part made me go feral. I’d taken my first line of coke that night and gone on a four-day bender with Base in America.

I love you.Nope, she didn’t love me. She had no idea what love was. I blocked her right after I typed several responses without sending any.

It was only days later that Bernadette approached me outside of the dance studio as I contemplated going in, and I wish so fucking much I’d walked away from her false offer.

Gritting my teeth, raging at myself for reading the messages again – something I’ve done a billion times while off my head on drugs or drowning myself in booze – I do the unthinkable.

I unblock her number.

My blood is roaring in my ears, fingers trembling as I change her contact name and type a message to her.

Me: I’m outside.

There. Simple and straight to the point. No need to overcomplicate it. After two years of keeping my distance, I broke my rules by following her to the front gate, by watching her dance, by approaching her and letting her touch me, by letting myself remember every sound she’d ever made for me.

When her hand wrapped around my cock – the lie that wasn’t a lie – I forgot what she’d done. But I remember now. And I refuse to let her fuck with my head again.

My heart races as soon as my phone vibrates in my hand, nerves shattering into fragments at her three-word response. I’m a pathetic piece of shit.

Stacey: Well hello, stranger.

I stop my lips from tugging up into a smirk, my chest tightening as I swallow. “Waste Love” begins playing, and I turn it up slightly, but not loud enough to wake her family. I remember her saying her stepmother hated visitors, hated anyone in the house, which is why I was always climbing through her window.

Me: Move or I’ll drive away.

She types, deletes, types, deletes. I nearly send another message when she responds.

Stacey: I’m rolling my eyes at you. Be 5 mins.

Her bedroom light turns on, the curtains opening to reveal her glancing down at me in only her bra. My skin prickles with goosebumps at the fresh memory of my mouth on her tit, heat rushing up my spine and making my dick twitch.

After a longer second of our eyes clashing without looking away, she gives me the middle finger and vanishes from my view.

Little shit.

I don’t block her again, but I do swipe up on the chat box and instantly despise myself as I read all our older messages. Mostly flirty and teasing, telling the other that they’re fuckably hot while in the same room as my family. Pictures from trips that we’d secretly taken. I want to scrap them all, but when my finger hovers over the delete-all button, I decide not to.

After I was dared to kiss her years ago, I lasted all but a few days before cornering her in my kitchen and daring her to kiss me again while no one was around. I pulled her onto the countertop and let my hands roam her body, close to having a panic attack from thinking I would do something wrong.

That version of myself doesn’t exist now. I don’t get anxiety around her because she’s pretty and I have no idea what to do with her. No, I reckon if I fucked her now, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from strangling her to death.

The anchor who broke me.

Fucking ridiculous.

She appears nearly fifteen minutes later, rushing out with a suitcase rolling behind her and a bag over her shoulder. I should get out and help her, but I pop the boot and relax into my seat instead.

I shouldn’t be nervous. I shouldn’t be wondering what to say to her. I definitely shouldn’t be thinking about her words to me last night.

Relax. It means nothing.

I guess it never had. Not to her.

I gulp down air as she drops into the passenger seat in a band top and jeans. Her perfume and shampoo take over all my senses, and I have to roll down my window more and light up a cigarette to block them out.

Stacey leans forward, looking up at her window. When I follow her eyes, I see a shadow standing there, but whoever it is quickly shuts her curtains.

Must be her stepbrother Kyle. I never met him because he was always away studying, but she spoke highly about him often.

She doesn’t say anything as she clips in her belt, or when she pulls out her phone and starts scrolling social media, ignoring whatever messages keep popping up on her screen.

Not a hello. Not a hey, what happened last night was a mistake, not a fucking word about it. Fine. I won’t bring it up either.

It shouldn’t annoy me this much.

As I drive out of her estate, I turn up the music. But when I go to press the accelerator, I chance a look at her as if I’m looking for traffic, and my eyes drop to her neck.

My brows furrow, and I almost stop the car to inspect the bruises she’s tried to hide with make-up.

My first instinct is to hunt down whoever hurt her and kill them, but then I remember the way I grabbed her at the studio, and I grip the steering wheel tighter.

Surely I didn’t cause those bruises? I didn’t… Fuck. No, I wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted me to hold her firmly.

I should pull over and apologise right now. I should tell her that I never meant to mark her. I’m not a psychopath that hurts the people I care about. Yeah, I’ve shot people in the head or disfigured them, and I’ve tortured people for information to help Bernadette, but never have I lifted a hand to Stacey.

Fuck. Maybe I did do that. Maybe the hold I had on her throat last night was tighter than I thought. Maybe everyone’s right, and I am like my dad and out of touch with reality.

A lump sticks in my throat, and I run through every possible way to say sorry.

But then my sister calls her, and she turns off my music to speak. She tells her we’re on our way, groans and asks her to stop shouting, then huffs and hangs up.

“They’re leaving now. They don’t want to be late. They’ll get us at the airport.”

She trains her gaze on the scratch on my cheek; the obvious bite marks on the side of my neck. I probably smell like sex too. If any of it bothers her, she doesn’t show it as she goes back to typing on her phone.

Why would she care? She’s heartless.

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear then leans down to grab something from her handbag at her feet. My eyes fall on our initials woven together on the exposed part of her back. I shake my head and look away.

I light another cigarette and turn up the rock music.

When we get to the manor, she walks my dogs while I shower and dress. She chats with the staff; I glare at them. We don’t talk on the way to the airport, or while we’re stuck in a traffic jam that doesn’t seem to be moving.

I keep looking at her throat, noticing that she’s touched up her make-up and the bruises are barely visible now. Maybe it wasn’t from the studio, and like me, she was fucking someone else last night.

The thought irks me enough to clench my jaw. I’m a walking, talking contradiction.

You don’t hate her, son. You’re just mad at her,my dad had said when I last visited.

But he’s a liar. I do hate her. I’m not trembling with anxiety because I’m mad at her – I’m fucking losing it because all I can think about is her with him.

“Shit,” she blurts out. “The motorway got closed off from a bad crash. That’s why we’re stuck here.”

I frown. “Does it say how long until it’s cleared?”

“Could be hours,” she replies, slouching. “We’ll definitely miss our flight. I’ll tell Lu.”

And to make things even better, we do miss our flight, and the next one from Glasgow isn’t for two days. Instead, we have to drive to Edinburgh, book the only hotel near the airport with any availability and wait until tomorrow to fly out.

Base wishes me good luck, and I swipe away from Bernadette’s message regarding a contract. She tracks my every move – the ones I allow her to track anyway – so she knows where I’m heading.

I spy one of my cars nearby – Barry is sitting in the passenger seat with a laptop. I nod at him on the way in, and four guards dressed casually walk behind us, staying far enough back that Stacey doesn’t catch on.

When we reach the hotel reception, I’m certain someone is playing a joke on me. I’m fully expecting someone to jump out of a plant pot with a camera.

Stacey turning a shade of white just adds to my annoyance.

There’s only one fucking room available.