Chapter 33

Kendall

Finn had… Finn… My brain stuttered every time I considered my brother’s betrayal, but right as I started to try and make sense of it, Connor switched on the tap, washing the blood from his knuckles.

He’d knocked my brother on his arse for me.

That was enough to draw me closer, to watch the drops of blood wash away and down the drain. The water felt cold, too cold when I pushed my own fingers into the stream to pull his hand out. I inspected the knuckles, reaching out to touch the wounds when a hiss from Connor made me stop.

“Doesn’t look like the knuckles are split,” I said.

“He wasn’t worth that. Cunt always went down like a sack of shit when I hit him.”

Connor bit off each crude word but that didn’t warn me off. Instead, I moved closer, pressing myself into the space between him and the sink. I could feel the cool of the metal at my back and heat of his body at my front as I stared up at him.

“So how would it have gone?”

“How would what have gone, Kendall?” Connor Woods hanging on by a thread. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself because he was renowned for keeping his cool at all times. My hand rose, wanting to see if his body was vibrating with tension, just like mine was, but I went to drop it. His wounded hand grabbed mine, picking it up and placing it on his chest so I could feel the rapid thump of his heartbeat. “What do you want to know?”

“You got me that interview?”

Mum had made it sound like it was something his mother had done after I catered one of her parties. His grip on me tightened, and he shook his head.

“You don’t get it. You never did. I know I was a fucking arsehole. I know you have no reason to believe me, but… Whatever you needed, I would’ve gotten it for you, Kendall. You just had to ask.”

“Before or after you laughed in my face?”

It felt like that was teenage me asking that question, not this Kendall. He picked me up in answer, setting me on the edge of the counter before stepping between my legs.

“After, obviously, but…” He leaned in, and I couldn’t help but reach up and stroke that cheek. His eyelids closed, and I saw the fan of his eyelashes against his cheek. “I don’t know how to apologise for all the bullshit we put you through. Once we worked out what we wanted, it was a subject of a lot of conversation, but… I just hoped… I wanted… I needed to find a way.” His eyes opened again and this time his gaze felt much too sharp, too intimate. “I still need to find a way.”

“Punching Finn out isn’t a bad way to start making amends,” I said with a little laugh, then felt bad straight afterwards. He was my brother, but… I reached inside, trying to find any kind of fraternal love right now, but failed. I wasn’t even angry. This was peak Finn, finding out you fucked up and then blaming it on anyone, anything, else. He would’ve realised what had happened and just blabbered some bullshit to get him off the hook, forgetting about it all once the danger passed and fuck the consequences.

“Cool.” The sound of Van’s knuckles cracking had me turning his way. “I’m ready to make a whole lot of ‘amends.’ What about you, Gage?”

“Won’t be enough to scrape into a jam jar once we’re done,” the big man said, but he came closer rather than running after my brother. “But what about you? How are you feeling?”

Having the three of them cluster closer, studying my face not to laugh when I started crying but to see how I really felt, was surreal. It was hard to put into words. My body ached with that sensual kind of pain that came from damn good sex and all the feel-good endorphins were still coursing through my veins, making clear more could come if I just tugged Gage back down the hall for more.

Or all three of them…

That had me blinking then shaking my head, trying to focus on what had happened outside.

This was the moment where I felt pain at my brother’s betrayal, right? Where our solid sibling bond was shattered. But that wasn’t Finn and me. When we were kids, he never seemed to know what to do with a younger sister, so he bugged the shit out of me for being around. When we got older, he just engaged in the kind of benign neglect a lot of brothers seem to fall into. We lived in separate parts of the city and had our own lives independent of each other. If it wasn’t for his two kids, Benny and Kate, I don’t know if we’d see each other at all outside of Christmas. So instead of an ache inside myself, I just found… a weird kind of emptiness. I could almost hear my mother’s voice in my ear, telling me that this was just Finn being Finn.

But that didn’t mean I had to put up with it.

In some ways I felt a little cheated by Connor punching Finn, because it robbed me of the opportunity of doing it.

“Empty,” I finally admitted. “Like angry at his bullshit, at all this time…” I frowned. “He could’ve fessed up at any point, and then I…” My eyes slid sideways. “We…”

“What could we do?” Van asked, sidling closer.

His hand slid closer, almost touching mine. Long fingers, golden brown skin, with calluses on some of the fingers, I realised then they were mine to touch. With a graze of one little finger against his, I heard him suck in a breath in response. That Van, golden and perfect—the one all the girls wanted—wanted me was too fucking much for my brain to handle, right up until his hands covered mine.

“We could’ve… found a way to move forward.” God, what was that pain in my chest? I wanted to pull away, claw at my sternum, but Van held me still. “We could’ve found a way to… move past the bullshit of the past and…” I hadn’t dared to even think this way in so damn long, and in some ways it made sense. I was sitting in the kitchen. My dreams had died in one, but what if they were revived, brought back to life? “And I don’t know what would have happened.” My eyes ached in a way I knew well, from tears that wanted to be shed, but I wouldn’t allow them to. I blinked and blinked and forced myself to go on. “Maybe we’d be happy or something.”

“Or something.”

Van said that with a huff, grabbing me off the counter and then carrying me into the lounge room. Apparently being with these three idiots meant my legs no longer worked. I admit, I saw the benefits as he sat down on the couch, cradling me in his arms. He smelled like freshly cut timber, musk, and clean boy sweat, and I wanted to bury my nose in his neck to smell more.

Which I could do now.

I moved then, doing just that, and his hand slid up the back of my neck, holding me right there.

“Being happy.” His voice vibrated through me, chest to chest. “Yeah, I’d like that a whole fucking lot.”

“Be the first we’d felt that in some time.” I looked up when I felt the couch shift to see Gage had sat down beside me. “What about you, Connor?”

There was something wary in his gaze. There always was. In a lot of ways, the rest of us had it easier. Our parents were a billion times more chill than Connor’s dad was, so we didn’t have to go home to face a man perpetually disappointed in him. But I watched him suck in a breath, his smile fragile.

“It’s all I ever wanted. I thought Finn would get over it, and then…” He reached out and took my hand, clinging to it like a drowning man. “Then once we’d spent time making shit up to you, Kendall, making clear how much we cared about you, then… Then we’d all be happy.”

“It’s not too late.” Van stared up at me as I sat there, straddling his lap. “You know that, right? We lost some time, but we can make up for that. In some ways, we’re in a much better position. We’re financially stable, secure, and you’ll never have to look at renting a place with a dunny in a shed.”

I found myself smiling despite myself, and he grinned right along with me, until I cupped his jaw in my hands. Van watched me all too closely as I dropped lower, my mouth hovering over his.

“Yeah, I think I’d like that a whole lot.”