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.