CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
You like pulp, right?
I had no idea what that meant. But it was the only clue Blake had given me when I’d asked what kind of room he’d booked for us at the Vault tonight. And it wasn’t really a clue, was it? No, it told me nothing and only made me more curious.
Letting the door of the bar swing closed behind me as I finished my shift, I glimpsed at the cloudy sky. ‘Grim’ was about the best way to describe it. The air felt thick and muggy, like just before a storm. Adjusting the strap of my purse, I headed to the parking lot.
It had been five days since we got back from our vacation. Five uneventful days—no activity from Smith, and no bullshit from Tara or Joshua or Libby. Not that I expected that peace to last, but I certainly intended to enjoy it.
I was due to meet Blake in the basement at seven. First, I needed to go back to his apartment so that I could shower and change into my—
“Kensey Lyons?”
Halting at the unfamiliar female voice, I turned. A dark-haired woman stood there, eyes guarded, hand clenched tightly around a bunch of keys. She was somewhere in her forties. Maybe older—she was good enough with makeup that I couldn’t tell for sure.
A journalist, maybe? No, she didn’t look like someone searching for a scoop. She looked … anxious.
I lifted a brow. “Something I can help you with?”
She licked her lower lip and took a small, cautious step toward me. “My name is Liza Montgomery.”
And then I stopped breathing. She couldn’t have shocked me more if she’d bitch-slapped me. This had to be the Montgomery. Wariness kicked in, overriding the surprise, and my pulsed picked up. Unsure what to expect, I took a centering breath and waited, staring at her blankly.
“Blake hasn’t told you about me,” she correctly assumed. She glanced around. “I was hoping we could talk.”
My grip on my purse strap flexed. “About?” I heard my cell start to ring, but I ignored it.
“Blake. I understand you’re living with him. I think—”
“You need to get the fuck out of here,” a male voice growled. Rossi. He’d come to follow me to Blake’s apartment, as usual. By the way he was glaring at Liza, nostrils flaring, he knew her.
Rossi’s expression softened just a little as he turned to me. “Kensey, get in the car, honey, okay. I’ll take care of this.” He whirled on Liza, snapping, “If you’ve done this to get Blake’s attention, thinking he’ll come here, you’re wasting your time. He ain’t stupid.”
She flapped her arms. “What was I supposed to do? He won’t take my calls. He won’t—”
“Woman, why would he take your calls?”
Her eyes briefly drifted shut. “I understand he’s angry, but I need to speak with him. This can’t go on. It has to stop.”
“Yeah? Why is that?”
“I’ve paid for what happened, Rossi, I’ve paid ten times over. I left Redwater. Isn’t that enough?”
“Nothing will ever be enough, Liza.” He only then seemed to notice that I was still standing there. “Kensey, honey, get in the car.” But I didn’t.
Liza turned to me, her face beseeching. “You need to talk with Blake. Tell him I deserve some peace. Tell him—”
“Liza, get the fuck out of here,” Rossi snarled.
She jutted out her chin. “Why? What else can he do to me?”
“You’d be surprised,” drawled Rossi.
Liza swallowed. Once again, she looked at me. “Talk with Blake and ask him to either call me or leave me alone. Please.” She scurried over to a Volvo that had seen better days and drove off.
Rossi’s shoulders lowered. “Thank fuck for that. I lied, Kensey. Blake’s on his way. He flipped when I told him she approached you. That’s probably him calling you right now. Answer the phone and assure him you’re fine before he loses his mind.”
Looking in the direction that Liza had disappeared, I pulled out my phone and answered, “Hello.” My voice was low. Flat.
“Kensey.” Blake sighed in what could have been relief. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Put Rossi on the phone, baby.”
I handed the phone to Rossi, who put it to his ear and said, “She’s gone.” He flicked a look at me. “Not much, but enough that you’re gonna have to answer some uncomfortable questions.”
Oh my God, Blake was checking to see how much Liza had told me. I’d just been approached by the woman outside my own damn place of work, and his main concern was how much I knew about his precious project.
“Yeah. We’ll wait for you.” Rossi handed me the phone. “Here, honey.”
I took it and, with a swipe of my thumb across the screen, ended the call without even a single word to Blake.
“He’s almost here,” Rossi told me.
“You know, shockingly enough, I really don’t care right now.”
Rossi winced. “Give him a chance to fill in the blanks.”
Oh, I’d give him a chance, because I deserved to know what the hell I’d just been dragged into.
I was leaning against my car, arms folded, when Blake pulled up a few minutes later. He fairly leaped out of his Maserati and made a beeline for me, his eyes raking over me; studying me from head to toe. Weirdly, he didn’t enter my personal space. Didn’t touch me, kiss me, draw me to him, anything.
“Did she touch you?” he asked, his posture stiff, jaw tense.
I slowly shook my head.
Rossi stepped toward him. “She asked Kensey to speak to you on her behalf, but I personally think she only came because she thought you’d ride to Kensey’s rescue and then she’d be able to talk to you, face-to-face.”
Blake’s eyes narrowed. “That so?”
I watched him closely as I told him, “She said she’s paid for what she did, that ‘this’ can’t go on. Was driving her out of Redwater part of your project’s goal?”
A muscle in his cheek ticked. “Yes.”
I swallowed. “She said she deserves some peace.”
His eyes darkened in a way that made my stomach flip. “Peace? That’s the last thing she fucking deserves.”
“We talked about this in Mexico. It’s tragic that Levi committed suicide. But, ultimately, it was his choice.”
Blake stiffened. One brow arched. “Are you saying she holds no blame? That I should give her what she wants?”
“Don’t get pissy with me. How the hell would I know what she does or doesn’t deserve? You won’t tell me anything. I don’t have a damn clue how it all went down.” I waited for him to explain, but he regarded me with an unblinking stare that gave away nothing. “This is what I do know, Blake—me and my mother had people trying to drive us out of Redwater all my life, blaming us for Maxwell’s fuck-ups. All we wanted was some peace.”
“It’s not the same, Kensey. Not even close.” He rubbed his jaw. “Wait here. I need to talk to Rossi.”
Blake led him away, speaking in a voice too low for me to catch … and I realized that he hadn’t cleared up a single thing. No blanks were filled. I was still none the wiser. And I was pretty sure that, even though his baggage had just approached me in a goddamn parking lot, he had no intention of explaining any of it. Why else would he be over there, whispering?
Muscles fairly quivering with anger, I yanked open my car door, hopped inside, and drove off in a screech of tires. A glimpse in my rear-view mirror showed Blake rushing to his own car. The bastard was going to follow me.
I cursed, realizing I had nowhere to go. I had no apartment, and I certainly wasn’t going to his place. Sarah was out with Bastien, so I couldn’t go to her apartment. It was Cade’s day off work, but if I went to his place, there would be bloodshed for sure. Cade would yell at him for upsetting me, and Blake would then pounce on him—happy to have an excuse to fight him. There was my mother’s house, of course, but I didn’t want to bring her into this.
And then I had an idea.
I changed direction, determination flooding me, and ignored my ringing cell as I drove. An occasional glimpse in the rear-view mirror showed that Blake wasn’t far behind. But that was a good thing, because I needed him for this.
Finally, I arrived at my destination and pulled up outside the Vault’s private parking garage, near the keypad. I didn’t have the code, so I waited, fingers tapping the steering wheel.
Mere moments after his car parked behind mine he was standing at my open window. I didn’t look at him as I spoke. “You have two choices. You can tell me what the hell you’ve been hiding, or we part ways right here, right now. I respect that you needed time. I gave it to you. But you told me that this situation would never touch me. Well, it did. And it took me off-guard. I didn’t know what I was dealing with, I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t have a fucking clue what she was talking about.”
I met his gaze then. “Like it or not, I’ve been brought into this ‘project’ of yours, just as you were brought into my mess. I didn’t try pushing you out of my situation—I made sure you knew exactly what you were dealing with to protect yourself, and I respected your right to involve yourself. Now you need to do the same for me, or you need to let me walk away without any fuss. Make your choice.”
He didn’t speak. Just stared at me, eyes hard and unreadable. I didn’t back down, though. I wouldn’t. And I let him see that in my expression.
He pushed away from the window and backed up a step. Still, he didn’t speak. Instead, he punched in the code on the keypad.
My heart slammed against my ribs, and I let out a shaky breath. I drove into the garage, whipped my car into an empty space, and climbed out. Standing near the trunk of my car, arms folded, I waited as he parked his Maserati.
Crossing to me, he looked at me in silence for a long moment. “You sure you want to know, Kensey? You sure you want to tumble even further down the rabbit hole?”
“I’m sure.”
He didn’t look relieved. “All right.” He put his face close to mine. “But know this: If you say you can’t deal with what you learn, I won’t just tip my hat and let you walk away from me. We’ll go somewhere and talk. And talk and talk and talk until you tell me you can deal with it, because I fucking refuse to give you up.”
Okay, well that took me off-guard. I didn’t respond, though. Just followed him through the door and into the elevator. When he jammed a key into the B3 button on the number panel and then pressed it, my heart started to gallop. I realized then that a part of me didn’t want to know what happened on that floor, because what if it was something I couldn’t handle? Something I couldn’t ignore?
No, Emma had told me that it wasn’t ‘so bad.’ Blake himself had said that ‘nothing terrible’ occurred down there. And then I remembered another thing that Emma had said …
“I’m hoping you’ll show the same spunk you showed at the garage when you stumbled upon that scene, because I think you may just have the power to hurt Blake. And I’d hate to see him hurt again.”
At that moment, the elevator doors slid open. I stepped out, and I gaped. Not in horror or disgust. No, I just really hadn’t expected this. At all. Really hadn’t expected to see the large space filled with people that were crowded around boxing rings and mixed martial art cages. Their shouting and hooting mixed with the sounds of the fighters grunting and growling.
An underground fight club—or fight floor.
As we walked around, I could hear fists and feet thudding into flesh; hear the clanging of wood as fighters hit the floor hard. Some spectators held beers, others held cash, as they egged on whichever fighter they’d bet their money on. Somewhere, a referee whistled and—
Well, fuck. I blinked, recognizing one of the boxers as a goddamn TV. host.
“You’re not looking at the dregs of society, coming here to brawl,” Blake told me. “These people pay to come here, let off steam, and gamble. Millionaires, politicians, actors, models—hell, even a vicar.”
“Models and actors? But their faces—”
“It can be specified before a fight that the face or other areas are out of bounds.” He studied me closely, searching for something. Probably judgement.
“You didn’t need to keep this from me. I could have handled it, Blake. It might not be legal, but it’s consensual and I can see you have referees and security guards patrolling. I wouldn’t have collapsed in horror about it; I’m not fucking delicate.” And he knew that, so there had to be something I was missing. There had to be … And then it hit me. “The bruises I’ve seen on you. Not your PT.”
“No,” he admitted.
“The weekend of the carnival, you had a big bruise on your jaw—I saw it on the photos.”
“I’d had a particularly bad fight the previous Sunday, and I came out of it with a lot of bruises and swellings. They took their time fading. That was why I didn’t meet with you.”
“You were giving the injuries more time to heal and fade.”
He inclined his head. “I never met with you on weekdays for the same reason. It used to be my routine to come here on a Sunday night and let off steam. By the time I saw you the following weekend, most of the injuries had faded.”
“You haven’t done it lately.” I’d made a passing comment a few days ago that his PT had been going easy on him lately, because there had been no bruises. Now I understood. “You couldn’t fight because I was living with you, and that meant I’d have seen the injuries.”
“Yes.”
“Ordinarily, you fight here a lot.”
“Yes.”
“I could have handled that too.” I didn’t like it, but I could handle it.
He covered the small space between us in one stride, but he didn’t touch me. “What’s the question swimming around your head right now? Ask me.”
“Why would you fight here so often?” Every Sunday was a lot. Considering it part of his weekly routine was odd.
“The answer is … I need it sometimes.”
My brows lowered. “You … need it?”
“I need that feeling of my fist crashing into something. And I even need the pain of a fist smashing into me. In short, I like giving pain, and I like receiving it.”
My stomach bottomed out, because the first thought that floated into my head was: Just like Michael.
“Not sexually. I’m not into sadomasochism or anything like that. I don’t have a temper. I don’t lose my shit. I just … I just need this.” And here, he got what he needed in a controlled, consensual environment.
I swallowed. “I don’t get it.”
“The pain … it helps me. I know how fucked up that sounds, Kensey. I do. Just as I know that learning the person you’re sleeping with likes to dole out pain must be a knife to the gut, especially since Bale is much the same. I read articles about him, because I wanted to be sure I didn’t say anything that would push a button for you, and that’s how I learned that he and I have this fucked-up thing in common. And that’s why I didn’t want us to ever have this conversation.”
I shoved my hand into my hair, struggling to absorb everything—not wanting to absorb it. “Who are you beating up each time you get into those rings and cages? Who put that rage there?”
His face tightened. “I don’t want you down here. Come upstairs to my office with me. This isn’t me evading your questions. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Just not here.”
Since I really needed to sit down, I nodded and walked with him back to the elevator on wobbly legs, my heart hammering in my chest. I felt cold. Confused. Off-balance.
He didn’t touch me, maybe sensing I needed space or maybe worried I’d reject him. But when we reached the club’s main floor, he apparently decided to try his luck, because he held out his hand.
I just stared at it, uncertain. It wasn’t that I was now scared of him or something. It was just that my mind was in absolute chaos, and I didn’t really know what to think. I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. No wonder Cade had told me to be prepared.
“I’d never hurt you, Kensey.” The hint of pain in his eyes broke my resolve. I put my hand in his, and he gave it a little squeeze. “You have every reason not to believe me when I say this, but you are safe with me.” He pressed a kiss to my hair. “Now we talk.”
Keeping me protected from the crowd with his body, he guided me across the busy dance floor and over to the flight of iron steps. Once inside his office, he locked the door and ushered me over to the leather sofas near the tinted window. Eager to hear what he had to say, I sat down and rested my clasped hands on my lap.
“Want a drink?”
I shook my head.
Instead of sitting beside me, he sank into the sofa opposite me and draped his arm over the back of it. “You once asked me if I’d ever been in a relationship. I told you I was seventeen at the time. I was seventeen when it ended. I was fourteen when it started. Liza Montgomery was my chemistry teacher.”
My mouth almost dropped open. Speechless, all I could do was stare at him.
“It started just after my mom died. I was a mess. Feeling angry and guilty because she’d stayed in that burning house looking for me, no matter how much I screamed for her to get out—she couldn’t hear me. She died in my bedroom.” He swallowed. “I was picking fights all the time. I liked fighting. Liked the pain, liked venting. Liza played the concerned teacher. She often kept me behind after class to ‘talk.’ It wasn’t long before she made a move.”
My hands fisted. If I’d known earlier that that fucking bitch had taken advantage of a grieving teenager, I’d have ripped her hair right out of her head. “What happened?”
“I was a teenage boy ruled by hormones. She was hot and kind of young for a teacher. What do you think happened?”
“I mean, how did you come to hate her so much? You have every right to hate her. I fucking hate her. But I’m guessing this somehow ties in with Levi’s suicide. Am I right?”
“Yes.” He tapped his fingers on the back of the sofa. “Turns out I wasn’t the first kid she’d … groomed, I guess you could say. I also wasn’t the only kid she was toying with at the time. But I didn’t know that until Levi killed himself, leaving a note to say that he couldn’t live without her.”
“She’d broken it off with him?”
“Yes. I don’t know why exactly—he didn’t explain that in the letter. Maybe he wanted them to go public, or maybe he was just getting too old for her. If it’s the latter, she probably would have dumped me pretty soon after that.”
Personally, I believed it was likely to be the latter. She obviously had a preference for young boys—maybe out of some twisted sexual deviancy, or maybe because the taboo of sleeping with her students was a thrill for her.
“Levi never mentioned her to me until it ended. He didn’t tell me her name. Just said he’d been seeing a married woman and that she’d dumped him.”
“Wait, she’s married?”
“Not anymore. Her ex-husband knew about it. Didn’t care. She once told me that he didn’t give a damn about anything she did as long as she kept her nose out of his business. Anyway, as for Levi … I didn’t even think that the woman he was seeing could be Liza. It really didn’t occur to me. It should have done. It should have clicked in my brain, but it didn’t.”
“Why would it have done? I’m guessing she told you that she cared for you, that she said she would never have broken so many rules to be with you if she hadn’t. Considering she’d put her career on the line, it must have been easy to believe she loved you. Am I right?” At his curt nod, I added, “Well then, you were hardly going to assume she was also sleeping with others.”
If my words at all helped, Blake didn’t show it. “Levi might not have mentioned her if I hadn’t demanded to know why he looked like shit all the time and had turned into someone I didn’t know. He’d lost weight, stopped taking care of himself, clearly wasn’t sleeping, and didn’t change his clothes for days at a time. His grades went to shit, he didn’t want to leave his house—a house he hated—and he dropped out of the football team.”
“Sounds like he was depressed.” My mother had deteriorated like that several times.
“He told me a little about her, but not her name. Said he needed her. Loved her. Couldn’t live without her. You know what I did? Told him to stop being a bitch. Said no girl or woman was worth putting himself through the ringer for and that there were plenty more out there.”
The self-recrimination in his tone was painful to hear. “You were a teenager, Blake. You couldn’t have known just how far down he’d sunk.”
Blake ignored that. “He went to her house, uninvited, and saw me leaving. More, he saw me kissing Liza on the porch.”
I flexed my fingers, wishing I’d slapped the sick bitch when I had the chance. “Did he confront you?”
“No, I hadn’t known he was there until later. He thought she’d dumped him for me. He killed himself in my house, Kensey. I came home, went up to my bedroom, and found him hanging there. And I found his note, detailing everything.” Blake clenched his teeth. “He died hating me. Hating me so much that he wanted me to find him that way.”
Oh, fuck. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his friend had killed himself, blaming him for his own misery, he’d also died in Blake’s room … just as his mother had died of smoke inhalation in his old room.
I would have reached out. Grabbed his hand. Something. But his body language screamed, “Don’t touch me.”
“There was an investigation, and it all came out. She was arrested, but not convicted.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because I lied to the police and said that it hadn’t happened. I said that I was the one who wrote Levi’s note, wanting to get my teacher in trouble.”
I looked at him, perplexed. “But … why would you do that?”
“Same reason the other kids kept quiet. She had videos, Kensey.”
My belly churned. “Videos?”
“She’d secretly filmed herself with us for her own sick reasons. Maybe the videos were like trophies to her, I don’t know. She confronted me outside school and showed me a sample. From that angle, you couldn’t tell it was her, but you could see me perfectly clear. She threatened that if I told the truth, all the videos she had of me and the others would be posted online—particularly on child-porn sites. Like I said, I was fourteen when it started. That’s just the right age for some sick fuckers. Once something like that is online, Kensey, you can never really get it off. Videos get shared. Downloaded. Copied. Put in physical format.
“Me and the other boys got together to talk about it, and we made the decision to keep our mouths shut. We didn’t want to live knowing that sick bastards were jerking off at the sight of us. Didn’t want to live knowing someone could recognize us from the videos or that they could be one day used against us. Didn’t want them haunting us all our lives. We also didn’t want Levi’s memory stained by them. We couldn’t save him, but we could at least be sure there weren’t what were effectively porn videos of him floating around.”
Fucking hell. “So she got away with it?”
“There are different kinds of justice. I haven’t hurt her, Kensey, if that’s what you’re wondering. I never rolled her up in a fucking carpet. But me, Bastien, and Tara have made her and her ex-husband pay in other ways. They divorced shortly after I bought and took apart the last of his businesses.”
“Hasn’t she threatened to post the videos online if you don’t leave her alone?”
“A year after Levi’s death, she and her ex-husband came back from a dinner party one night to find their home ablaze. Very little survived the fire. Shame that.”
I didn’t need to ask if he’d had something to do with it. Considering Blake’s mother died in a house fire, it might have surprised me that he’d set someone else’s home alight. But he’d clearly known Liza and her ex-husband were out of the house, and I could hardly blame him for wanting to be sure the recordings were destroyed. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that someone had explicit videos of you that could be uploaded onto child-porn sites at any time. As he’d said, it would have haunted him all his life. “And you’re sure the vids were destroyed?”
“Positive. See, she was blackmailing Bastien.”
“What?”
“Bastien was angrier than the rest of us. Like Levi, he’d loved her. Trusted her. Allowed her to do … things to and with him that he hadn’t been comfortable doing, but he’d gone along with it all just to make her happy. So, yeah, he was running on rage. He kept loitering near her house, following her around, and turning up wherever she was just to psych her out. It worked. He scared her. So she threatened that if he didn’t back off and agree to pay her a monthly sum, she’d upload some pictures of him onto the web; pictures in which she was wearing Dominatrix gear and doing some heavily kinky stuff to him. It wasn’t about money for her, she was trying to keep him under control.”
Oh my God. “She has no soul at all, does she?”
“No, baby, she doesn’t.”
“Did she blackmail you or the others?”
“Me? No. But then, she didn’t have any pictures of me in kinky situations—I hadn’t jumped through sexual hoops for her. If she tried blackmailing the others, they didn’t say so. After the fire, Bastien told her he wouldn’t pay her another penny unless she could prove she still had the pictures. But she couldn’t. She threatened to upload his videos instead, but he called her bluff and said he didn’t believe they’d survived the fire. He also said that if she could prove she had them, he’d pay her double what he’d been paying her to stop her from uploading them. She’s a greedy bitch, Kensey—if she’d still had the videos, she’d have shown him a clip so that she could get her hands on his money and keep him under her control.”
“Free from the threat of the videos, did you go to the police with the whole story?”
“No, because we would have had to explain why we lied in our statements. We would have had to talk about the videos and tell the police the ins and outs of what happened. Shame kept us quiet. Shame and guilt over Levi.”
Needless shame and guilt—the boys had done nothing wrong. But I suspected that those words wouldn’t comfort Blake. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew intellectually that the emotions were senseless. But what you knew and what you felt weren’t always the same.
“Bastien, Tara, and I don’t spend every waking minute of our lives concocting schemes to make her pay,” said Blake. “We leave her alone for years at a time. We give her a chance to rebuild her life. Get a new job. Make new friends. Find herself a boyfriend. Then, just when it’s all going great …”
“You swoop in.”
“She once made our lives hell.” He shrugged. “We’re just returning the favor.”
And who could blame them for that?
“She got engaged a few months ago to a very rich man in Louisiana. She gets engaged a lot. Very good at making the male gender fall for her.”
“You anonymously sent him information about her arrest and the investigation that took place, didn’t you?”
“Yes. We did the same to her other fiancés. She no doubt claimed it was all lies, but none of them ever gave her the benefit of the doubt—probably because they were all high-society people like politicians, who can’t risk being associated with that kind of scandal. I don’t know.”
I absentmindedly rubbed at my upper arm. “How did Tara fuck up when we were in Mexico? It was her who called you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. Liza managed to get a job as an online tutor, doing webinars and such. To me, that doesn’t mean her students would be safe. She could groom and lure them to her—she’s good at grooming. Tara should have been watching her closely enough to notice, since she long ago declared that she’d ensure Liza never worked with children again.”
“I take it Liza no longer has the job.” Which meant she’d lost her fiancé and her job in short order. “So, once again, her world collapsed around her. And she came to me, thinking it would make you show up.”
He slowly leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs. “I’m so fucking sorry that she got near you. I never thought that would ever happen. Didn’t even realize she was in Redwater. She hasn’t been back for years.” He tentatively laid his hand on my bare knee, eyes drinking in my face. “I didn’t want her to ever breathe your air, let alone speak to you.”
I could understand that, since I didn’t want Michael anywhere near him. “Thank you for trusting me with all that.” He’d had the choice of letting me walk away, but he hadn’t. “But I’m going to reiterate that you don’t bear any blame in what Levi did. You don’t deserve to have someone pound on you with their fists.”
“I like the pain, Kensey,” he said, his tone something between sad and bitter.
“You say it helps you. I don’t understand.”
“I’ve never tried to explain it before. It clears my mind. Makes me feel … real. At peace. Alive, like after a really tough workout. I can focus better afterward. I feel more in control.”
And he’d had control wiped away from him several times in his life.
It was little wonder that demons lurked inside him—he lost his mother because she’d refused to come out of the fire until she found him. He lost a father he’d been unable to connect with, leaving him with a messed-up stepmother who’d made sexual advances several times. His teacher had groomed, abused, and fooled him into thinking she cared for him. And his friend had committed suicide in Blake’s bedroom, hating him.
I snapped out of my thoughts when Blake’s hand squeezed my knee gently.
“Having you living with me wasn’t the only reason I stopped fighting, Kensey,” he said. “I made the decision to stop on the day you confronted me about the pictures that Smith sent you. I saw how hurt you were that I’d lied to you. I fucking hated it. I didn’t want to have to lie to you again, so I stayed away from the rings and the cages.”
My brow furrowed. “But you said you need the pain.”
“I need you more.” His thumb drew a circle on my knee. “I knew that if I wanted you in my life, I had to give it up. Completely. When I want something badly, I do what it takes to get it. I knew this was what it would take to keep you. I’d already started to need it less since you came along. You give me a different kind of peace. One that’s real, not brought on by endorphins. I got to learn the difference. Like I’ve said before, you’re my good thing. Don’t ask me to watch you walk away. I can’t do that. I won’t.” His jaw set, telling me he meant it. “It makes me a selfish bastard, I know, but I won’t.”
I didn’t want to walk away. I knew that if I did, he’d go back to the way things were before me, and the thought of that made my throat thicken. It wasn’t the fights that bothered me; it was the reasons behind him having them. No matter what he thought, it wasn’t as simple as liking to give and receive pain. It wasn’t as simple as finding the endorphins somewhat addictive. Whether he saw it or not, he was punishing himself each time he let someone hurt him. Whenever he stood in a ring or cage, battering his opponent, he was striking out at those who’d hurt him. And I’d bet that one of the people he was angry with was Levi, and that only made him feel guiltier—which just fed his subconscious urge to punish himself.
It was a vicious cycle, and I didn’t want him to be part of it anymore. I didn’t want that for him.
“If anyone deserves ‘normal,’ Kensey, it’s you. And I don’t just mean because you have Bale as a stepfather. I know the weight of your mother’s fragility sits heavily on your shoulders. I know that being living proof of another person’s infidelity has left its mark on you. These are my marks, and they’re ugly. But I need you to say you can deal with them.”
I blew out a breath. His marks were more than just ugly. But Blake didn’t need my baggage any more than I needed his, did he? Still, he was here. He accepted it. Accepted me. And I truly didn’t know how to walk away from him. It would rip me apart because … because … well, I loved the bastard, didn’t I?
Still, I needed to be sure of something. “You mean it when you say that you’re done with the fights? There are a lot of things I can accept and deal with, Blake—you hurting yourself isn’t one of them. Be honest, you wouldn’t like me climbing into a ring, week after week, getting all banged up—especially when it’s in search of some kind of artificial peace.”
He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm. “You’re right, I wouldn’t want that. I’d fucking hate it, and I’d do what it took to make you stop. I won’t lie to you, baby, the pull to get in one of those rings or cages hasn’t gone. It might be a while before it does. It’s been my quick fix for a long time. But I made the decision to stop, and I’ll stick with it. Never again will I do it, Kensey. Never again.”
His voice rung with a solemn sincerity. I studied his face, seeing that same earnestness there. It was impossible to doubt him. And I wanted to believe him. Badly. Maybe he’d stick by his promise; maybe he wouldn’t. But he deserved a chance, didn’t he? And he’d already been hurt so much … What kind of person would I be if, after baring his soul that way and trusting me with his secrets, I walked out on him? I was better than that, and he deserved better.
I took a deep, cleansing breath, letting the tension in my muscles ebb. “Okay. But if you break that promise, I’ll join you in that ring and kick your epic ass myself.”