The Revenge by Tijan

I hadn’t hacked my way into finding out the truth. I wish I had, now.

I sucked in my breath, the plaid fabric scratching my stomach, just over my ribs, and I cursed in a hiss.

I really hated plaid.

I hated the look. I hated the feel of it. I hated even the smell of it. And yes, it definitely had a smell. Stale death. Bottle that crap up and someone would make a fortune in a nasty prank sort of gift. Can you imagine? Instead of sending a bag of dicks or an envelope stuffed with exploding glitter, you send a can of perfume and they open it to smell stale death?

I’m a genius, I tell ya.

Though maybe it’s just me, since I’ve only been smelling stale death for the last three weeks.

It was that long ago when we put the closed casket of Chrissy Hayes six feet under. Everyone had come out in droves. My graduate school classmates. My new friends. Professors from Hawking, classmates and teachers from undergraduate, and even people from high school. Then again, almost the entire town of Brookley showed up. Chrissy Hayes was a community legend. A nurse in the local hospital, who kicked ass in the Christmas ugly sweater competitions year after year. She was looked at like a daughter by most of the vets from the VFW, or a sister, or they just wanted to fuck her. ’Cause my mom got a lot of that, too. She was hella hot, if I do say so myself.

So there were a lot of those guys at the funeral. Guys who had dated her. Guys who wished they had dated her. Most looked at her fondly, and if they didn’t, they pretended for the day, because they took one look at the thirty-plus security guards stationed around the church, wake, cemetery and they got fake real quick. I don’t think there were a lot of those anyway.

Neighbor Carla came.

And my family.

So many of my family members came.

My grandma and grandpa. Aunt Sarah. My uncles. All my cousins. Most of them were giving Kash, Peter, and Matt stink eye, but then Seraphina and Cyclone came forward to meet the other side of my family and all of them melted. You’d have to be the psychopath who put a bullet through my mother’s brain not to soften at the sight of my little sister and brother. By the end of the weekend, Cyclone didn’t move from my grandma’s side and Seraphina walked hand in hand with my grandpa, only switching out to hold my Uncle Rich’s hand, too.

They weren’t the only family who came.

Peter’s side came, too.

His two brothers, their wives, their ex-wives, and their children. Peter’s parents had passed long ago, so it made sense why Seraphina and Cyclone took to my own grandparents so fast. And thank God I didn’t know anything about their mother’s parents, because either someone said something or maybe Payton, their aunt, had slunk away somewhere for the last month. She wasn’t there when Kash said he thought it was best if we moved into the Chesapeake estates’ main house—not just his villa but the actual house—and I hadn’t seen her since. Marie and Theresa had stepped up, and I was just glad Marie was there. Marie, who had been my first nemesis at the family’s estate, and now she’d been the glue holding everything together. Theresa ran the kitchen, but she was the second glue. She was like a crown molding.

Or maybe for me.

Maybe they’d both been the glue holding me together.

I didn’t know. That was too much thinking, something I was trying not to do so much, because when I started thinking, I started remembering, and want to know a smart person’s personal nightmare? Having a photographic memory and replaying your entire childhood, where you were raised by your recently buried mother, over and over and over and … You get my drift.

So, yeah.

Not thinking. Another habit I was trying to pick up.

It worked some of the days. Most days, not so much.

“Bailey.”

Ah. There they were. It was the latest person Kash sent.

I’ve been standing in a room, by myself, staring out the window, not talking to someone, and there was always a timer. It wasn’t just my family, but it was my friends, too. Torie. Tamara. Even Melissa and Scott. They were around, taking turns checking on me. The only one who was in tune with me, who knew I’d probably stepped away so I wouldn’t lose my mind, was Kash.

My man.

I loved him.

Thinking back to the girl I’d been when I first met him—she never stood a chance. It was like her job was to fall for Kash. It was written in the stars. It was inevitable. But all the shit that came afterward hadn’t been included in the fine print. She had no clue that choosing her father over her mother, choosing to fall in love with Kashton Colello, would eventually make her lose the one person who’d been there all her life.

Brain, shut off.

That was my own checkout.

When I started thinking thoughts like that, I automatically shut down. It was a door closing, and on the other side was a mess of catastrophe, hysteria, panic, hatred, loathing, and just so many emotions.

The girl (see, still talking in third person here) needed to go into zombie mode. So that’s what I did.

It was at the same time that the person chosen to check on me stepped next to me, and I turned even before they spoke another word. It was Matt. His face was closed off, but there was a distant hint of concern in his eyes. He had a glass of bourbon in hand, but to be honest, he rarely went without it lately, and he took one look at me, sighed, put his free hand in his suit pants pocket, and then turned to look out the window with me.