The Revenge (The Insiders Trilogy #3)(4)

He murmured, right before taking a sip, “I don’t blame you one bit.”

I was hiding.

He knew it.

I now knew he knew it, and just like that, without another word spoken, we both looked out the window. I had no clue where we were. That was another given these days. I rarely knew what we were doing, where we were going. I just went. I showed up. I stood around. I sat around. I rarely spoke, and then eventually Kash would come get me, or he’d send someone for me, and then we’d go home and we’d repeat it the next day.

Today I asked, “Where are we?”

I felt Matt’s perusal more than I heard his silence before he responded, quietly, “We’re at an event at your school. Dad donated that seventy million.”

That would explain why I saw one of my classmates earlier. And why I was in a dress that itched.

“Oh. Okay.”

That was it. That was all I had in me.

So, back to the window.

It was a good window.

I just never saw the window.





THREE

Kash


“She’s not doing good.”

I grunted at Peter’s statement, turning to him. “No shit.”

We were standing in a banquet room, surrounded by Bailey’s professors and Hawking higher-ups, and both of us were watching our girl standing at the window. Matt was with her now. Neither spoke a word, but I was glad he was there. Her brother had tuned in to how to be with her, because if you pushed her, Bailey would bolt. She couldn’t handle much, and I had actually sat and watched her turn herself off too many times to count.

“I’m glad you guys moved into the house.”

I hated it. “It’s good for Bailey to be around you guys right now.”

“That, and your apartment wasn’t safe.”

She was thinner since Chrissy’s death. Bailey always looked beautiful to me, always would, but there was a sadness that emanated from her. She looked lost at the same time. I watched as she began rubbing her chest, her finger scratching her dress, and I was feeling the same itch. Maybe it was because of my background, knowing why my parents had been murdered, who had had them murdered, and the fact he was still out there, but I hated living in a house like Peter’s. It was a mansion, but we were put up in our own section.

We were supposed to have privacy.

That wasn’t the truth.

Seraphina. Cyclone. Even Matt. Marie. Theresa. They were all stopping by, all checking on Bailey, and I couldn’t blame them. I’d have done the same if I wasn’t the one holding her in my arms. But I hated that building. Give me an apartment building with a clear escape route next to me, or my own place like the villa, and I was happy. I’d been staying at the villa almost since I first moved in with the Francis family.

I’ve always been like this. Wired. Always feeling in a corner. Waiting for my grandfather to come.

It was now.

Calhoun Bastian had delivered a devastating blow, and I hadn’t been able to fire back, not yet, but I knew I had to. God. My chest burned. I was thinking it, and it would take me away from Bailey.

And fuck my grandfather because he did his research.

He came to her school.

I thought it was about trying to scare me, to show me how close he could get to Bailey. It hadn’t been about that, and I knew it now. I knew it too late. He’d been testing me. He’d been gauging me, seeing how much I cared for her, and I showed him. Freely. Willingly. I pushed back on him, hard, and it’d been a mistake. He saw how in love with her I was.

She was my weakness. Not the Francis family anymore, but Bailey.

I wanted to hunt him down now, stop him now.

“We haven’t talked about…”

I let Peter’s statement hang between us. No. We hadn’t talked. Peter had fallen in love with Chrissy Hayes, and my grandfather had taken his woman away. What was there to talk about? I heard his tone, how he was trying to warm up to the real co nversation. And that he wanted to do it here, in a fucking college building. I wasn’t angry at Peter, but I was angry.

I was angry at everyone, everything.

I was angry because the real person I wanted to tear apart would require me to leave the woman I had hurt, the woman I loved, and I wasn’t sure if that’s what she actually needed more than anything.

God.

“Kash—”

“Don’t,” I gutted out, cutting him off.

“Kash.” He tried again.

I turned to him. “I said don’t.”

Peter swallowed. His chin firmed. He was taking what I was showing. I shook my head and turned back to watch Bailey, like I’d done a thousand times over the last three weeks.

“I need to go and you know it,” I said.

I heard his swift inhale. “She needs you.”

“She needs me to kill him more.”

The decision was made. I had to go. The sooner the better.

He frowned. “Kash.”

I shook my head. “No. You know I’m right. I’ve been fighting him using board moves. I set up chess pieces and still never saw him coming. He took her mother out. He took your woman, and that’s on me.”

“It’s not—”

“It is!”

I seared him with a look. He shouldn’t be fighting me on this. He knew. He knew more than anyone how this was my fault, how he hadn’t brought her into the family in the first place because of me, because of who I shared blood with.