Razed (Barnes Brothers #2)(76)

Keelie slid him a look, her brow going up. “Clever. Did they know you’d taken the pictures?”

“Probably suspected, but I lied, through my teeth. They couldn’t prove it. It’s pretty obvious he’s not asking her to the spring formal in the picture so the school came down on him. I had a few more of him with other students and every time he showed up around me again, I just started dropping more of them. He got the point. That summer, he ended up getting arrested. He’d jumped a kid near his house but he didn’t realize it was a cop’s kid.”

“Ouch.”

Zane flipped to the next set, the girl at the table. “Lisa. I don’t remember her last name. She was a year younger than the rest of us, smarter than almost all of us. She got treated like that nonstop. He ended up getting pulled into the office over her—her parents saw the pictures and reported him to the police. He left her alone after that.”

Keelie worried the neckline of her shirt.

“That’s Malcolm. He was sick a lot. Asthma put him in the hospital a few times and he caught the flu our senior year—it killed him.” Zane stopped for a minute, just remembering. Unable to say much more, he just flipped to the pictures of his black eye and busted mouth. “They tried to shove him in a locker. They’d done it before. I grabbed somebody’s backpack and swung it, hard enough to knock one of them down. The yelling caught the gym teacher’s attention and they had to pull us apart. I’d already been taking classes for a few months so I’d done more damage and, that time, they actually did call my parents but they didn’t say anything once they heard what those kids had tried to do to Malcolm.”

“Nobody mentioned how they were always picking on you?”

“But they weren’t,” Zane said softly. He looked at her. “I’d been the victim before. I’d decided I wasn’t going to let it happen anymore, and what’s more . . . I wasn’t going to stand by when it happened to others. If I got hurt, I got hurt. I was bigger, not as much fun to pick on. But when I waded in, that was when they turned on me. I was the troublemaker by that point.”


*

I’d been the victim . . .

Guilt swamped her and she had to turn away while the voices rose up, pealing inside her head like bells.

Stop, Price . . . help!

Katherine, let me handle this . . .

“You’re a better person than I was,” she said, her voice thick.

She looked back toward the spot where his laptop had been. It was gone, but she could still see the pictures, remember her loathing, and her anger at him. At herself. Only he’d done what she’d wished she’d had the courage to do.

“Keelie?”

His hand brushed her shoulder.

She flinched.

He didn’t let that stop him.

How surprising. As Zane closed his hands over her shoulders and pulled her back against him, she reached up, covered her hands with his. That one touch managed to both ground her and still leave her feeling so completely adrift. He pressed his lips to her temple and she shivered, confusion and frustration raging inside her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

What’s wrong . . .

Such a simple question.

Such a complicated one.

She eased away from him, although breaking that connection with him felt like she was ripping out something vital.

Moving to one of the windows that ran the length of the western wall, she pressed a hand to the smooth surface. The heat from the sun warmed it yet did nothing to warm her.

For more than a decade, she’d tried to come to grips with the guilt.

At first she’d tried to hide from it. Then she’d tried to outrun it.

Finally she’d tried to make amends. It wasn’t ever going to happen.

You can tell the truth now.

“When I was fifteen, I walked in while my stepbrother was raping a girl. His friends were watching. Egging him on.”

Slowly, she turned to face him.





Chapter Fifteen




“Wow. Which one are you?”

Travis Barnes pushed his sunglasses back on his head and studied the blonde leaning against the glass-fronted case. His eyes automatically bounced off everything inside it.

If he didn’t look at it, he could pretend it didn’t exist.

That was how he operated, as far as this went.

He’d seen some messed-up shit in his life and he’d dealt with it all just fine. Hell, Travis had done some messed-up shit.

And while he might deny it even on his deathbed, he got a little weirded out over the bizarre, painful, and private places some people chose to get pierced.

He wasn’t sure if the pieces displayed in that glass case were intended for some of those weirder places. Zach had once told all of them about a woman who’d come up to him and asked him to look at her clitoral piercing. Zach, of course, had declined. He didn’t do piercings, but he knew enough about them—and others—to leave Travis cringing.

Even Zach had been grimacing by the time he finished.

Travis didn’t get it.

Why would a woman do that?

Why would a man would pierce his cock?

One reason only, as far as he was concerned. They were insane.

Insanity explained a lot, really.

Insanity was one of the reasons he had a job. Insanity, arrogance, and stupidity. Zach and his crew made a living tattooing and piercing. Travis made a living dealing with insane, arrogant, or stupid criminals. Everybody had their quirks. His just didn’t involve shoving metal into sensitive personal bits.