Tears drip off my chin.
Sweat drips off his.
The only sound in the room is our panted breaths. Both of us stand facing each other, the entire previous night of bliss completely forgotten.
“I went home, Grayson. I went back there after I’d decided on the adoptive parents, to try to find you one last time.” I swipe more tears away, but my vision continues to blur. My entire body is shaking with the guilt and anger and heartbreak that I’ve held inside for six long, horrible years. Finally, I get to release it and it’s all coming out in one big jumbled mess. “But I got to your house that day. I thought of all of our scars, all of the pain we went through…I thought of how we were raised, and you were gone and I was in school.”
I suck in a breath, trying to quell the trembling that only continues to increase. His face softens from rage to highly annoyed impatience, and the slight shift in his demeanor fills me with confidence to continue—that he’ll understand.
“The night before, I had been flipping through channels and I saw you.” I swallow hard, remembering the shock of that moment, how everything had frozen while I stared at the man who had disappeared from my life pinning someone to an octagonal mat. “It was your first televised fight, and it was the first time I’d had any indication where you were. So I went to your dad’s house to see if he knew, but I got there and I couldn’t do it.”
I take a step forward, wrapping my fingers around his forearm. I grip him tight when he flinches but try to make him understand.
“We were so young, Grayson. I thought you hated me. And I saw you that night, winning a fight, and the look in your eyes told me you were finally happy. You were making something of yourself like you’d always wanted, and I didn’t want to take that from you.”
He opens his mouth to say something, his chest still heaving rapidly.
“I thought of how we had grown up, what it would mean for our child if I found you then. You would’ve had to quit what you were doing. I would have dropped out of college. We would have moved back to Braxton, stuck in that damn town, close to everyone we hated…and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that to you.” I tug on his arm when he stays silent, his jaw tightly clenched and his eyes narrowed into slits. “I gave our child the life you and I had always wanted. I gave him a future with people who would love him and give him the best of everything. I gave him everything we wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Fuck you,” he hisses as tears spill over his eyes. His chin shakes and quivers, and he yanks his arm away from me. Wiping the tears away, he shakes his head back and forth.
I crumble to my knees in front of him, a sobbing mess. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, I really am. But I think…even if you had known, I still would have wanted that for him. He’s getting everything he needs, everything we could never give him.”
I stand up, my legs shaking and feeling like they could give out on me all over again.
Grayson grinds his teeth together and sneers. “I’m a dad, and you fucking took that from me without me even getting a fucking say in it. That boy,” he pauses, pushing his fingers to his chest again, “my boy, isn’t getting everything he needs because he’s not…with…his…fucking…father!”
I jump back from the roar that echoes and bounces off every corner of the large open space.
“Get out.”
My eyes snap to his. “Grayson—”
He lifts a hand, silencing me with a look. “Get your fucking ass out of my room and out of this hotel.”
“Please, Grayson.”
“Shut the fuck up.” His hand slashes in the direction of the front door. “Get out of my sight before I do or say something I’m going to regret. When I can fucking stand to even think of you again, you’ll be hearing from either me or my lawyers.”
My mouth drops and gapes wide open. Lawyers?
He must read the thought in my eyes because he smiles—an evil, cold smile that sends a shiver down my spine. “Lawyers, Kennedy. Because I’m going to do whatever I have to do to make you pay for this and to get my son. Now get. The fuck. Out.”
I nod, my chin quivering and tears falling before I’m halfway to the door. I hear footsteps to my left and see Sarah scurrying down the hallway toward me. I shake my head, telling her not to touch me now when she whispers, “I’ll go get our things, then.”
I nod and bite down on my upper lip to hide the sobs that are fighting to scratch their way out of my throat.
“Kennedy.”
I look back over my shoulder to see Grayson still glaring at me as if I’ve become his next opponent. And I think in a sense I have, because I knew this would happen. I knew he’d despise me, and it’s my fault.
“When I call, you better answer.”
I nod twice before I feel Sarah’s arm wrap around my shoulder as she comes up next to me.
She ushers me out of the room, into the elevator, and somehow she manages to hand me my shoes and my purse, helping me get them on before we hit the street.
Thirteen
Grayson
Fucking hell. I’ve never been so pissed—so full of rage that I finally understand the meaning of “seeing red.” It dances at the edges of my vision like wild flames. I’m hot and sweating. My chest burns, scorching everything inside of me.
“Legend.”
I open my eyes to see Lynx and Landon standing several feet away from me, unreadable expressions on their matching faces.
It looks like a mixture of compassion and wariness. I don’t fucking blame them. The urge to punch something or someone is screaming at me. My knuckles hurt. Fuck, all my muscles ache right now.
“What?” I growl, my lips curving. My jaw is clenched so tight that I feel the pain radiate to my ears.
They look at each other, their damn silent-twin communication they do all the time that drives me crazy, and then Landon tosses my gym bag at my chest.
I clasp it easily—the weight hitting me is nothing compared to the one that’s bearing down on my shoulders.
A son. I have a damn son. I have someone walking around on this earth with my DNA inside him, and I never knew about it.
How could she do this to me?
“Let’s take it out in the cage,” Landon says, already moving toward the door.
He’s right, it’d be better. The healthier option for sure. Definitely the more sane one.
But fuck it. I don’t want the body-numbing exercise.
I want mind-numbing alcohol—something I never reach for when I’m angry because it’s too close to how I grew up.
But between my father’s visit…the photo…
I drop the bag on the floor, completely unsatisfied by the thump it makes when it hits the ground, and head for the bar in the corner of the living room.
“You go to the gym,” I say, keeping my back to the silent men. “I’m getting fucking wasted.”
I have a scotch in my hand, highball full, no ice, when their footsteps approach me at my back.
“All right then,” Lynx says and reaches for the bottle. “We’ll get fucking wasted.”
The urge to tell them to leave me alone is strong. There’s nothing they can do for me, nothing they can say that will make any of this better.
Nothing will silence the barrage of questions pummeling my brain at the moment.
I take a large swallow, grimacing as the alcohol slides down my throat.
“Almost six,” I mutter to myself when the glass is half-emptied. I don’t know anything about kids—absolutely nothing except that when they’re babies they crap a lot and cry more. “Is he in school?”
Lynx pours himself a glass and slides another filled one to Landon. Both of them are silent, but I’m not surprised. They don’t know shit about kids, either.
“Kindergarten?” Landon says after he takes his first drink.
I look down into an empty glass and reach for the bottle.
Kindergarten. First grade? I have no clue. I have no clue what he looks like. If he has my hair or my eyes. If he likes sports. If he’s smart. I don’t know what makes my kid cry or what makes him laugh. If he likes to be tickled or thrown high in the air.
One glass turns to two. Two turns into three. I drink so much I lose track, and nothing else is spoken. Lynx and Landon leave me to my thoughts as the late morning turns to afternoon, afternoon turns to night, and emptied bottles are scattered all over the fucking penthouse.
I just know I’ll figure out a plan in the morning, figure out a way to get my kid back because he never should have been taken from me in the first place.
And then I’ll figure out what to do with Kennedy—a woman who, just hours ago, I worshipped with my lips and my hands and my dick. A woman I wanted to prove myself to. A woman who I knew, even though I hadn’t admitted it, I wanted to be with.
Drunk and tired, ready to pass out on the leather couch, one arm draped over the back, I close my eyes and all I can see is her.
I see the sadness and the fear in her eyes, the pain lashing through her as I shouted at her, accusing her. Who can blame her? I was a fucking prick.
All I want to do is pull her into my arms and comfort her.
I want to admit to her that all those years ago, when we had shared our dreams of having kids and the life we would want to give them…she was the only one I imagined sharing that with. When we’d talked about what we’d do differently, how we’d insist on family night dinners and homemade birthday cakes, I had always envisioned Kennedy by my side, being my partner through all of it. We would raise our family together.