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Fane

After

I knew there were people on the other side of the glass, watching me as I sat in the interrogation room where they’d led me before removing the handcuffs.

The sort of violence my father had lived by wasn’t something I ever cared for. It had surrounded me growing up and seeped into the walls of my childhood until it became the background hum of my existence. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with it—maybe because it wasn’t a decision at all. It was just always there, this quiet, constant vow.

The reality was, I didn’t need to lay a finger on someone to make myself heard. I didn’t need blood on my knuckles to get the results I wanted. Ironically, my penchant for silence had turned into the very thing that made people pay attention when I eventually did.

There was only ever one time I released the hold I had on that part of me, and that was the same night my dad left and didn’t come back.

After that, I’d come close just once.

That time had been tonight—or maybe last night now—just before I entered Darling. I was ten minutes out from seeing the sign that was welcoming me back to the only place I’d ever really want to be. The place that held everything that was important to me. Another seven minutes or so, and I would have been home.

That thought made me desperate. It made me fucking murderous.

Instead, I was pulled over, arrested on-site for the murder of someone whose name didn’t ring a single bell, and then brought here.

It was in that moment when they pulled me from my truck that the pulsing need to turn all my fury and pain and fucking unhinged fear onto them beckoned me like nothing else ever had.

But I knew better. That had never been who I was.

No, my beast was something else entirely.

Silent. Purposeful. Intentional. Patient.

So, here I sat, still absentmindedly rubbing the spot on my wrist where the cuffs had pinched, waiting for someone to come in.

I’d been here for going on six hours, and I knew that they could hold me here for another forty-two. If I were a betting man, I’d say that they were trying to get me on edge—hours alone in a silent room. Desperate to get out, to speak to anyone, that I was willing to confess to something when I wasn’t even fully aware of what even happened.

Too bad they didn’t know that was my fucking happy place.

Well, almost.

I’d been read my rights, but whatever lawyer I was promised hadn’t shown up and they’d taken my phone even though it had died about an hour after I’d called Ash.

The only thing that delayed me leaving Artington was checking my truck. I’d been separated from it for a good portion of the day while it sat in the parking lot of the Mackenzie Co. high-rise downtown. Declan wasn’t a particularly smart guy, so figuring out what he—or someone working for him—had done to my truck only took half an hour.

That was thirty minutes that kept me from Cali. Thirty minutes I couldn’t get back. But after tightening the lug nuts on the tires that had been loosened and removing the wad of cloth stuffed into the tailpipe, I was on my way, driving as fast as I could.

I swallowed down the way my vision turned red at the knowledge this was exactly what I knew he wanted to happen, that he was keeping me from getting to her even now. Even after he was dead.

And I knew that he was. Dead.

There wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that the second Ash set foot into that house, Declan’s seconds had become numbered.

My head snapped to the side when the door to the room opened and the two men who had arrested me walked in, grim looks already on their haggard faces.

“Mr. Mackenzie, my name is Detective Dozen, and this is Detective Ambros.” He stared at me like he was waiting for me to let them know what a pleasure it was to finally have them introduce themselves.

I just stared at them and waited for him to spit out whatever he was here to say.

“You were arrested for the murder of Tinsley Benshaw. Do you know who that is?” He opened the folder he’d brought in with him and slid out a picture before setting it in front of me.

The girl couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. Blue eyes, not as bright as Ash’s but close. I flicked my eyes from the photo up to the man who had to have the stupidest-looking mustache I’d ever fucking seen.

“No.”

“Does she look familiar to you here?” He pulled out another image of the same girl, except in this image, she didn’t have a single item of clothing on her. Her skin was a gray hue, those same blue eyes were open, unseeing, dull. Her body was littered with bloody bite marks and bruises and there was a laceration just below her right collarbone.

I lifted my eyes from the image back to the detective’s milky-brown ones. “No.”

They were silent for a second before the other detective leaned forward onto the desk. “We obtained a warrant to go through your phone, to search your car, the whole nine yards, Fane. Do you know that your DNA is all over that young girl?”

“What DNA?”

“Your hair.” He spoke so seriously that it took real effort not to fucking laugh in his face. “I’ll admit, it was odd to see hair sprinkled all along Miss Benshaw’s body, but it wouldn’t be the first time a killer has left such an idiotic calling card.”

“When did she die?”

“Thursday afternoon.”

“I wasn’t even in Artington then.”

“We know.”

I knew I was looking at them like they were the stupidest that Artington Law Enforcement had to offer. “You arrested me for a crime you knew I didn’t commit?”

They looked at each other before Mustache spoke to me again. “Do you know anyone that might want to frame you for murder, Fane?”

“No.” That wasn’t wholly true, and the reality of it made me clench my fists. “If you know I didn’t kill her, why am I still here?”

“You worked with Declan Thomas.”

His name made my blood roar through my ears. “He tried to kill my wife.”

“Miss Grey isn’t your wife.”

“Semantics.” I stared at him until the little vein in his forehead started to throb in a way that looked painfully uncomfortable. The two detectives looked at one another again in a way that made it very clear that of the three of us, I was the only one here that didn’t know what was going on. The only reason I could gather that they were still asking me these stupid as fuck questions was because they thought I was in on whatever was going on.

“We don’t believe you killed Tinsley”

“Great. Can I go?”

“We actually know who did.”

“Can I go?” I asked again, this time through clenched teeth, my jaw aching from the effort.

“It was Declan Thomas.” He paused, watching me closely, as if gauging how I’d react to the blow he was about to land.

Then he dropped it.

“Your brother.”

* * *

“My what?”

Slowly, like every page he pulled out of the folder weighed a thousand tons, the detective pulled out images of me going all the way back to when I was seventeen.

There was me at my old high school, at the gym, at the house my mom and I never left. Then me, grown up and out of that house. Working at the bar, leaving the apartment building I’d shared with Ash, me with Cali when we first met.

It was clear with those early photos that he had no interest in Cali. She was cropped out, cut off, ignored.

But then newer photos began to appear.

Photos from Darling. Of Cali and me at home, and then just Cali. I was the one cut off, cropped out.

It was like this fucked-up part of my brain knew what was coming next. It didn’t surprise me the way it probably should have to see photos of Cali and me at the waterfall in Darling. Of her splayed out on the rock, back arched.

Photo after photo hit the table. Different angles, some fucking closer than the others. And then photos of us at home, through the open slats of the bedroom window.

My hand slammed down on the table, the sound reverberating off the walls as both detectives jumped, their chairs scraping back across the linoleum.

I slowly gathered the photos into a neat pile and flipped them upside down. “Look at these photos again, and it’ll be the last goddamn thing you ever fucking do.”

“That sounds like a threat, Mr. Mackenzie.”

“Take it however you’d like.” My voice was low, deadly. “I’m not leaving without these photos.”

“They’re evidence.”

“Evidence of what? That your suspect had a fucking fetish for my wife?”

“She’s not your—”

“I hope you finish that sentence.”

Detective Dozen, a name that sounded more like a joke with every passing second, closed his mouth with an audible snap.

“Your brother—”

“I’m an only child.” I cut him off. My stomach rolled with the idea of being related to that piece of shit.

“Declan is your father’s son with a different woman.”

Detective Ambros reached for another folder that he had tucked under his arm and pulled out another image of a woman I didn’t recognize.

It occurred to me then that Declan was almost exactly two years younger than me. The only thing I felt at the realization that there was another version of me and my mom just two years behind, likely enduring the same things we did, was pity.

The woman stared back at me through the photo with dead, sad eyes. Eyes that were almost black, just like her son’s.

It gave me a sick sort of satisfaction knowing that neither of the children that my father sired looked anything like him. Like the universe was doing its best to erase him from memory.

I also learned that where I tried to turn myself into nothing in order to escape any possibility of being anything like my father, Declan had taken to his particular tastes like a moth to a flame.

I sat there and listened while the detectives talked about how the injuries that both he and his mother sustained showed a pattern of abuse in the home even though nothing was ever admitted.

I learned that he lived down the street from me but went to a different school across town. I learned that’s where my father went when I told him if he stepped foot in the house again that I’d kill him, knowing he saw it in my eyes for the truth those words held.

From the ages of fifteen to eighteen, Declan was hospitalized twice, once for a skull fracture and once for a knife wound just below his collarbone. And just before he turned eighteen, his mother died.

“How did she die?” I didn’t need the question answered for me to be sure of the answer.

My head was pounding with the information they were shoving at me.

Declan’s apartment in the city was a wealth of depraved information. Of journal entries and video diaries. Of detailed plans on exactly what he wanted to do to our father.

“He was curious about you for a long time, and as far as we could tell, there wasn’t any serious sinister intent until—”

“Two years ago?” When I started working at Mackenzie Co .

“No.” Dozen slid another image across the table. One of me, the image pinned to a wall with a knife through the middle of my face. “Six months ago.”

“When I asked for the Darling project.”

Ambros nodded. “It was a show of favoritism that Declan never received. He felt betrayed by both you and your father.”

“I didn’t even know him.”

“Well, he knew about you. His latest entries were centered on taking things from both you and your father. He said he wanted to—”

“Get what he was owed.” I could hear the words ripping from his throat through the phone. Images bombarding me of what he looked like on the other end. Of Cali, of how he was hurting her.

“He wanted to take Cali from you,” Ambros said, his voice heavy. The very idea made my skin crawl, and my muscles ripple under my skin. “And from your father, he wanted Mackenzie Co.”

I snorted a laugh. “There’s no way in hell he would have gotten a dime from that man.”

Ambros placed a third folder on the table. Where they kept pulling these from, I had no fucking idea. The contents inside grabbed my attention, though, and if I was honest with myself, they didn’t surprise me at all.

Mackenzie Co. had always been a successful business. At one point, it had even been legitimate. But that hadn’t been the case for a very long time.

Over the last twenty years, the majority of the company’s success had come from developing towns that showed a lot of promise as up-and-coming weekend getaways. It turned out that not only were all of those developments undertaken using substandard materials that couldn’t reach regulatory standards if they’d been propped on fucking stilts, but none of the projects had ever been legally approved.

Every single one moved forward because Mackenzie Co. paid off local town officials.

The hole of bullshit this company was in never ended. Zoning laws? Overlooked. Environmental regulations? Nonexistent. Building codes? What fucking building codes? They inflated property values like balloons at a kids’ party, leaving a mess behind every time.

“And what?” I asked, voice sharp. “You think I had something to do with this?”

“At the start.” Dozen leaned back, a hand going to his mustache, reminding me that these guys had arrested me for a murder they knew I didn’t commit and that I’d been here for ten fucking hours. “Warrant cleared that up.”

“Yippee.”

“We may need you to testi—”

“No.”

I stood up, my body cracking after being in one position for so long. Grabbing the stack of photos from the table in front of me, I reached for the folder Ambros held in a death grip that contained the rest of the images Declan had taken and rolled them up.

Taking evidence was definitely not legal, but they didn’t do a fucking thing to stop me, namely because I was almost certain that the way they’d brought me in wasn’t legal either.

They had dragged me into the Darling Police Station, which was in the middle of town, right near Sunshine, but the moment I stepped onto the sidewalk, the person standing in front of me was not the person I expected.

I had stopped being surprised by anything he did a long time ago.

“Why are you here?”

“I heard about Declan. As his employer—”

“His father, you mean.” I stared at Will Mackenzie and saw the same thing I always did—a stranger. Someone I didn’t know and didn’t want to, and the very reason I punished myself every fucking day of my life.

I made myself believe I deserved less, that I needed to be less, because anything more meant there was a chance I could end up just like him.

No, I wasn’t a violent man. But my palms were tingling with the urge to reach out and wrap my hand around his throat and squeeze until there was no life left in him.

What happened to me and my mom, Declan and his mom, none of that was my fault.

What happened to Cali wasn’t my fault. It was his , and I wanted to kill him for it.

He took a small step back, and the delight at knowing he was frightened sent a thrill through me.

“Declan had some information about the company. Things that will need us to present a united front.”

My laughter startled him. Half, I think, because the sound didn’t exist in our house growing up, and half because I don’t think he’d ever heard me do it.

This wasn’t the kind of laugh born from joy or safety. It wasn’t born from happiness.

It was the sort born of rot. Of mindless rage. The kind that grows in the parts of you meant to be nurtured but instead are neglected until they wither and die.

I stalked toward him, closing the space between us until he had to crane his neck to meet my eyes.

“I hope you’re fucking suffocated by the weight of every single one of your failures,” I said, voice low and razor-sharp. “And that you rot in the hell you’ve built for yourself.”

I spat on the ground between us, savoring the way he flinched.

“You will get nothing from me.”

I turned to leave, but his voice stopped me mid-step. Seems like he had more fucking balls than I gave him credit for.

“Think of Cali, Fane. Of your mother,” he said, each word deliberate. Then, after a pause that bristled with his arrogance: “I’ll let you consider my offer a little while longer…son.”

I didn’t turn back to face him, but it didn’t stop the small smile from ghosting across my lips. I had resigned myself to just…let him be.

It was probably a little too forgiving of me to imagine he’d begin to fester in any type of guilt. Perhaps a long-ago wish of mine that I’d attached to the single shooting star I’d kept for myself during one of those many nights Cali and I lay beneath the night sky had been answered.

I kept walking, heading past Sunshine and toward Cali’s house—our house.

The frosted, still, and pitch black night like a curtain closing on every part of my life that he had ever existed in. In its wake, a blank slate where I knew I deserved the sort of love she’d always held for me.

This person who had chosen me, over and over.

This woman I would never take for granted ever again. The truth of it settled into my bones, growing more absolute with every step that carried me home.