“I don’t want to be your lover,” I lie. “So let’s drop this. I’m not leaving with you. I’ll have to “listen” to you—“ I use air quotation marks. “And keep my mouth shut when other girls fuck you. No, thank you, dickhead.”
He throws me a filthy look. “Jesus fucking Christ, but you’re a fucking brat.” He stalks toward the door. “Don’t fucking move,” he throws over his shoulder.
“As if,” I yell to the closing door. “Where the fuck can I go hooked up to IVs and heart monitors?”
Kiln laughs and gives me his usual smirk. Huffing, I turn my head and he begins to whistle, purposely irritating me.
“You know, little girl, Sloane’s gone through a lot of shit to get to you. You could show him some kindness. He hasn’t done for anyone what he’s done for you.”
“He’s not fucking me, so that works both ways. He’s not doing for me what he does for them.”
“You want to fuck, I’ll fuck you when Sloane isn’t around.”
“Third time’s the charm, huh? This is your third time offering and my final time telling you fuck no.”
He huffs out laughter. “Any particular reason why?”
“For starters? You’re a two-faced fucking hypocrite, reminding him of the trouble he can get into while still trying to fuck me yourself. If you fuck me, you’re going to fucking jail, too.”
“Keep it up, Georgiana. I’m going to enjoy watching Sloane wash your fucking mouth out with his dick for using such filthy language.”
I chew on one of my nails. “You’re an idiot to boot. He said we’ll never fuck.”
A tense silence falls around us before he sighs. “I don’t give a fuck one way or the other what the fuck he does with you. To me, women are little more than money grubbing bitches.” He releases another deep sigh, this one more heartfelt. I sense there’s a story behind his statement. “What I do care about is the band, the lifestyle, and the money. Sloane’s the moneymaker and we were reeling to figure out how to keep him in line. If he fucked up, he was out. But so were we. You give him purpose. He’s finally found something to fucking save and I know him. When he’s on a mission, he has a singular obsession. He wants you with us, we bring you with us and find a way to make it work.”
“You can’t fucking bring me where I don’t wish to go.”
He scrubs a hand over his jaw, frustrated by my determination. I refuse to admit that his insight about Sloane has gotten to me. But I’m curious. “Who has he tried to save?”
His long, hard stare chills me. “Our sister,” he says softly. “But, according to him, she drowned anyway.”
Sloane
When I was a little boy, my life was perfect, without pain or hurt or betrayal. I lived in a big house, upon a hill, surrounded by servants and my parents. I swore they loved and cherished me.
Scratch that. They adored me. But that was before my fairytale world, fit for princes and princesses, tumbled around my head and sent me crashing to the ground. It was before the messiness of my father’s first wife—his three older children—became known to me. Kiln was the baby of the trio, a year older than me.
Jaeger was the eldest and Steffie fell somewhere in the middle. She was sweet and pretty, unaffected by her mother’s bitterness, her brothers’ hostility, and our father’s hidden ruthlessness.
I met them when I was ten. Kiln had just turned eleven, Jaeger was twenty-four, and Steffie was eighteen. I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know she was afraid of water, so she’d never learned to swim.
Her screams still haunt me sometimes. Drugs, alcohol, violence have never removed the sound of her yelling. I was too far away, even though the yacht was close to shore. Close enough for me to hear the splash of her hitting the water. She was flailing and struggling and begging for help.
By then, I was sixteen, already lost in the music world. I wanted to be a famous rocker and Dad was determined I succeed. Anything I wanted. Anything. Everything. Whatever. That’s how much he loved my mother. He adored her enough to give their love child his heart’s content. Even allowing her son to take up guitar after the daughter from his former marriage introduced him to it.
Whatever took place between my dad and his first wife carried over and wrecked me and the fairytale fantasy of a little boy who idolized his parents. That day, in gorgeous, pristine waters, and beneath clear blue skies, my father jumped into the ocean when he spotted my attempts to swim to Steffie.
He saw me and he did it anyway.
Before my very eyes, before I reached her, Dad held my sister under the water and drowned her. Just because…because her mother had infuriated him and committed the ultimate sin.
She’d insulted my mother and, thus, signed her daughter’s death sentence and thrust me into a living hell. It would’ve been too easy to hurt Steffie’s mother. He wanted her to live her life in grief, because of one infraction I never discovered the exact nature of.