It stole my breath. The proximity and the severity.
Agony lashed across his face, and he gripped my hand in both of his, his voice rough. “I’m ready to give you my truth.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Zee ~ Twenty Years Old
“Just wanted to tell you goodbye. Pretty sure they’re coming for me. Don’t think I’m gonna be seeing you again. But I guess it doesn’t matter all that much when it was you who stabbed me in the back.”
“Who?” Zee demanded.
A smoky dimness cloaked the night sky. City lights glowed against the fog that sagged so low and thick Zee could almost reach out and touch it.
It cast his entire world in an ominous haze, everything he’d ever known vapors and mist.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter?” Zee turned frantic, begging through the phone. “I’m sorry, Mark. I’m so goddamned sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You were my best friend. My brother. I trusted you. Would have trusted you with my life. And I told you I was fuckin’ sorry for answering that phone…but you’ve gotta know what it looked like when I walked in on you two.”
Zee blinked hard, trying to see through the torment. “It was a mistake.”
But simply labeling it a mistake felt like committing treason. Another dose added to the mounting disloyalty.
Mark’s words trembled with anger. “A mistake? You fucked my girlfriend. Didn’t think it was possible for you to commit something like that.”
Zee’s hand fisted in his hair, and he began to pace. With each desperate step, loneliness closed in. His chest felt too tight and too empty, like he could feel the connection that had always bound them together loosen.
Because he couldn’t ever take back what he’d done.
“She said…she said you’d broken up with her. That you hit her.”
“And you believed her.” It wasn’t a question, just a sinking acceptance that severed a little more of who Zee and Mark once were. “You really think I’d hit her? I loved her.”
Sickness clawed at Zee’s being, sinking in like fangs and dripping venom into his soul.
He bent in two, retching on the ground.
What did I do?
What did I do?
The world spun faster.
Dizzying.
Ruining.
Toppling.
“I didn’t…I’d never—”
Zee could feel the world splintering, his foundation crumbling beneath his feet.
Opening to reveal his wrong.
It tossed him headfirst into a bottomless chasm.
Endless.
Purgatory.
Zee started to ramble, desperate for a solution. For the two of them to find solid ground. That place where they belonged. Where Mark was his hero and he was Mark’s rock.
“I’m sorry, man. I’ll do anything. Anything. Come back to LA. We’ll work it out. Figure out how to get you out of this trouble. Just…tell me you forgive me. Tell me you’re okay…that this won’t cause you to slip. You’re scaring me, man. You’re scaring me.”
Mark’s laughter was hollow. “What’s the point of staying clean…the point in working hard for what is right…when it’s just taken away from you anyway?”
Zee gulped around the agony. “Mark—”
“I have to go.”
He ended the call and Zee choked over a strike of fear that hit him like a bolt of lightning.
Without giving it a second thought, he dialed Baz. It went straight to voice mail.
Searching for an answer, for courage, Zee turned his face to the heavens. It glowed like he was at the brink of day without the promise of a sunrise.
The stars were obscured.
Hidden.
Stars he knew shined and glimmered so damned bright when you stepped out of the limelight and depravity of this sordid city. Somehow, he’d always thought those twinkling stars the guardians of the wishes he’d cast upon their fallen as a child.
As if they held them protectively where they forever danced until the day those wishes were released and that dream became a reality.
In that moment, Zee swore he heard a silent curse uttered that left them permanently dimmed.
As a kid, Zee had breathed a million of those wishes.
Countless.
Infinite.
Now he could feel them falling all around him. Burning and bleeding out.
Disintegrating into nothing.
“He’s gone, Zee. He’s gone. I’m so damned sorry. He’s gone.”
Denial screamed in Zee’s head while grief clutched him like a vice. Squeezing him in two.
He knew. He knew. He knew.
“No,” Zee begged.
On the other end of the line, Baz stumbled over deep, guttural cries, floored by grief.
It was palpable. Too much. Too much.
Zee choked over the emotion.
What did I do? What did I do?
“No,” he whimpered again. His spirit thrashed, crashed and collided with his heart that wept. “No.”
“I found him, Zee. I fucking found him. Face down on the tour bus. I should have known. I should have known. He’d been clean. He’d been clean, but he was acting sketchy. All itchy and wired. Should have known he was gettin’ ready to slip.”
Zee tore at his hair as the words tumbled out. “Someone…someone was after him.”
Another sob ripped through the line. “No, Zee. No. He OD’ed. There was a bag…I was there. I found him. I found him. I tried. I fucking tried to breathe life back into him. I promise. I tried so fucking hard. He was already gone. Oh…God—”
Baz broke on the confession.
Sobs tore through the air.
Agony.
Torment.
It was my fault.
My fault.
I did this.
Zee dropped to his knees.
Because he no longer knew how to stand.
Wind whipped through the air like a heated tornado that spun and churned and destroyed. It lashed and beat, catching up the cries that echoed at Mark’s graveside.
The coffin was lowered into the ground.
Zee’s mother moaned. The deepest kind of grief.
Zee clenched his fists and ground his teeth against the agony that shredded his insides.
Grief and guilt and devastation.
His mother buried her face in his father’s chest, and Zee stood there. Alone. Drowning in a hollowness unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Excruciating. Violent. Piercing.
He watched as his mother stepped forward and tossed a handful of dirt onto the gleaming black wood. The tiny particles scattered across the top like a booming proclamation.
The final declaration that Zee had nothing left.
His mother’s knees buckled, and his father led her away, while Zee stood there with his throat thick and his eyes stinging.
Baz stepped up and squeezed his shoulder. “He loved you, Zee. Know this has to be killing you…but if you know one thing, I want you to know that.”
Zee mashed his eyes shut, desperate to confess it all. To admit to Baz what he’d done. To tell him Mark had begged him for help, told him he was afraid, and in his petulant anger, he’d turned him away.
Instead, he slowly turned when Baz’s spine stiffened, hackles almost visible as he lifted his shoulders and cocked his head.
Veronica strode through the grass, a clingy black dress displaying her body and black sunglasses hiding her eyes.