KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel (22 page)

Chapter
Thirty-Four

Kim followed Kennick to the hospital and stayed at his
side the whole time. When the police arrived with their questions – and
answered the questions Kennick had for them – she held his hand. Miraculously,
his body was largely unscathed, although his feet were badly blistered. He
could stand on them, but just barely, and it was painful. He was recommended to
bed rest for at least a few weeks.

When, finally, they were released, Kim drove him back
to the trailer park and helped him into the trailer, where Cristov and Damon
waited to be updated on Kennick’s condition and the word from the police. There
wasn’t much to say, and Kennick was tired, so the conversation wasn’t a long
one, and Kim and Kennick collapsed into bed once more after showering to rid
themselves of the smell of smoke. They fell asleep quickly, and stayed asleep,
though both were plagued with nightmares of fire and hell and smoke.

In the morning, things got worse.

Kennick woke up determined. Kim saw it in his face,
and it made her want to bury her head in the sand like an ostrich. She made a
light breakfast of toast and eggs, barely exchanging words with Cristov and
Damon in the kitchen, who both sat in obvious unease at the table, but who
retired to their own rooms when Kennick emerged and gave them a familiar
gesture that meant he wanted to be alone.

They sat, not eating, facing each other at the table.
Kim felt like she was witnessing the end to her own movie. Even before he told
her, she knew what he was going to see. This was what gypsies did, after all.
They travelled. They left. And Kennick was leaving. He was going to take the
kumpania
and bring them somewhere safe,
because Kingdom had proved itself to be a dangerous place for his kind.

“Come with me, Kim,” Kennick said, holding both her
hands in his across the table.

“I can’t do that,” she moaned, feeling her heart
ripped asunder. She didn’t want to admit she could have become one of those
girls who fell in love so fast, but it seemed more and more to be the dire
truth. She thought of the girls she’d grown up with, who’d move in with a man
after three months of dating, be married by six months, and pregnant at ten.
She’d thought they were stupid and desperate. Now she understood, how when it
was
right
you felt it all over. But
moving in was one thing. Moving out was another.

“Why?” Kennick asked, gripping her hands harder, his
emerald eyes searching hers for reasons she knew he knew.

“This is where my life is, Kennick,” she said. “My
job, my family, my friends. My future.”

“You can have a future with me. What do you do here
that you can’t do with the
kumpania?
I’m
r
om baro.
I’m like the mayor. You
can…”

“Stop,” Kim said, her voice threatening to rise to a
wail as she struggled to free her hands. His touch, once a salve for all the
pains in her heart, was becoming too painful to bear. “You know it’s not the
same. You
know
it.”

“These people,” Kennick said, releasing her hands as
his eyes darkened. “These people
burned
down a trailer
that had people in it. These are the people you’re always
defending, Kim. These are the people that you want to give up happiness for.”

“Not all of them,” Kim said, her breath hitching. “It
wasn’t
all
of them, Kennick. And
they’re all I’ve ever known. I would never belong here…”

“And you think you’ll ever really belong in this shit
town?” He was yelling now, the power of his anger frightening. She shrunk back
and he saw, saw how her chest sunk backwards as though her heart was trying to
hide away from him. His long, light brown hair fell into his eyes as he lowered
his head, shaking it slowly.

“I hoped you were going to be the one,” he said, fists
clenching but voice soft. “I thought…but that’s the thing about hope.”

Now he looked back up at her, and the pain and loss in
his eyes made a strangled cry escape her lips.

“It’s the quickest way to hell,” he finished.
Standing, he moved to the door, limping through the pain in his feet, and
pulled it open. Kim watched him there, in all his masculine beauty, the hurt
like a palpable aura around his body. She thought of how his skin tasted under
her tongue, how his smile had made her heart skip a beat, how his strong hands
on her made her feel beautiful, strong and alive. Then she followed him,
standing before him.

Kim laid her hand on his stubbled cheek. She wanted to
memorize the placement of every one of those funny, red hairs that covered his
chin. She wanted to count his eyelashes, commit the number to memory. She
wanted to take his sweetness – their sweetness – to the grave. She knew she’d
never find anything like it. Not for the rest of her days.

“I love you,” she whispered, the words coming out
perfectly, as though they’d always existed between them and had just been
waiting to be said, to be brought into the waking world. “I always will.”

His neck flexed and he uttered a short, guttural
noise. She was waiting for him to say them back.

“Find me,” he said instead. “When you change your
mind, find me.”

She shook her head, a single tear escaping through her
lashes. This was how it ended, then.
Not
with a bang, but a whimper,
she thought, some half-remembered poem coming
into her mind as the door shut behind her.

Chapter
Thirty-Five

Damon and Cristov watched
their brother tear through the trailer. He was ripping the sheets off his bed,
grabbing the food out of the fridge, emptying his drawers. It all went into a
pile in the middle of the double-wide. His feet were bleeding, but he acted as
though he couldn’t feel them at all. He felt like his heart was being crushed
under a stampede. Everything reminded him of her, of her bright laugh, her nose
crinkling when she smiled, her face when he made her come, so open and all his.

“Nick,” Cristov breathed,
his body tense with the energy in the room. “Stop. You gotta stop.”

“Gotta get rid of her,” he
growled, looking around for someplace else to ransack. “Her hair’s all over
this shit. Her smell. This damn town, it’s all over our shit.”

Damon rose and closed the
distance between them in two strides. With his hand clenched tight around
Kennick’s shirt, he barreled forward, using his massive size to overcome his
brother’s rage-induced struggling. When Kennick’s back hit the wall, the whole
trailer shook. The brothers locked eyes, Kennick’s lips in an ugly snarl.

“You’re being crazy,” Damon
said, voice even. “You're not even supposed to be on your feet.”

“Let me go, Damon,” Kennick
spat, kicking out at his brother’s legs. Damon merely moved in closer.

“Stop acting like a
schav,
” Damon ordered. “You are a man,
so act like it.”

Kennick’s body slumped as
his energy waned. Only when his eyes lost their fiery anger did Damon release
him, but Kennick glared at his brother before pushing him away to collapse at
the table, draping his body across the whole length of the booth.

“I loved the shit out of her,” he groaned, holding his
forehead in one hand, hiding his eyes.

“No kidding,” Cristov snorted. “Never seen a man act
like this. At least not since Uncle Nevimos got his hands on that mung bean
liquor.”

Kennick shot him a look as Damon slid in next to
Cristov, folding his hands across the table.

“We ought to have a
diwano,
” Damon said solemnly and Kennick nodded, somewhat irritated
with himself. He was throwing a hissy fit over his heart instead of planning
for the future of the
kumpania
. He
was not fulfilling his father’s legacy very well at all these days, it seemed.
A
diwano
was in order; a meeting of
the
kumpania’s
elder members to
discuss their next moves.

They had held a
diwano
before returning to Kingdom, and Kennick well remembered the way he’d had
to convince many of the older and clearly wiser members of the
kumpania
to go along with the idea. He
should have listened to them. The Volanis family was the heart of the
kumpania,
but they weren’t the only
members. Still, his people had followed him, trusted him, because he was their
rom baro.
Their big man. He felt very
little at that moment.

“Cristov, can you…”

“On it,” the youngest brother said, already knowing
what Kennick was asking. He would go around and announce the
diwano.
Usually, Cristov would bitch
about not being a lowly messenger, but he was well aware that this was not the
time for petty complaints. He slid past Damon.

“Say eight pm. Here,” Kennick said.

“You two behave,” Cristov said, pointing his finger at
the brothers before vanishing out into the unbearable heat. Kennick fixed Damon
in a long, meaningful stare.

“Thank you for that,” Kennick said, and Damon nodded.
“I’m fucking up, aren’t I? Maybe you should have been
rom baro…
”

“No,” Damon said quickly. “It is your birthright. And
you are good at it. At the more important things.”

Kennick’s eyebrows raised.

“Important things? What could be more important than
deciding the future of the
kumpania
?”

“The little things,” Damon said with a shrug. “You
know, Dad was shit for planning. He let the other men run the businesses,
mostly.”

Kennick nodded. This was true; he’d taken it upon
himself, when he was old enough, to learn about the businesses his people ran,
since Pieter seemed to have little to no interest in it.

“But you and Dad – you’re good at people. You know how
to talk to them. Settle out the little things. Make the women feel like their
men love them. Keep the men from running wild. You delegate, make people feel
important. It’s the right way to do things.”

Kennick cracked a smile.

“Shit, I’m just a politician, huh?”

Damon shrugged.

“No one ever said you had to do it all alone,
brother,” Damon said, narrowing his eyes. “You know I’m here. Cristov is –
well, he’s Cristov, but he’s here. And Mina, everyone loves Mina, if you really
fuck up, she can change some minds in your favor. You don’t have to feel like a
failure just because of all this mess. It’s all our mess, and we’ll clean it up
together.”

“I know,
prala,
I
know,” Kennick said, offering a wan smile before running his hands across his
face.
Prala
. Brother. He spread his
fingers, looking at the mess he’d made in the middle of the trailer.

“You think Mina will come clean this up for us?”

“I think you can ask, and then kiss the family jewels
goodbye,” Damon laughed.

Just then, there was a knock at the door. Damon made
as if to rise, but Kennick waved him down, limping towards the door, the pain
in his feet returning as his energy waned. He was surprised to see his cousin,
Pieter, standing on the step, looking red as a strawberry and shuffling his
feet.

“Trouble, huh?” Kennick asked, torn between smiling at
the look of boyish guilt on Pieter’s face and groaning because more trouble was
the
last
thing he needed. Still, any
trouble the pint-sized devil could have spun for himself would be a breeze
compared to a burned trailer and a mob of angry townspeople.

“Um,” Pieter said, and the high, strained quality of
his voice made Kennick’s throat go dry.
Shit,
he thought.
What now?

“Come in,” Kennick said, stepping aside as the boy
darted into the trailer and turned around, still looking like his head was
about to pop off his neck and hit the ceiling.

“Hi, Pieter,” Damon said, examining the boy with
curiosity. “What’s wrong, little man?”

“I saw something bad,” Pieter said, his voice inches
away from a wail. Damon and Kennick shared a glance. “Something…real bad. I’m…I
don’t know if I should…”

“Want a drink?” Kennick said, gesturing to the empty
booth. Pieter’s eyes widened and his nervousness seemed to evaporate for a
moment. There was nothing like being treated like a man to make a boy feel like
a man. And Kennick could tell that the weight Pieter was bearing was a man’s
weight.

The boy slid into the empty seat and Kennick pulled a
bottle of whiskey from above the fridge, pouring out barely a centimeter,
diluting it with lots of cold water. It still
smelled
like a man’s drink, and watching Kennick pour it was enough
to make Pieter feel like he was being treated like an adult. He took a tiny sip
of the drink, struggling to hide the disgust that marred his features as the
slight tinge of alcohol burned his throat. Kennick sat himself across from
Pieter and folded his hands across the table.

“Whatever you saw,” Kennick said, “you can tell me.
I’ll protect you, Pieter. You are my kin, my
familia.
”

Pieter nodded, the red in his cheeks started to
lessen.

“Last night,” the boy began, biting his lip between
words. “When the fire? Well, before the fire. I was….I was runnin’ away, or I
was gonna, ‘cause Ma was real mad that I put my crayons all in the microwave.
Boy from town said it would be cool. But so I was sneakin’, you know, to
get…well, anyway, I seen…

I seen a man at the trailer. He had a green bottle. It
looked green, anyway. It was hard to see. But there was – it was a weird
bottle, ‘cause the cap was all floppy and soft. And then he put a light to it,
to the cap, and it went on fire. And I seen him throw it into the trailer.”

Pieter’s voice was rising steadily. Kennick and Damon
exchanged a glance.

“Did you see who the man was, Pieter? What he looked
like?”

The boy nodded and bravely took another sip of his
“whiskey.”

“It looked a lot like – well, I’m sure it wasn’t, but
you know it looked like…it looked like…”

The boy looked, more than ever, like he wanted to
crawl under a rock for the rest of his life.

“Jenner,” he finally said, voice barely whisper. His
eyes flew upwards quickly, and he leaned forward, speaking loudly. “But I ain’t
sayin’ it was him, I’m just sayin’ it
looked
like him! It just
looked
a lot
like him! Coulda been anyone, really…”

“Pieter,” Damon said, voice low and serious. “How much
did the man look like Jenner? Whatever you answer, we won’t be mad. Just
because he’s
kumpania,
you don’t have
to protect him.”

A silent tear rolled down Pieter’s red cheek and he
nodded.

“It looked just like ‘im. Just exactly like ‘im.”