I only have two days to figure out how to stop Beatrice from leaving. Less than two days. It’s Thursday night, and she, Charlotte, Mack, and their “muscle”—Tara, an Air Force vet with a concealed carry permit—have plans to head out of town Saturday morning. Right around the time I’ll be jumping into a cab to meet the rest of the team at the arena to catch the bus for the airport.
My first instinct is to simply not show up, to call Coach Saturday morning with some bullshit story about a bad case of food poisoning, stay home, and sit on Beatrice until she promises to skip the last two shows. Or go to Mobile with hermyself if she insists on honoring her obligation to the band and her fans.
But if I get caught in a lie, that’s it for my career, and selfishly, I don’t want to go out like that, not because of a piece of human garbage like Kai.
Or Henry James Killian, rather.
The moment I read it, the name seemed familiar. Still, I wouldn’t have been able to place it without the rest of the information Blue provided.
But once I typed in Nebraska and the right dates, along with the name, he was right. It was all there in black and white, including several pictures of a very young Kai. He was even skinnier back then, all lanky arms and legs, with none of the tattoos he’s become famous for. His head was shaved in a close buzz cut, and he kept his chin tucked tight to his chest as he was led from police vehicles to the courthouse and back again, but anyone who knows him well would know exactly who that kid grew up to be.
Even with the long hair he’s dyed black. Even with the bright blue contacts he wears on stage, adding drama to otherwise ordinary hazel eyes, his profile is the same.
So is the smirk on his lips when he thinks he’s getting away with something.
I remember the first time I saw that smirk, at a dinner with my parents, where Beatrice dropped the bomb that she wasn’t coming home with us. She’d moved in with Kai that afternoon and intended to live with him from now on, since they’d be going on the road with the band soon anyway. She was nineteen by then. It wasn’t like there was anything my parents could legally do to stop her, and Kai had arranged it so that they were forced to make their arguments in favor of why she should stay home in front of him, where it was awkward for my conflict-avoidant parents to properly make their case.
They aren’t the kind of people to tell a guy that he’s a bad influence to his face.
But I was.
I told Beatrice she was making a mistake, that Kai didn’t deserve her or appreciate her. That she should not onlynotmove in with him, but she should drop out of the band, as well. As far as I was concerned, it was obvious she needed a clean break from the creep who’d basically groomed her. When they met, he was twenty-one to her seventeen. They both insisted things hadn’t gotten “romantic” until she was just a couple of months shy of eighteen, but I never believed him.
I told him as much at that dinner.
He didn’t say a word. He just shrugged and smirked, the same way he smirked in those photos outside the courtroom after he was cleared of kidnapping and attempted murder. Somehow, the fancy lawyer his wealthy family hired to defend him managed to convince a jury that he and his fifteen-year-old ex-girlfriend had been enacting a mutual fantasy when things went awry.
There were text messages between them, proving she’d once said she thought it would be “hot” to be kidnapped by a man in a mask, like the men in the romance novels she read at the time.
She never said anything, however, about wanting to be held in a cellar in an abandoned cabin in the Nebraska woods for weeks, half-starved and psychologically tortured, while her family lost their minds with fear and grief. She never said anything about wanting that “masked man” to be the boyfriend she’d broken up with a few weeks before, telling him she never wanted to see him again after catching him in bed with her best friend. She never said anything about wanting to be told, again and again, by that same boyfriend, that she would never leave that cellar, never see her family again, never have a life aside from whatever life he decided to give her.
I have no idea what was going through the minds of the people on that jury when they let him off with community service, a misdemeanor charge, and a slap on the wrist. From the articles I read, the fact that hehadn’tsexually assaulted her seemed to convince them that he wasn’t all bad.
Sure, he kidnapped her, starved her, refused medical attention for the broken ankle she sustained when he pushed her down the stairs into the cellar, and lied very convincingly to detectives about his lack of involvement in her disappearance for three weeks, until a heart-to-heart with his old man convinced him to come forward, but hey…no raping!
What a nice guy.
What a promising young man.
Wouldn’t want to mess up his life or ruin his future over a teenage misunderstanding.
One of the local papers actually had the gall to call it a “lover’s spat,” and the small town where they lived seemed divided about who was to blame for all the terror the girl’s disappearance had caused. The fact that Kai’s father was a wealthy, well-connected real estate developer, and the girl came from a single-parent home and was on scholarship to the exclusive prep school they both attended, probably had something to do with that.
Wealth, position, and family connections have saved lousier men than Kai from suffering the consequences of their actions.
His getting off with a slap on the wrist isn’t a bug in the system; it’s a feature. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: the system is designed to protect perpetrators, not victims. That’s why that woman taking a beating from her husband on Bourbon Street had a string of domestic violence reports as long as my arm, but still couldn’t get placed at a halfway house until a semi-famous hockey player beat the shit out of her abuser, attracting the kind of attention that made local news stations and charities take notice.
That’s why Henry James Killian was gently chastised and his juvenile record sealed, leaving him free to reinvent himself as “Kai,” a talented young musician, a few years later.
It seems he kept his nose clean through college at Vanderbilt and afterward, at least until the band became famous enough for him to stretch his “baby asshole rock star” wings, but still…
Still…
My gut is screaming that boys who do things like he did don’t change. They just grow up to become men who are more careful about not getting caught.
A soft knock on the bedroom door makes me flinch. My voice is tight as I call, “Yeah?”
“Do you need anything?” Charlotte asks through the door. “Imodium? Electrolyte beverages? A hand to hold?”
