I stiffen. “Because I’m going to do to him what he’s done to all these women, to me. I’m going to destroy him.”
The color drains from his face. He blinks. “Oh, Jesus, Bailey, no …”
“You’re the one who said I needed closure.”
He gives me awhat-the-fuck-are-you-smokingkind of look and shakes his head. “How is getting involved with this guy closure? That’s not closure. What you’re talking about—shit—it sounds like madness.”
Heat hits my eyes, the tears already rising. I stand and grab the picture of Reed sitting on his deck, beer in hand, and shake it. “This man has destroyed so many lives, Ben. So many! You want to know what closure is for me?” I slap the photo back to the table and stab it with my finger. “Ruining him. Taking back what he stole and returning it to his victims. Doing to himexactlywhat he’s done to others. I want to make him hurt. I want him to suffer. That’s closure! It’s how I stay out of the ground. And you can either support me in this, or you can walk away. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But you don’t get to stop me. I’m doing this with or without you. Do you understand? With or without.”
He stares at me with his eyes glossing. His lips tremble, and I know he’s fighting tears, too. But there’s something else buried in the look—a flicker of understanding. He’s been here before in his own way, when the doctors told him he’d never walk again, that living a normal life would be difficult. He didn’t listen to them, either. He simply turned their words into motivation and proved them all wrong. He did it his own way, just like I have to do this mine.
After a moment, he nods. “I’m always with you. You know I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know,” I say, leaning over and pulling him into a hug. “I know.”
When we separate, he’s crying, no longer holding the tears back. He runs the back of his hand over his face and laughs. “You’re out of your goddamn mind, though. There’s no way you can do this alone.”
I retake my seat. “I’m not going to. Zane’s going to help me. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Chapter 32
REED
Las Vegas, Nevada
Age Twenty-Four
The bachelorettes were fucking obnoxious. They couldn’t be much older than Reed—he guessed them to be somewhere in their mid-twenties—but they were screeching like they were at a college frat party.
They’d stormed into Frankie’s five minutes ago in a drunken mash of pink and white skirts and proceeded to swarm through the bar like a cloud of mosquitoes. They danced and giggled, shrieked and nuzzled, barely managing to stay upright on their way to the bar.
“Shots! Shots! Shots!”
They took them down together, the bride-to-be closing her eyes before throwing her head back in a howl.
Reed sighed.
He knew their kind. They filtered past him every day at the Wynn, paying him about as much attention as the luggage he carried. Women who snapped their fingers at him like he was their own personal servant and complained about their lives all the way to their rooms.
“You would notbelievehow bad Marcus dented the BMW. It just looks awful now.”
“My manicure is already chipping. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Am I fat? I’m getting fat, right? It’s all the fried food out here, I swear.”
These women who acted like their lives were the equivalent of a suburban concentration camp. None of them had struggled. Not by a long shot. Not like Reed had struggled when Aunt Beth kicked him out of her house after graduation. She’d paid for a single semester of community college before pulling the plug. A single fucking semester.
“I told you I was done if you get Cs.”
One C in math. That’s it. A single, goddamn C—which would have been a B if his bitch of a professor hadn’t docked him for showing up to class late after pulling a double-shift changing oil at Mac’s Garage. Traffic had been bad on the way over. He’d explained this. He’d told her he had to have a job to pay rent. It wasn’t his fault. He’d even managed to summon a few tears in the process, but she hadn’t cared. She’d simply told him to take his seat. That was it. College over.
He took a long pull of his beer. It was why he was here now, struggling to make ends meet. Reed thought he might make a few professional connections in Vegas and find a job that paid well. But between rent and the outrageous living expenses, the city was a sewer that seemed to suck every single dollar he made right out of him.
At least he had Frankie’s. The bar was a neon-soaked respite where he could toss back a few beers and unwind with the locals comfortably far from the strip. It was his sanctuary in a way—a place to get his head straight after a long shift. Yet, here they were, these women dusted in sashes and glitter, ruining the vibe while reminding him of exactly where he stood in the social pecking order.
One of them—a chunky blonde with a helium-balloon voice—was honking at the bartender for another round of drinks a few feet away while the two behind her giggled and swayed.
“Jesus Christ,” the guy next to him said, slapping a twenty on the bar while rising to his feet. Reed was about to do the same—needed toget the fuck out of here—when something one of the women said cut through all the clatter.
