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  “What the hell is going on?” he snaps, like he’s tired of waiting, or maybe uneasy about the answers he might get. He has no idea.

  I blow out a breath, and tell him everything.

  Every damn sordid detail.

  “When I was fourteen—several months after the accident happened—I overheard my father and Olson talking. They were discussing Zack. How he should have died with my mother and Sera. How him being alive kept the accident fresh in everyone’s mind. I didn’t really understand at the time, but something didn’t feel right. I listened every chance I got, eavesdropped on their conversations. Usually they were nothing, but every once in a while, I’d pick up another small clue. They were always cryptic, but it became apparent to me, even as a kid, that my father and Olson had something to do with the accident.”

  “Jesus, JD. Did you tell anyone about this?” I feel myself relax at Smith’s reaction. A great sense of relief sweeps over me when he doesn’t accuse me of being crazy. Because let’s face it, this whole thing sounds insane.

  “No. Not at the time.” Who would have believed me? “Think about it. He was a community leader. Some people loved him, some people hated him, but everyone knew the kind of influence he wielded. I was a young teenager who had lost his mother and sister. A hothead looking for someone to blame. Even when I tried to talk to you about it,” I meet his eyes, “when the furnaces went down at the hotel, you thought I was nuts.”

  The Christmas brunch at The Gatehouse when the furnaces were sabotaged seems like it was three decades, rather than three weeks, ago. “And we’re friends. Think about it.”

  Smith puts his hands over his face and scrubs two-day’s worth of growth, then slaps the table hard. The sharp sound reverberates in the room. I can almost feel the sting.

  “When I finally went to my father, he was pissed that I overheard part of the conversation. I pretended it had only happened once. He interrogated me for a long time, and I asked some questions of my own. Nothing accusatory, I still hadn’t wrapped my head around all of it. But he got defensive. Threatened to have me committed to a psychiatric hospital if I ever talked to anyone about it. People would think I was crazy, he said. By the time I left his office, I started to believe that maybe I was crazy.” My chest tightens when glimpses of that scared kid emerge. He was all alone with no one to turn to. No one he could trust to help. “I’ll never forget that feeling.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Smith mutters under his breath.

  “I was more careful after that to not get caught, and so were they.” My stomach burns, and I feel the acid rising. I can’t shake my younger self. Telling Smith brought him out into the open, and now he doesn’t want to go back inside. The room’s beginning to close in on me. The air’s hot and stale. I get up and turn down the thermostat.

  “What does this have to do with Gabrielle Duval?” Smith asks. “How does she fit into this?”

  “My father sent Zack away.” I stand behind my chair and squeeze the back to steady myself. “We had no idea where he went. Not for years.” The bile is tickling my tonsils. “He wouldn’t tell us. When I got to prep school, Ms. Newman helped me figure it out.”

  “The school social worker?”

  I nod. “Mmhm.”

  “That was true? You were boning her?”

  I scratch the back of my head. My sexual exploits at prep school have nothing to do with this story. “Not then. Later.” After Gabrielle was out of my life. “It has nothing to do with this.”

  “As soon as I knew where Zack was, I went. It was a Saturday night. He wasn’t allowed visitors, but my father hadn’t been clear enough with his directive, and the woman manning the desk at the facility didn’t need much arm twisting to be convinced it would be okay to let me visit my brother.”

  My chest is so tight it hurts. Nineteen-year-old JD had more resources than the fourteen-year-old who had originally confronted his father, but I was still alone when it came to this. “I hadn’t seen Zack in five years. I barely recognized him. And there was no sign he recognized me. He was quiet. His limbs were curled. Atrophy. When I talked to the nurse about it, she said something about how it was a shame he hadn’t gotten more physical and occupational therapy after the accident.” I remember every word she said that night. Verbatim. It was just a passing remark, but it cut deep. “When I pressed her, she explained that only ongoing therapy can help slow the muscles from shrinking.”

  I glance at Smith. I pretend the pity in his eyes is for Zack and not for me.

  “At first I was numb,” I say, unbuttoning my shirt cuff and rolling up the sleeve. Even with the thermostat turned all the way down, it’s still so fucking hot in here. “I was shocked that we weren’t doing everything possible to make Zack’s life better. DW is evil, and by that time, I knew it, but Zack—he was helpless.”

  I blow out a long breath. “When I got back to my Jeep, I was so furious I couldn’t see straight. I pulled out of the parking lot, with my mind somewhere else. I had to swerve to avoid a woman changing a flat tire on the side of the road.” The memory of how close my car came to striking her still gives me a jolt, even after all this time.

  “I didn’t bother to go back to school. I went directly home. Straight to my father’s study. I confronted him about Zack. Spit out everything I knew, everything I believed about my mother’s accident. He let me finish, then he pulled out the tapes.”

  “What tapes?” Smith asks carefully.

  I can’t say it. Not even to Smith. I crack my knuckles, one at a time. “Of me with Gabrielle.” I take a minute to gather the fortitude to tell him the rest. “Having sex,” I whisper, each word feeling like a colossal betrayal to Gabrielle. Each syllable strangling my gut anew.

  Smith swallows every drop of bourbon and pours another before he speaks. “He recorded you having sex with your girlfriend?”

  I nod, looking down at my hands. They’re shaking. I don’t know why, because I’m too numb right now to feel anything.

  “He’s your father.”

  “He’s a monster, Smith. A fucking psychopath.” I throw down the bourbon, and then the rest of the story comes pouring out. Most of it, anyway. “He made me help out at Wildflower all the time. Encouraged me to watch all sorts of things that weren’t appropriate for a teenage boy. And then I went home, horny as fuck, and experimented with my beautiful, innocent girlfriend.” I press the heels of my hands into my weary eyes. “While my father watched. He taped everything. He told me he’d sit back in his chair and enjoy a drink and a cigar, or a blow job, while he watched me fuck her. He laughed at me. Mimicked her reactions.” I can still see his face while he taunted me, imitating my sweet girlfriend who never deserved any of it.

  Smith pours me another drink. I can’t even look him in the eye. I’m still so horrified by it, like it happened yesterday. I take a swig, and let the bourbon slide down my throat, buying time before I tell him the rest.

  “My father told me if I didn’t fall into line, he’d release the recordings. Everyone would see what a whore she was, enjoying all those filthy things I did to her. I lunged at him, grabbed him by the throat, until Olson whacked me with the butt of a gun and threw me on the ground. My father kicked me in the ribs, while Olson held the gun on me. Told me he was going to teach her what it was like to be fucked by a real man. Said he was going to blackmail her with the tapes so she’d have dirty sex with him.”

  Somewhere I find the courage to glance at Smith. He’s pale. Looks like he’s going to blow his lunch at any minute. That’s how I feel, too. “That’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Your father is one sick fuck.”

  “I can barely wrap my head around it and it’s my life. The life I’ve been living since the first time I overheard him with Olson. I live it every day.”

  “Did you ever think about telling someone about any of this?”

  “Who?” I shake my head. “There wasn’t a single person I could trust not to betray me back
then. At least not anyone who could have done a damn thing to help. My father was already too powerful.”

  “Did he ever make good on the threat?” Smith asks, tentatively, his eyes focused on something that is not me.

  “No.” I shake my head, thinking back at how awful it was choosing between sending Gabrielle away from her parents and letting him hurt her. Choosing between having her in my life and letting her go so he wouldn’t destroy her. I still don’t know where nineteen-year-old JD found the strength to do any of it. “I had complete access to my trust at that point. It wasn’t easy, but I convinced Gabrielle’s parents to send her to boarding school. She left almost immediately. Didn’t come back to Charleston for more than a few days at a time, here and there, until she bought the hotel.”

  “Have you ever found any solid connection between your father and the accident?”

  Not a goddamn thing. Aside from being unable to protect Gabrielle, it’s my greatest failure in life. “Nothing that would hold up under any real scrutiny. The answers are at Sayle. I know they are, and I’m looking, but he’s watching me. He’s got spies everywhere.”

  “After hearing this, I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. And I’ve spent months at a time in a fucking warzone.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” I say, glancing at him. “There’s more.”

  Smith grunts and buries his face into his arms on the table.

  “After he was elected, I persuaded Gabrielle to resume a relationship with me. Don’t ask—that story is vile too. But I need her under my protection while I hunt around. He’ll destroy her to get to me. Even when she was gone, he’d occasionally say things about her that would make me want to kill him. And I’ve never been very good at hiding my feelings. He knows she’s how to get to me.”

  Smith pokes his head up from his arms. “And you think he had something to with the fire?”

  “I’m positive. He says just enough to fuck with my head. But I’m positive. Every time we poke around at Sayle, something happens. I’ll tell you what else. I haven’t found out a damn thing about the accident, but there’s something bad going on at Sayle.”

  “Bad, how?”

  “I don’t know, yet.” And I’m so tired right now I don’t have the strength or the presence of mind to think about it. “But he’s up to something.”

  “Jesus Christ. She does need protection,” Smith says. “The whole fucking country needs protection. Hell, the whole world needs it.”

  Smith runs a thumb across his bottom lip. “What about that ex-fiancé you talked about? The guy you think is in jail. You think he’s involved in this somehow? Your father didn’t light the fire himself, and Olson was with him during the inauguration. I can vouch for it.”

  “I don’t know if he’s connected to my father in any way. It’s crossed my mind. But I kept an eye on the scumbag the entire time he was in Gabrielle’s life, and I never found any connection. He’s an abusive sonofabitch. But he didn’t set the fire.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s in jail, right outside of Reynosa. Got caught with several kilos of smack crossing the border. I pay his rent. It’s expensive, but worth every cent. They’ll keep him for as long as I continue to pony up. That bastard will never lay a hand on Gabrielle or on any other woman. Not while I’m alive.”

  Smith’s jaw is on the table. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

  “She had bruises he put on her when he was drunk. He had his hands around her neck.” The numbness inside is dissipating, and my blood pressure is climbing. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s lucky to still be alive.”

  “No arguments from me. But let’s go back to your father, the psychopath. The fucking commander-in-chief is a psychopath.” The color is gone from Smith’s face. “The man who commands our armed forces and sends kids into battle.”

  “The correct term is anti-social disorder, and he more than meets the clinical criteria. Yes, he’s a psychopath. A dangerous one.”

  I’m staring at an old photo of my grandparents hanging on the far wall, but I can feel Smith’s eyes on me. “You should have told me this before,” he says. “You should have made me listen. I’m sorry. I am so fucking sorry.”

  Smith feels like he let me down. If the roles were reversed, that’s how I would feel too. There is nothing I can say that will make him feel any better. We’re exactly alike in that way. “I’m sorry to have dropped this in your lap,” I confess, since we’re laying it all out there. “It puts you at substantial risk, and potentially implicates you in things bigger than we can understand right now. I really need you to stay. I don’t need you involved in my hunting expeditions, but I need you to continue to provide security for my brothers—and for Gabrielle. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Like hell.” Smith leans back in the seat. If I look under the table, the front legs of his chair will be inches off the floor. “I spent years in uniform, protecting our constitution, the country, men died beside me. He’s the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and an evil bastard. There’s no fucking way I’m standing on the sidelines.” He throws back the rest of his drink. “But we have to be equal partners in this, JD. No more secrets. And I manage all the security. Even Gabrielle’s.”

  I nod. There’s no choice, and I know he’s right anyway.

  “Do your brothers know about any of this?”

  “Chase snoops around for me, but I’ve kept him pretty much in the dark about almost everything. Gray knows nothing, except that I’m really worried about the way my father uses him.”

  “You mean the trip to the Mediterranean where his security wasn’t allowed to go?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “That’s exactly what I mean. I guarantee some shit went down on that trip, and Gray was sent along to take the fall if there is one. He’s not talking, although I’m not sure he knows anything. He trusts my father too damn much. He knows better, but he can’t help himself.”

  “I’m going to talk to Gray. He might have some information that could be helpful to us.”

  “Go ahead, but go easy with him. He likes to believe DW isn’t as bad as I make him out to be.” I trust Gray not to run to my father, because deep down he knows DW is a bad actor. It’s just too painful for him to believe.

  “What does Gabrielle know?”

  “Nothing. She doesn’t know a thing I just told you.”

  “JD. She’s a pawn. Her life is in danger. She has a right to know. And she’d probably be more cooperative with security if she understood the risk. You need to tell her—or I will.”

  Fucking Smith. “Not now. And before I forget, put some more security on her family.”

  “I don’t take orders from you regarding security. We’re done with that. But the minute I leave here, the Duval’s security will be beefed up. That still doesn’t change the fact that Gabrielle needs to know what’s going on. At least some of it.”

  Jesus Christ. It’s like talking to a goddamn wall. “Not now, Smith. She just lost her best friend, along with a lifelong dream that she put her heart and soul into making happen. When, and if, the time is right, I’ll be the one to tell her. Not you. Don’t fuck with me on this.”

  He clasps his enormous hands together, and rests them on the table, twiddling his thumbs. “How’s she doing?” He’s letting it go for now. But he’ll be back to nagging me about telling her, that I guarantee.

  “She’s asleep. The doctor gave her a sedative. My father knew that nothing else, nothing would break me like watching her suffer. Not in the same way.” I slam my fist on the table and the near-empty bottle of bourbon teeters.

  “Listen, I don’t doubt a word you told me, but let’s not chase red herrings. We don’t know for sure your father was involved in setting the fire. That’s going to take some more digging. But it sounds like there’s plenty other nasty stuff he might be involved with. We need to formulate a cohesive plan to deal with him.”

  “We will, but not until Gabrielle’s through the worst of this
.” Right now destroying that bastard has to take second place to her needs. She’s on tenuous emotional footing and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. That’s where my energy needs to be focused. “My biggest concern right now is getting her through Georgina’s funeral.”

  He sits back in the chair, studying me. “This isn’t just some sick obsession with protecting her. You love her.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” he quips. He slides the back of his fingers across his jawline, before catching my eye. “I take that back. If you love her, then it matters to me. If she’s important to you, she’s important to me. It’s that simple.”

  In some ways, I’m closer to Smith than I am to my brothers. After my mother died, and it became clear my father is Satan, I’ve taken on a different role with my brothers. A more paternal one. With Smith, I can just be. “She’s in danger,” I tell him. “He won’t kill her—then he’d lose his leverage over me—but he won’t hesitate to hurt her. And she could get killed by accident. She almost did.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to your mother?”

  “No.” I feel the venom coursing through my veins. It’s thick and hot. “I think that sonofabitch had her killed. It was planned. I know it.”

  Smith watches me until it starts to get uncomfortable. He doesn’t say anything, but I can see the gears turning. “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  “I want every firearm you own. And I want them today, before I leave this room.”

  Where the hell did that come from? “What? I tell you my father is a lunatic who has it out for me and you want my guns? That’s not fucking happening.”

  “Every single one.”

  “Why?” I bark.

  “Because I know you, JD. You foam at the mouth when the Chinese restaurant forgets to send hot chili oil with your takeout. The only time you’re this calm in the face of adversity is when you have a battle plan.”

  “I look calm to you? Because I’m not feeling any fucking calm.”

  “For you, this is serene. Your behaving like a man who not only has a plan, but has made his peace with God.”