Shiver

His face tightened. “I don’t want you down here. Come upstairs to my office with me. This isn’t me evading your questions. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Just not here.”

Since I really needed to sit down, I nodded and walked with him back to the elevator on wobbly legs, my heart hammering in my chest. I felt cold. Confused. Off-balance.

He didn’t touch me, maybe sensing I needed space or maybe worried I’d reject him. But when we reached the club’s main floor, he apparently decided to try his luck, because he held out his hand.

I just stared at it, uncertain. It wasn’t that I was now scared of him or something. It was just that my mind was in absolute chaos, and I didn’t really know what to think. I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. No wonder Cade had told me to be prepared.

“I’d never hurt you, Kensey.” The hint of pain in his eyes broke my resolve. I put my hand in his, and he gave it a little squeeze. “You have every reason not to believe me when I say this, but you are safe with me.” He pressed a kiss to my hair. “Now we talk.”

Keeping me protected from the crowd with his body, he guided me across the busy dance floor and over to the flight of iron steps. Once inside his office, he locked the door and ushered me over to the leather sofas near the tinted window. Eager to hear what he had to say, I sat down and rested my clasped hands on my lap.

“Want a drink?”

I shook my head.

Instead of sitting beside me, he sank into the sofa opposite me and draped his arm over the back of it. “You once asked me if I’d ever been in a relationship. I told you I was seventeen at the time. I was seventeen when it ended. I was fourteen when it started. Liza Montgomery was my chemistry teacher.”

My mouth almost dropped open. Speechless, all I could do was stare at him.

“It started just after my mom died. I was a mess. Feeling angry and guilty because she’d stayed in that burning house looking for me, no matter how much I screamed for her to get out—she couldn’t hear me. She died in my bedroom.” He swallowed. “I was picking fights all the time. I liked fighting. Liked the pain, liked venting. Liza played the concerned teacher. She often kept me behind after class to ‘talk.’ It wasn’t long before she made a move.”

My hands fisted. If I’d known earlier that that fucking bitch had taken advantage of a grieving teenager, I’d have ripped her hair right out of her head. “What happened?”

“I was a teenage boy ruled by hormones. She was hot and kind of young for a teacher. What do you think happened?”

“I mean, how did you come to hate her so much? You have every right to hate her. I fucking hate her. But I’m guessing this somehow ties in with Levi’s suicide. Am I right?”

“Yes.” He tapped his fingers on the back of the sofa. “Turns out I wasn’t the first kid she’d … groomed, I guess you could say. I also wasn’t the only kid she was toying with at the time. But I didn’t know that until Levi killed himself, leaving a note to say that he couldn’t live without her.”

“She’d broken it off with him?”

“Yes. I don’t know why exactly—he didn’t explain that in the letter. Maybe he wanted them to go public, or maybe he was just getting too old for her. If it’s the latter, she probably would have dumped me pretty soon after that.”

Personally, I believed it was likely to be the latter. She obviously had a preference for young boys—maybe out of some twisted sexual deviancy, or maybe because the taboo of sleeping with her students was a thrill for her.

“Levi never mentioned her to me until it ended. He didn’t tell me her name. Just said he’d been seeing a married woman and that she’d dumped him.”

“Wait, she’s married?”

“Not anymore. Her ex-husband knew about it. Didn’t care. She once told me that he didn’t give a damn about anything she did as long as she kept her nose out of his business. Anyway, as for Levi … I didn’t even think that the woman he was seeing could be Liza. It really didn’t occur to me. It should have done. It should have clicked in my brain, but it didn’t.”

“Why would it have done? I’m guessing she told you that she cared for you, that she said she would never have broken so many rules to be with you if she hadn’t. Considering she’d put her career on the line, it must have been easy to believe she loved you. Am I right?” At his curt nod, I added, “Well then, you were hardly going to assume she was also sleeping with others.”

If my words at all helped, Blake didn’t show it. “Levi might not have mentioned her if I hadn’t demanded to know why he looked like shit all the time and had turned into someone I didn’t know. He’d lost weight, stopped taking care of himself, clearly wasn’t sleeping, and didn’t change his clothes for days at a time. His grades went to shit, he didn’t want to leave his house—a house he hated—and he dropped out of the football team.”

“Sounds like he was depressed.” My mother had deteriorated like that several times.

“He told me a little about her, but not her name. Said he needed her. Loved her. Couldn’t live without her. You know what I did? Told him to stop being a bitch. Said no girl or woman was worth putting himself through the ringer for and that there were plenty more out there.”

The self-recrimination in his tone was painful to hear. “You were a teenager, Blake. You couldn’t have known just how far down he’d sunk.”

Blake ignored that. “He went to her house, uninvited, and saw me leaving. More, he saw me kissing Liza on the porch.”

I flexed my fingers, wishing I’d slapped the sick bitch when I had the chance. “Did he confront you?”

“No, I hadn’t known he was there until later. He thought she’d dumped him for me. He killed himself in my house, Kensey. I came home, went up to my bedroom, and found him hanging there. And I found his note, detailing everything.” Blake clenched his teeth. “He died hating me. Hating me so much that he wanted me to find him that way.”

Oh, fuck. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his friend had killed himself, blaming him for his own misery, he’d also died in Blake’s room … just as his mother had died of smoke inhalation in his old room.

I would have reached out. Grabbed his hand. Something. But his body language screamed, “Don’t touch me.”

“There was an investigation, and it all came out. She was arrested, but not convicted.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because I lied to the police and said that it hadn’t happened. I said that I was the one who wrote Levi’s note, wanting to get my teacher in trouble.”

I looked at him, perplexed. “But … why would you do that?”

“Same reason the other kids kept quiet. She had videos, Kensey.”

My belly churned. “Videos?”

“She’d secretly filmed herself with us for her own sick reasons. Maybe the videos were like trophies to her, I don’t know. She confronted me outside school and showed me a sample. From that angle, you couldn’t tell it was her, but you could see me perfectly clear. She threatened that if I told the truth, all the videos she had of me and the others would be posted online—particularly on child-porn sites. Like I said, I was fourteen when it started. That’s just the right age for some sick fuckers. Once something like that is online, Kensey, you can never really get it off. Videos get shared. Downloaded. Copied. Put in physical format.