Tainted Kiss (Tainted Knights 1)

I started to get up, to go get my phone so I could call Kale and find out what the hell was going on. Right then, I needed to hear his voice, to know for sure that he was all right.

Jenna’s hand on my arm stopped me. Then she handed over the folded newspaper that wasn’t a newspaper.

It was one of the daily trash magazines. A kind of gossip column for the who’s who celebrities. I used to pick them up every now and again for Sage when she was in one of her darkly depressed moods. Sometimes reading about how crazy famous people lived and some of their antics would cheer her up.

Something told me I wasn’t going to find anything amusing about this particular edition.

I was frozen in place, half-sitting and half-standing, staring at the hand holding the paper.

“Take it,” she said in a soft but authoritative tone. “Just pretend it’s a band-aid and pull it off quickly.”

My fingers started to shake, which pissed me off.

Clenching my hand into a fist for a second, I gritted my teeth as I snatched the paper from her. Sitting down, I unfolded it and took in the front cover.

A small picture took up the upper left hand side. Some reality TV princess who had been partying hard on a bar crawl in Manhattan Beach. A slightly larger picture was across from it of some politician’s kid who had been arrested for DUI for the second time in six months.

But of course neither of those things mattered to me. No, what caught and held my attention almost instantly was the picture of the rocker who had not one, but two girls on his lap. One was kissing his mouth while the other was licking his chest. His face was blocked by the one tying her tongue into knots with his, but I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was.

The ink on his arm gave him away. The way the mysterious woman, who represented his mother—he had told me one night as we’d lain in bed and I had traced his tattoos over and over again—was more prominent than the dirty street scene that represented life in general. Part of his beard was showing, as well as the top of his dark head.

A cocktail of emotions ricocheted around inside of me. Hurt. Jealousy. Disbelief. Pain. Nausea. Anger. Jealousy again, topped with a double scoop of anger and a big fat cherry on top.

“‘Tainted Knights’ drummer parties hard at Petrova house in Miami’,” I read the caption out loud. “‘Find out who else was in attendance on page twelve’.”

Miami. That was where the guys had been the last three days, so that much was true. I wanted to believe that the rest of it was all made up. That it was someone else under those two girls, and some photographer had just photo-shopped Kale’s tattoos onto this guy’s arm.

I knew it wasn’t the case, though. That was Kale. With two—fucking two—girls on his lap. Touching him. Kissing him. Licking. Him.

I dropped the paper onto the island counter and lifted wounded eyes to Kin. She would know if it was true or not. She would have talked to Jace, found out what had really happened.

That guarded look was still in place, but it quickly came down, and I knew.

It was real.

“Jace said he doesn’t know everything that happened last night,” she told me, running her fingers through her hair to push the red locks away from her face. “One minute, Kale was sitting on some couch with Gray and Sin, talking to a group of guys. He got pulled into a conversation with Petrova who was throwing the party. The next thing he knew, Gray was chasing after Kassa for one reason or another, Sin was long gone, and Kale was like that.”

I slowly nodded and tried to swallow around the ball of emotions that were clogging my throat. “Did …?” I stopped, cleared my throat a few times, and tried again. “Did he fuck them?”

“Jace said no. He grabbed Kale, and they left.”

Relief flooded through me, but it didn’t wipe out everything that was still jumbled up inside of me right then. No one wanted to see their boyfriend making out with someone else. They sure as hell didn’t want to see it happening with two chicks. And they for sure didn’t want the world to have a front row seat to it. At least, I knew I didn’t.

My stomach roiled again, and I put my hand over my mouth, fighting back the building nausea.

“Does he know? About this paper?”

Kin hesitated, but then she shook her head. “As far as I know, no. Kale was still asleep when I talked to Jace. They’re on their way to Jackson for their next show tonight.”

“A-Ask him not to say anything just yet.”

I was losing the battle. The vomit was going to win.

I jumped to my feet. “I … God. Sorry,” I moaned as I made a run for my room.

I dashed through the living room, down the hall to my room, past my bed, and made it all the way to the tiled floor of my bathroom when the vomit won. I bent in half, heaving over and over again as sweat beaded on my forehead and upper lip. I didn’t think about the mess I was going to have to clean up. I didn’t think about Kale and the two chicks who had been so into what they were doing. My head was completely empty, except for one thought.

This will never end. I will be throwing up my guts, and it will still keep coming.