My interest was piqued. It sounded like some type of confession was about to go down and it sounded like some shit I might need to hear. Bonnie nodded.
“Okay but please, Maze, spare me the talk of what a d-bag he was. He’s dead. Dammit! He’s dead!”
Maisie nodded, but I noticed she didn’t agree. “And I’m sorry that his death is making your hurt so bad, Bonnie. I love you, but I have to tell you the truth.”
“And it needs to happen now?” she said over wracking sobs.
“Yes, dammit. It does.” This was a different side of my girl; one I hadn’t seen before. “Listen to me! When I jumped out of that window, I saw Wyatt.”
“What do you mean, you saw him? Where?”
Maisie sighed and pushed a hand through her hair. “At that house when I got kidnapped. I jumped off the second floor, and I saw him through a window on the ground floor when I landed. He was doing some kind of drugs with two skeezy girls.” She gave Bonnie a look of concern.
Now I wondered who this Wyatt character was. Was he a Crusader? Fuck, they might be all over Glitz by now.
“You’re lying!” Bonnie screeched.
“Bon, please listen to me. I saw him, he was there.” Maisie said as she reached up and wiped the tears rolling down Bonnie’s face with her thumbs.
“Are you sure? Two girls? At the brothel slash crack house?” Bonnie asked and Maisie nodded. “Not doing the volunteer work that kept him so busy,” she bawled.
“One of the girls was blowing him and the other was shooting him up. He seemed happy; not like he was there against his will.”
Maisie’s words triggered a flash of a memory of some dude sitting in the front room of the house and the two whores with him. He refused to leave until his hour was up, and he had a fat stack of dope so the girls stayed too and when the house went boom, they all went to pieces.
“My. God.”
Bonnie’s cries turned into harsh, gasping sobs, so strangling I thought she might stop breathing. “Why wasn’t I enough? Why couldn’t he just walk away when he clearly didn’t want me?”
More tears came, this time they were gut-wrenching, and I felt Bonnie’s pain. Deeply. Viscerally.
“Screw that, Bon, you are more than enough. Maybe now that the dickhead is gone, you’ll finally start to believe it.”
Maisie hugged Bonnie tighter and when Cal’s head popped above them in the doorway, my own relief was palpable.
“We need you downstairs Virgil.”
I gave a quick nod, checked that my boner was gone and stood. “Gotta go, babe.” I pressed a quick kiss to her mouth and laid a hand on Bonnie’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry about your loss, Bonnie. Death fucking sucks.”
She huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, it does. Thank you again, Virgil, for saving my best friend.” She paused awkwardly and then wrapped her arms tightly around my waist for just a second. “I’m so grateful to you.” She let go and clung to Maisie again.
“Be careful,” Maisie mouthed to me just before I ducked out of the room.
I nodded because I would be extra careful. Because now that I had someone to come back to, I sure as shit wanted to come back and see what would happen next.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maisie
“Did you know that my parents only allowed me to date Wyatt because he’s from a good Irish Catholic family, which is code for well-connected Catholics?”
Bonnie leaned forward trying for a whisper and failing miserably. “His father’s a state senator and he is, was, a trust fund kid.”
She shook her head but even in the moonlight I could see the tears slip down her cheeks.
We were in one of the many little private outdoor seating areas located on Ashby Manor property, enjoying the warm desert breeze and a bottle of Irish Whiskey the cook offered up after one look at Bonnie’s red face.
“I had no idea. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“It’s embarrassing,” she insisted and poured another glug into her glass and knocked it back.
“They knew all about his DUI’s, the drugs and even the whores. But since it wasn’t public knowledge it wasn’t ‘real’,” she said and lifted her fingers in air quotes.
I let out a long breath as her words sank in. “That’s fucked up, Bon.”
She nodded. And hiccupped. “Totally fucked up.”
I gasped at her unexpected curse. “Bonnie, you rebel,” I teased and she managed an almost laugh.
“Is this just a party for two?” Kat appeared with four fancy crystal tumblers in one hand, a carafe of amber liquid in the other. Sadie was right beside her, a decanter in her hand.
“The more, the merrier,” Bonnie said a little too loud and then snorted as she poured way too much whiskey into her glass. “It’s not like you’ve ever seen me at my best anyway. I might not even have a best. Fuck my best. I don’t even care anymore.”