Page 103 of Arranged Devotion
“I kept telling myself I was the one who would save you.” The confession hurts, but he needs to hear it. “I rationalized marrying Liam because it meant you might be safe too. I told myself I could fix it, but now… I was making it worse…”
“Regan, don’t do that,” he says as I cry. I dig my fingernails into my thigh but it doesn’t help. He burned his life, nearly ripped our family to pieces, and he did it for me and Mom. He did more than I ever could, and I hate myself so much in this moment, somuch it hurts. It takes a few deep breaths as pathetic self-pity floods my guts before I gather my shit together and face him.
“Tell me how it happened. Start from the beginning. Tell me everything, Luke, or else I can’t help you. Make me understand.”
He takes a breath, looks like he wants to blow me off, but exhales instead.
“Kieren was smart about it. He laid the groundwork. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got here, especially out there in the woods, and I keep coming back to this conversation me and him had one day, on a random Sunday over a year back. We were drinking on the porch and he looks at me out of nowhere and goes,your dad’s pretty intense, huh?And I was like, oh wow, he’s talking about it, and nobody talks about it. At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal and I was just like, yeah he can be pretty crazy, and sort of laughed, but Kieren wasn’t smiling. Then again like a month later, he mentioned how tough dad is on mom, which was weird, and again a few days after that, he said he thought Mom should try to stand up for herself or something like that… and soon the comments turned into conversations about our fucked up dynamic. I thought I could open up to him, that’s the sickest part. I thought he really cared.”
Cold, ugly dread fills me. Kieren can be charming and charismatic, and when his attention is fully on you, it’s hard not to get sucked into him. My head’s boiling as I start to question everything we did together, all the time we spent, the promises he made, the life I thought we were building. Was it always some lie he spun to get something he wanted? Then there’s poor Luke, looking for any affirmation from someone outside the family, desperate for someone to see the fucked-up shit he’s been seeing all his life, falling for Kieren’s trap.
Exactly the way I fell for it.
“He told you to take the blackmail stuff, didn’t he?”
“Not at first, but eventually. We sort of planned it… I mean, I planned it, that’s the worst part. Now I think he was walking me toward it the whole time, making me feel like it was my idea from the start, when really it was what he wanted all along. But he can’t really be that big of a bastard, can he?”
“I think he can, Luke. He cheated on me with Vera Baranov in our own bed. I don’t think he feels things the same way we do.” Even now, after everything, Luke’s still trying to justify what happened.
His head hangs low. “I know you’re right. I don’t want you to be though. I want Kieren to come running through that door and explain everything… tell you how we did it to save you… to save Mom from Dad… but that’s not going to happen.”
“No, Luke, it’s really not.”
The grunt he makes breaks my heart. He sucks air between his teeth and meets my eyes, his own streaming tears, jaw gritted.
“What’ll happen to me now, Regan? Don’t bullshit me. Don’t you dare lie, tell me the truth. What are they going to do to me?”
My voice cracks. “I don’t know.”
“Regan, damn it. They’re going to kill me. Come on, you know they are, just admit it.”
“I can’t let them. It won’t come to that.”
“Regan! Don’t do this, not right now, not when I need you. Please, fuck, be here with me, be here in reality and don’t tryto pretend like everything’s going to be okay. I’m dead, and you know what? I fucking deserve it.”
“No, you don’t, they’ll understand?—“
“They won’t. There’s nothing to explain. I betrayed them and I did it on purpose. Maybe I had good reasons and maybe Kieren lied to me, but that doesn’t change what happened. I still did it. Please, be here with me.”
“Alright, Luke, okay.” I squeeze his hand, still bound to the chair. “They’re going to want to kill you, but I’ll talk to them. I’ll try the best I can, okay? I swear, I’ll try.”
“Yeah, okay.” He lets out a shaky sob and leans his head back against the chair. “Feels better, finally saying it out loud. You have no clue how fucking stupid I’ve felt. I don’t know how I let Kieren manipulate me like that.”
“He was good. I fell for it for years. I don’t know if he meant anything he ever said to me, but he made me feel like I was special, like he loved me more than anything, and it was intoxicating. But listen to me, Luke, if there’s anything else you can tell me… something I can take to Liam, maybe use it to help you… now’s the time. Anything you can think of.”
His lips twitch as he shakes his head. “There’s nothing. Kieren never told me anything… except this one time, we went to a meeting…” He trails off, worried and considering his next words. “It was in the suburbs. This big house on a cul-de-sac. Kieren kept saying it was the real Baranov inner sanctum where the old man keeps all his dirt. Kieren was joking about how the Baranov boss is old school and doesn’t trust electronics. So maybe that means they didn’t make copies… and if those files are anywhere, they’ll be in that house.”
Hope flips into my chest. “Can you give Liam an address?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, I remember the area, and if we click around street view for a while I think I can find it.”
“We’ll start there.” I squeeze his hand one last time. “That’s really good. Thank you.”
“Do me a favor.” He watches as I move back toward the bedroom, going slow. My head’s pounding again and I need rest. “Don’t do anything stupid… don’t try to keep me alive and get yourself in trouble… live your damn life, okay? Live it the way you want to.”
I can’t answer. Years stream down my face as I escape into the bedroom to bury my face in a pillow. I sob hard for Luke, anger at Kieren and rage at myself and hatred of my father mixing and pulsing and driving me mad. If I had never met Kieren, if I hadn’t fallen for Kieren’s bullshit, or if I had been stronger in the face of my father’s relentless onslaught of abuse and bullshit?—
Luke might not be tied to a chair in my husband’s living room waiting to die right now.
