Page 33 of Bound By Fury

“Because I’m trying to tell you that—that I—” He waved his hands around, like the words were right there, but he just couldn’t find a way to put them together.

“Kai,” I sighed, flicking my gaze across his face, my heart in my throat as I waited. Maybe it was the moonlight shaded by the branches of the trees, but I could have sworn there were shadows crawling in his eyes.

“What the fuck do y’all think you’re doing?” boomed a voice from across the property line, a beam of stark-white light streaming through the fog that had slowly gathered around us.

“Shit!” Kai hissed, twisting onto his hands and knees before using my shoulders as leverage to stand. He brushed away the grass I’d picked and piled atop his legs. “Harper,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you—”

“If you don’t get your stupid ass back over here, boy, I swear on everything holy!”

Kai flinched, and it broke me.

“Look at what he’s doing to you!” I yelled, jumping to my feet and gripping his shirt between my fingers.

“You’re not okay, Kai. You need help! He’s going to kill you one of these days,” I said through gritted teeth. “And you know what, I don’t care if it makes me a bad person, but every night I pray something else kills him first.”

His ensuing laughter was crazed and humorless. “I don’t need saving,” he’d said malevolently.

I didn’t find any of it particularly funny. “Yeah? Well, what about Lexie, huh? What does she need?”

That seemed to sober him rather quickly. “Stop it,” he growled, and I’d never heard him use that tone with me before. It ignited something akin to fire in me.

“You stop it! She needs you, Kai! Lord knows your parents aren’t going to give her the things she needs. She doesn’t have anybody but you! And you’re going to die if things don’t change.” My voice was getting louder with every word. “You okay with leaving her like that?” You okay with leaving me like that? I wanted to scream but couldn’t. Because even back then I knew it was so much bigger than just me and him. “Leave it to Lucas to pick up the pieces for you?”

The very first inkling of hatred sparked in his eyes then. “Don’t say his fucking name to me right now.”

I kissed my teeth. “Oh, grow up! The world doesn’t revolve around you! You left! You left us here this summer with no warning. What was I supposed to do, just sit here pining after you? That’s not fair and you know it!”

“God, you sound stupid! You don’t get it at all!”

“So explain it to me!”

“I—I can’t!” His voice was raw and sounded like it hurt to speak. Like there would be a ring of bruises popping up there next.

“Well, then I guess there’s nothing left for us to say.” I was deflated, and my head was aching. I knew the only way to relieve the pressure would be to cry. But I couldn’t. Not right then. Not in front of him. Not like that.

“Just leave it, Harp.”

Josiah’s voice cut through the woods again. “Imma start counting down, and if I don’t see you crossing through these trees in the next—”

I cut him off. “You should go,” I said, backing away.

“I should have known you were going to act like this.”

I froze, too angry to catch my words before they left my mouth. “Like what? Like someone who gives a shit whether you live or die? Boo-hoo, get over it.”

“Fuck you, Harper,” he spat, rage contorting him into someone I didn’t recognize. I could have dropped straight to my knees from the pain of it all.

“Fuck me? Fuck you! You’re such an idiot!” I roared as he walked away. In the distance I could still hear the tail end of whatever his dad was screaming about.

“You know, if something happens to Lex because you were too chickenshit to do something, it’ll be all your fault, right?” My words were daggers, and I was stabbing him in the back with them. Maybe a part of me hoped that if I said something awful enough, he would have to turn around and look at me. To yell at me some more. I could prove to myself that he wasn’t giving up on us. On me.

The last thing I ever said to him was the worst of all. “For Lex’s sake, I hope you grow a backbone. Because if something happens to her, I’ll kill him myself.”

Later, when I learned about the accident, guilt planted a bullet in the barrel of my belly. The echo of my last words to him haunted me. I knew there was no one on the planet Kai loved more than Lexie. Not even me. And I knew his pain must have been unimaginable.

When I finally found the number for Alastair Matsoukas, all he told me was that Malachi didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t help but wonder how much power my words really had. If by saying all those awful things, I’d somehow changed the tides of fate. If I’d accidentally put a call out to the universe, and she’d answered in the worst way possible.

Though it’s completely irrational, I can’t shake the feeling that it was all my fault.