Yield (16 page)

Since her birthday and the hockey jersey, Kate had begun stockpiling cans under her bed again.
 

Twisting the bright new knot, Kate fled the trap that was her bedroom. She stumbled down the curving stairs because Jace liked circles. The lights that hung down the curving staircase from the top floor to the basement were circles. The bar in the basement was round, his shower was round, his office was round. He even had a tattoo of joined circles around his biceps. The sound of music came from the basement and she continued down the round staircase, only to stop when she saw Jace.

He sat on the curved couch, his guitar in place while he sipped from a bottle of beer. It was weird to see him alone. No band members, no groupies, no friends. She twisted and squeezed a knot as she approached the sectional on her tip toes. Folding her arms on the back of the black leather, she watched him play and sing.
 

When he sang, he made her heart feel tight and funny. She didn’t always understand what he was singing about but she understood the passion and love in his voice. He loved to sing. He was really, really good at it.

This man was her father.

The thought came at the oddest times, flooding her with an alien feeling because she never called him Dad. Not even in her head. He was Jace. Pressing her mouth against her forearm, she got lost in the song. In the power of it. Jace was a horrible father, even she had realized this in six months of living here, but he was an amazing musician.

“Fuck. Damn it.” He flexed out his hand and made a note on the paper sitting on the round table. He looked up and spotted her watching. A frown appeared as if he struggled to remember who she was and why she was here.

Kate
, she thought to herself.
I’m Kate.
 

“What?” He sounded impatient, like she was inconveniencing him.
I’m Kate. I’m yours.

“I—” She pinched skin on her wrist, she was turning the knot so much. Struggling to find the words, he became impatient and returned to the music. “There’s this guy,” she said. He sighed and slapped his hands over the strings, cutting the music off. “He keeps…he…he…” Tears burned as she struggled. In her head it was all there. He kept putting presents on her bed, he scared her, he had kissed her at the New Year’s Eve party in a way no one should kiss a child, he scared her so much.

“This boy is bugging you?”

She nodded.

“Tell him to piss off.”

“But—” Jace turned is attention back to the music, done with her.
He’s not a boy
, she finished in her head.

Chapter 12

Finding one woman should not have been this hard. Yes, there were over half a million people in the city, but finding Kate should’ve been a lot easier. Her apartment had been treacherous. Her roommates were something else. It was hard to imagine his sweet girl living with those two. They were walking vaginas. Groupies. Immaterial. After that he had been at a loss.

He had even checked the penthouse though it had been empty. Jace was zero help so he hadn’t even bothered. After that who was there to call? He didn’t know her friends. He knew dick all. Except that he had hurt her. Unintentionally.
 

“You mind-fuck, Doyle,” Oz said, “you don’t fuck with her mind. Maybe you should–”

“Maybe you should not finish that sentence. I fucked up. I get it.”

His friend went quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe I should finish it. Are you sure pursuing this is the right thing to do? Not for you, for her. You’re the one who said she was fragile.”

Had he? He couldn’t remember. Impatiently, he tapped his thumb on the leather wrapped steering wheel. His gaze landed on the black ring that had one day been waiting for him at the club just before he had left on tour. It was a deceptively simple design. He remembered the text where she confessed she had made the ring for him. Kate wasn’t one to easily give up her secrets.

She clutched them tight. So for her to have shared even that tiny nugget had been rare. Smoothing his index finger along the band, he remembered the slack from the others at him wearing the ring. He wasn’t a jewelry kind of guy. Fuck, he hadn’t even worn his wedding ring. Not because he hadn’t loved Claire and he had planned on fucking around on her, it just wasn’t his thing. Had it been an issue? He couldn’t remember. He did know Oz wore his. Doyle also knew he hadn’t taken Kate’s ring off since he had slid it on.

Hello, asshole, here’s an obvious statement.

“Your wife was the one who told me she was stronger than she realized.” He snatched up his phone and opened up the text conversation that had been going with Kate pretty steadily until today. He thumbed through random snippets: some clean, some very much not clean. Fun was telling her what to do and making her text back as he made her touch herself. She wasn’t allowed to fix typos. There were a lot of typos.

Doyle found what he was looking for, halting the scrolling to look at the photo, at her words when she told him this was Kate’s world. He watched the video. Nothing about the space said workshop or warehouse. Rental? Doubtful. She had the carcasses of guitars on walls. So that meant somewhere in the city, there was something with Kate’s name on it. Someone would’ve helped her with the legalities. Someone like– “I gotta go.” He disconnected the call, cutting his friend off in mid-word.
 

Starting the engine, he told his hands-free to call Charlie.

“How goes the work session?” Their manager never joined them. He had a low tolerance for bullshit.

“No one’s dead. Kate Jennings.”

“I’m acquainted with her.”

Dick. “Where is she set up?”

“Is this an emergency?”

Her green eyes filled with pain and something broken. Something that had felt a lot like her fragile trust.
“I think my dom let them call me a fuck toy. That’s what I think happened down there.”
 

Hell yes, this was a fucking emergency. “Yes.”

His manager hesitated. Charles rattled off the apartment where the venus flytrap vaginas were. “No, I don’t want that shitty apartment. I want to know where she’s set up.”

“Doyle, I can’t in good conscience–”

“It’s been a while since I threw down. I’m a little rusty, and I’m sober, but it shouldn’t be that hard to remember.”

“Are you threatening me with throwing a tantrum?”

“Well, I know how much you like cleaning up after us, Charles. It’s just a matter of how big a mess I make. You have a fondness for having to bail us out of jail, don’t you?”

“God damn it, Doyle. You’re an asshole.”

“How hard is it to clean up a mess when it hits Twitter? This wasn’t around for me before. Big and messy. Maybe someone accidentally gets hurt.” Jesus. He was not rocking sanity at all. “Kate. Jennings. Voila, no shit storm.”

“Fucker.” He gave an address.

“Always a pleasure, Charlie.” He hung up as he fed her location to the GPS. Not even his blackmail was a big of mess to clean up as this. Trust was fragile. Especially with someone who rarely experienced it. Throw in the mind-fuck world of her submission, and things could get extremely sticky. He knew better.
 

Assholes like Anderson were manipulative jack-offs. Unhappy with their lives, they had to make everyone else miserable. The mind-fuck had caught him by surprise. Usually he was able to handle the bassist’s bullshit, but that it had been Kate had blindsided him. How Anderson knew wasn’t the point. Maybe he had come into the penthouse when they had been scening, maybe he had actually known who she had been at the party. The how wasn’t important.
 

He had beaten the shit out of Anderson years ago when he had said something about Claire. Doyle had loved Claire. She had been his fiancée and his submissive. One snide comment and he had put his band mate in the floor. Anderson wasn’t a fighter. Even blitzed out of his brain, Doyle had put the beat down on him. He was bigger, stronger, and he knew how to cause pain. He enjoyed it.
 

But Kate.

That had been different. All kinds of different.

Her building was in a newly trendy area where old warehouses were being renovated into lofts, condos and office space. Getting in was surprisingly easy. All it took was an autograph on a guy’s arm and a selfie picture that he tweeted out to the world.
 

Someone needed better security.
 

The large warehouse was pretty much split in half, with four lofts on one side and two levels of condos on another. He went left until he reached the last door. Knocking beneath the spy hole, he looked around. The place still had a warehouse feeling, with concrete cinder blocks making up the wall and heavy doors announcing the personal spaces. The light above the door looked like it belonged on the exterior and nothing that he had seen so far screamed Kate.
 

Nothing but the face that appeared in the door cracked open.

She looked pale, with bruising under her eyes, making the green look darker. There was something familiar on her face; he had just never seen it because of him. Usually it was her stellar father who gave her a haunted look. God damn it. He hated seeing it directed at him.

He braced his hand on the doorframe above her head because he wanted to grab her. The frame was easier and safer. He had damaged something fragile today.

“I broke Anderson’s jaw when he called Claire a submissive cunt. I’d love to be honorable and say it was only one hit, but I took him to the floor and tried to introduce his nose to the floor via the back of his skull. We had a show, he wound up in surgery with his jaw wired in place and a buddy of Carl’s had to fill in for the rest of the tour because Anderson got hooked on pain meds that he would blend into milkshakes laced with booze. Charlie made me pay for Anderson’s hospital bills and attend some anger management courses. Flash forward fifteen years.”

Reaching out, he brushed her bangs out of her eyes and a tiny flinch moved through her. Fuck.
You haven’t earned the right to touch her there, Kolemann.
“Fifteen years later,” he said as he lowered his hand. “I’m clean, I’ve got fifteen more years of muscle and he’s rotting from the inside out. That’s not why I didn’t turn Jace’s white carpet red.”

“Didn’t want to pay his medical bills?”

“There are few times when life has surprised me with an upper cut. A pop to the chin that leaves you standing there, shaking your head as your ears ring. I can count them on one hand in the past fifteen years.” His thumb pointed up. “Finding Claire in bed with Jace. Seeing you in Edge,” his index finger aimed at the door followed by his middle finger, “and the cold-blooded rage I felt in Jace’s basement. I don’t like my bandmates. Maybe Max. I don’t even remotely respect them. We’re a small group of selfish assholes who lost sight of why we started this band long ago. We waste our talent and harm those we’re supposed to love the most. Why anyone buys our albums and comes to concerts is beyond me. We’re sliding into mediocrity and that fucking drives me nuts.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

Everything. He rested his head on his arm as he gazed down at her. “I wanted to end him, Katey. I talk about beating the shit out of Jace because he’s a total fuck up as a human being. I didn’t even take a swing at your father when I came home to find him nailing my wife. I walked out. I turned around and walked away. But Anderson.” He took a deep breath and held it, trying to smother that rage that built up remembering the man’s face as he talked about Kate. His Kate. His sweet girl who had just been emerging from a lifetime of hurt. “I am not exaggerating when I say I wanted to end him. I could. I grew up on the streets. I was a big, strong kid filled with a lot of anger. He grew up the spoiled, pampered son of a politician. I learned to fight in back alleys and he learned to snort shit up his nose. I lift weights and run every day, because if I don’t, I don’t have the strength and stamina to get through a show. He still puts shit up his nose. For fun I take crops, whips and straps to pretty submissives and can beat on one for a long time. For fun he puts shit up his nose.

“Ending him wouldn’t be hard. One good hit and he’s out. But it wouldn’t be one hit. It wouldn’t even have been the rage-filled beating I gave him over Claire. He wouldn’t just hurt, I’d make him beg. I’d draw it out. We both know I’m good at drawing out pain. Just thinking about it makes me want to go back and put that junkie in the ground.”

“You didn’t say anything, Doyle. Nothing. You went to work like he said he didn’t like your shirt.”

She was torturing the hell out of her bracelet. She hadn’t done that, he realized, since the night of the party. There had been the usual fiddling with it, but nothing like the twisting and rolling of one knot over and over again. Reaching down, he pressed his finger against hers, halting the movement because she was catching skin and turning it pink.

He rubbed his fingertip over the small hurt she had inflicted. “I could say that he’s a lot like a wasp and that engaging with him only makes things worse, which is true.”

“But?”

“But mostly I was too busy trying to deal with the rage. Calm my shit before I did something I couldn’t take back. Look what I did, eh? Did something I can’t take back.” He rolled one of the knots between his fingers. The leather was smooth and worn from countless touches from her. “The irony of protecting the asshole is not lost on me. In short, I fucked up.”

Since she hadn’t pulled her hand away, which he took as progress, Doyle touched the small bruises that were fading. He liked this bracelet, but he made a mental note on the amount of pressure to put on it.

“I don’t know if I can forgive you,” she said quietly, watching his finger touch each mark he had put there.

“I don’t want you to.”

Surprise made her look up. “I don’t want this to fade for either of us like these little dots are.” Breaking points needed to be remembered. “Will you show me your world, Katey Jay?”

She blinked slowly, clearly not expecting the question. She looked over her shoulder into the space as if seeking permission. He half expected her to say no, but a tiny jerk of her head made his body relax for the first time all afternoon. When she opened the door, he felt lucky. Very lucky. This could’ve gone the other way.