The Rebel King (All the King's Men Duet #2) - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,60

seat, lunging for the door. “No! Oh, my God, Owen!”

“Millie!” I reach for her arm, but she evades my grasp and jerks the door open. She trips out of the car and takes off running toward the burning vehicle. I run after her, only catching her when her stiletto turns over and she stumbles. I grab her from behind, wrapping my arms around her waist.

“Millie, you can’t,” I say, tears burning wet tracks down my face.

She wiggles free again and limps toward the burning vehicle, but Bob streaks past me and grabs her again. Her arms windmill, fighting with an invisible foe. Even with his strong arms around her waist, she still strains toward the destruction, toward her husband, her hands outstretched and trembling.

“O,” she moans, her voice jagged and falling apart. “No. Oh, God, no. Owen.”

The vibrant, beautiful woman who laughed with me only minutes ago is already gone. This is a sobbing, broken shell, and my heart aches knowing that other woman is being consumed in those flames. Owen is gone, and so is she. We’re standing in one of life’s awful moments where your breath is a comma, marking the space before and after tragedy, punctuating that nothing will ever be the same.

25

Maxim

My father and I haven’t spoken since Christmas when I warned him to leave Lennix the hell alone, so I’m surprised when his name pops up on my phone. Right away, I think of the compliment he “planted” in the media, and wonder what this is about. I’m reclining, resting on the flight home, but sit up to take his call.

“Dad.” I’m not asking a question or offering much of a greeting. Just literally letting him know I’ve answered.

“Maxim.” For a moment, it’s only my name, but spoken in a voice I’ve never heard from my father. Torn. Ragged. Lost.

“What’s wrong? Is it Mom?”

“No, your mother . . . she’s here with me.”

“Where’s here? What’s going on?”

“We’re flying to Baltimore. There’s been an accident at the fundraiser.”

“Nix?” Her name is out before anything or anyone else occurs to me.

“She’s fine, from what I’ve gathered. It’s . . . it’s Owen.”

I bite my tongue, not wanting to ask the question burning the tip of it—the question my father’s sober tone begs. And, from my father’s silence, he doesn’t want to answer.

“What about O?”

“He’s gone.”

There’s a wail in the background, a wounded animal with my mother’s voice. The moment retards, slows, stretched by her pain, like a drawn-out note in the octave of anguish. It doesn’t fall on me all at once, the impact of what my father said. Not like a brick, or a boulder, something heavy and flattening in one blow. It’s a deluge of pebbles, embedding themselves in my flesh one by one, second by agonizing second, until I’m covered. I can’t move. I can’t speak. Hurt is my only faculty.

“Maxim?” my father asks, with a hint of his typical command. “Did you hear me?”

“Gone,” I say dazedly. “Y-you said Owen’s gone . . . Jesus.”

In my seat, I bend at the waist and hold the phone away from my ear, letting it fall to the floor. I can’t find my bearings in a world where my brother doesn’t exist. I’ve never been here before. The pain is tornadic, picking up speed, tossing out everything I knew about how something could hurt. There is no point of reference for this. The reality of Owen being gone travels through me, miles per second, and nothing is left untouched.

“Maxim,” I hear my father again, a distant echo. “Son, talk to me.”

Without opening my eyes, I feel around on the floor until I find the phone and lift it to my ear. “I’m here.” That’s not my voice, grated up with sobs, but it’s coming from my body. “I’m . . . I’m trying to . . . shit.”

Words abandon me and I sit in silence for a moment with my father, and when he speaks, his voice is hoarse and emotion cracks it, and he says the words that I’ve often wanted to hear, but not like this. Never like this.

“Son, just come home.”

26

Lennix

There is no colder place than a waiting room when the waiting is over.

When hope turns off the lights. The held breath is released in tears. The end of faith. It all convenes in a waiting room when death has come and gone.

Millie sits on the hospital’s drab, impersonal couch, dry-eyed and lost in her own apocalypse. This is the end of the