Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92972 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92972 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
They aren’t the kind of people to tell a guy that he’s a bad influence to his face.
But I was.
I told Beatrice she was making a mistake, that Kai didn’t deserve her or appreciate her. That she should not only not move in with him, but she should drop out of the band, as well. As far as I was concerned, it was obvious she needed a clean break from the creep who’d basically groomed her. When they met, he was twenty-one to her seventeen. They both insisted things hadn’t gotten “romantic” until she was just a couple of months shy of eighteen, but I never believed him.
I told him as much at that dinner.
He didn’t say a word. He just shrugged and smirked, the same way he smirked in those photos outside the courtroom after he was cleared of kidnapping and attempted murder. Somehow, the fancy lawyer his wealthy family hired to defend him managed to convince a jury that he and his fifteen-year-old ex-girlfriend had been enacting a mutual fantasy when things went awry.
There were text messages between them, proving she’d once said she thought it would be “hot” to be kidnapped by a man in a mask, like the men in the romance novels she read at the time.
She never said anything, however, about wanting to be held in a cellar in an abandoned cabin in the Nebraska woods for weeks, half-starved and psychologically tortured, while her family lost their minds with fear and grief. She never said anything about wanting that “masked man” to be the boyfriend she’d broken up with a few weeks before, telling him she never wanted to see him again after catching him in bed with her best friend. She never said anything about wanting to be told, again and again, by that same boyfriend, that she would never leave that cellar, never see her family again, never have a life aside from whatever life he decided to give her.
I have no idea what was going through the minds of the people on that jury when they let him off with community service, a misdemeanor charge, and a slap on the wrist. From the articles I read, the fact that he hadn’t sexually assaulted her seemed to convince them that he wasn’t all bad.
Sure, he kidnapped her, starved her, refused medical attention for the broken ankle she sustained when he pushed her down the stairs into the cellar, and lied very convincingly to detectives about his lack of involvement in her disappearance for three weeks, until a heart-to-heart with his old man convinced him to come forward, but hey…no raping!
What a nice guy.
What a promising young man.
Wouldn’t want to mess up his life or ruin his future over a teenage misunderstanding.
One of the local papers actually had the gall to call it a “lover’s spat,” and the small town where they lived seemed divided about who was to blame for all the terror the girl’s disappearance had caused. The fact that Kai’s father was a wealthy, well-connected real estate developer, and the girl came from a single-parent home and was on scholarship to the exclusive prep school they both attended, probably had something to do with that.
Wealth, position, and family connections have saved lousier men than Kai from suffering the consequences of their actions.
His getting off with a slap on the wrist isn’t a bug in the system; it’s a feature. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: the system is designed to protect perpetrators, not victims. That’s why that woman taking a beating from her husband on Bourbon Street had a string of domestic violence reports as long as my arm, but still couldn’t get placed at a halfway house until a semi-famous hockey player beat the shit out of her abuser, attracting the kind of attention that made local news stations and charities take notice.
That’s why Henry James Killian was gently chastised and his juvenile record sealed, leaving him free to reinvent himself as “Kai,” a talented young musician, a few years later.
It seems he kept his nose clean through college at Vanderbilt and afterward, at least until the band became famous enough for him to stretch his “baby asshole rock star” wings, but still…
Still…
My gut is screaming that boys who do things like he did don’t change. They just grow up to become men who are more careful about not getting caught.
A soft knock on the bedroom door makes me flinch. My voice is tight as I call, “Yeah?”
“Do you need anything?” Charlotte asks through the door. “Imodium? Electrolyte beverages? A hand to hold?”
“Are you offering to hold my hand while my ass explodes?” I ask.
“I mean, no,” she says. “I might have been joking about that part, but if you need a hand to hold on the bed in between dashes to the bathroom, I’m your girl. I was raised on oysters on Sundays in the New Orleans heat, baby. I know the pain and suffering of a betrayal of the ass. Intimately.”