Page 6 of Unbind

Eventually, Gen shows up in the bar, her gold sequins rippling over her body and casting their light as she walks across the room. As with every other time I’ve met her, she looks fucking glorious. Unfortunately, she also looks fucking pissed off.

‘You two.’ She jerks her thumb over her shoulder. ‘Grab a table and sit.Now.I’m getting a drink.’

I look at Anton, eyebrows raised. He murmurs something in Gen’s ear and kisses her on the cheek before guiding me to a nearby empty table. ‘You heard the lady.’

If I thought tonight might be an occasion on which the formidable Genevieve Wolff attempts to ingratiate herself with me on behalf of her club, clearly I was deluded. Anton and I sit and wait as sheepishly as two schoolboys who’ve just smashed a window might await their headmistress, but within a minute, she’s joined us. She falls just short ofslamming her champagne coupe down on the table and sits on the free bar stool.

‘Is Nat okay?’ Anton asks her, and she shakes her head.

‘Honestly? No. No, she’s not,’ she says, glaring at me. I can feel the guilt, the defensiveness, instantly, even though I’m a grown man and completely innocent. After all these years, it’s still an instinct.

Blame Adam.

It must be his fault.

‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What’s wrong? Was it her diabetes?’

She shakes her head impatiently, but nothing on God’s green earth can prepare me for the next words to come out of her mouth.

‘Does the name Stephen Bennett mean anything to you?’

Stephen Bennett.

His name may evoke an incident that happened two decades ago—over half alifetimeago—but it’s as fresh and as horrifying and as triggering tripping off Gen’s scarlet lips as it was all those years ago.

Stephen Bennett belongs to a different lifetime and a different me, as does the unspeakable, inhuman thing I did to him. My fun, sexy evening at Alchemy belongs to the here and now. It belongs to the Adam Wright who’s told himself a million times over that he’s earned his place in this world.

But the mention of his name forms a bridge from this world to that, a portal that has me hurtling through time and space to a past I’d give anything to erase.

I whisper myyes.

Somehow, impossibly, I know what she’s going to say next before she says it.

‘Well, it seems Nat is his sister.’

4

ADAM

Contrition wears many faces, as does regret. They’re both complex emotions, both weighty enough to behave in similar, cyclical ways to grief.

I should know.

I have enough experience of all three.

I bow my head. I learnt in prison that the aggressor is capable of regretting the occurrence of a past trauma just as fully as his victim, and in myriad ways that are all as necessary to rehabilitation as they are painful to digest.

Over the past two decades, I’ve forged for myself an existence that allows me to endure my past, to make the only kind of fractured, imperfect peace with it that I’ll ever make. Empathy has played a key role, even if it’s been one of the toughest lessons of all.

There are people who…people who’ve helped on that front, let’s say, people for whose compassion I’ve been indescribably, pathetically grateful, even if their roles belong in the shadows of my journey back to myself.

But the careful, ring-fenced form of empathy for Stephen Bennett that I’ve espoused over the past twodecades threatens tonight to burst its banks and become a tidal wave that will fucking engulf me, and that’s because someone who loves him, someone whose life I presumably shattered alongside Stephen’s, is right here, in the same building as me, andnowI understand what it was I saw in her beautiful eyes.

Staggering, unequivocal hatred.

My overwhelming instinct is to bury my face in my hands, to shield myself from the disgust, the disappointment, written across Gen’s face.

But I don’t.

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