Okay, maybe he’s more thana tad bitvexed.
I gulp again. “I don’t know! He just starting talking about how he knows you better than anyone, and how he canreadyou, and then he was telling me about your grandfather’s horses.” I’m breathing hard, trying to hold his stare but, frankly, it’s scaring the shit out of me.
“And?” he prompts, shaking me lightly. “What else did he say?”
“Chase, you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” he says unapologetically. “What else did he say?”
My brow creases as I shuffle through memories of my conversation with Brett, which somehow seems like a lifetime ago after everything that’s happened in this damn elevator. “Um, he said you had a favorite horse. A stallion. Except you didn’t want him to know it was your favorite, so you only rode it when he was out of the house.” I take a deep breath.
“Anything else?”
“Just that you aren’t good at sharing.” I wince as I recall his exact words. “And that you’re always worried he’s going tosteal your favorite toys.”
Chase is totally silent, his eyes working with thoughts I can’t begin to decipher, his jaw locked down so tight, he’s probably going to crack his teeth. Not that he’d notice — he’s trapped so deep inside his head, the elevator could probably come loose from its cables and plummet back to earth without him realizing.
I give him a full minute before I speak again and when I do, my voice is soft.
“Chase.”
He looks at me with haunted eyes.
“What is it?” I whisper, my words barely audible.
He hesitates a beat, then unclenches his jaw with visible effort. “You think this is a game. You think I’m overreacting.” He pulls a deep breath in through his nose, his eyes never wavering from mine. “I thought those same things, once. When I was sixteen, I didn’t want to see what was right in front of me, didn’t want to see him for what he was. For what heis.”
I wait, knowing he’s not finished.
“My horse, Titan — he was a thoroughbred stallion. Dark black, solid muscle, more than sixteen hands. A gift from my grandfather, on my seventeenth birthday. He said I’d become a man, and a man needed his own horse, so long as I agreed to care for it myself, to do all the feeding, brushing, exercising. I didn’t mind. Titan was first thing that was ever justmine — solely my responsibility.” Chase’s eyes are distant, clouded with memories. “Brett’s younger than me by about eight months. He would’ve gotten his horse, if he’d waited. Grandfather was always fair, never favored one of us over the other. But Brett didn’t want to wait. He was jealous — so jealous, it consumed him. I could see it in the way he watched me brushing Titan out after our rides, in the way he lurked in the shadows of the stable, waiting for an opportunity.”
Chase lifts his gaze to meet mine, and I see stark anger there, in the depths of his irises, along with hurt — a deep-rooted, long-aching pain that still plagues him, even after all these years. I barely know this man, I’m not even sure Ilikethis man, but I can’t help feeling compassion for him. Heart turning in my chest, my fingers involuntarily begin to stroke the bare skin at the back of his neck, just above his shirt collar.
“One day, I had to go away, I don’t even remember why. I asked one of the stable hands to keep an eye on Titan. But when I came home and went out to the stables, planning to take him for a ride, he wasn’t in his stall. No one had seen him. The stable hand didn’t know where he’d gone.” His nostrils flare on a sharp inhale. “ButIknew. Even before Brett ran into the stable without my horse, his face a mask of fake shock and horror, Iknew.”
The breath catches in my throat.
“He said it was an accident. That he’d taken Titan for a short ride, to give him some exercise because he knew I was busy that day. He said Titan’s hoof caught on a rock, that he stumbled, fell, landed wrong. It was a terribleaccident, a tragedy — my thoroughbred with a broken leg.”
The very air around us has stilled, as though the world itself has stopped spinning, and I don’t dare breathe, unwilling to shatter the moment until he’s purged this long-unspoken memory from his system.
“He was in pain. There was nothing to be done.” Chase’s voice is eerily empty, detached of all emotion. “Grandfather got out his pistol and we walked to the field, where Brett left him, writhing in agony, foaming at the mouth. I’d never seen an animal suffer like that. And I’d never held a gun until that day, when Grandfather pressed its cool butt into my hand and told me being a man wasn’t always pretty. Titan was my horse — it was my responsibility to take care of it.”
My fingers stop moving and instead simply press into the skin of his neck, a wordless offer of comfort.
“I stroked his mane, one last time. Told him I was sorry. And then I shot him in the head.”
His voice doesn’t break, when he says it, but my heart does — I feel it fissure inside my chest, picturing the young boy and the horse he loved, lying dead in a field.
“Chase,” I whisper, grief sluicing though me.
“Brett did that,” Chase says flatly. “He broke him. Killed him. The first of many things of mine he’s broken.”
I’m wordless, stunned, as I stare at him, searching for the right words. But thereareno right words, not for this. Nothing I say can fix this.
Chase’s eyes return to mine. “I’m not overreacting. I’m not projecting my anger onto him,” he says resolutely. “He’s charming. He always was. And he’s smart enough to cover his tracks. Maybe he seems harmless to you, maybe you still think none of this shit applies to you, but I need you to believe me when I say that you’rewrong, Gemma.”
I somehow manage to nod as horror washes over me for an entirely different reason.