Pavane for a Lost Boy (Or Rather, How to Survive Loss after Rejection)

Chapter Seventy-Six

Ryan Peavey.

Ryan fucking Peavey, the same young man who had me shot and fighting for my life at the gala after exposing my past and playing the cat-and-mouse game for my heart, is in the same parlor room of the Kendricks manor with me. And despite the scratches on his face (thanks to Holly giving him a nasty beatdown before Mr. Kendricks nad the servants pull her off him while he laughed), he still looked as if he was born to be an all-American jock. He still had that cocky swagger that attracted and repelled people if they weren't careful to not get too close to him.

"Well, that was a greeting that I'll never forget," he said flippantly, not caring if he had a few scratches that made him more like a god (I'll deny it if you tell him that) as he was led to a stool to sit as everyone calmed themselves down (and Mr. Kendricks had one of the servants to call the police in secret). "Holly, you can stil pack one hell of a punch."

"You deserve worse, you bastard," my next-door friend seethed, Javi coming over to calm her down. "After all the shit you pulled on Demario and everyone else, you deserve way worse than me punching the shit out of you."

"Got that right," Oliver quipped, glaring at him while pulling me closer to him. "What are you doing here?"

"Straight to the point, aren't we?" Ryan drawled, crossing his arms and sending me a smirk that I averted from. "I'll bite. I'm here to make my intentions known and to let you know that Theo and I parted ways. Creative and moral differences, to say the least."

"That's debatable," Antonio quipped, rolling his eyes. "Let me guess, you decided that Blake was dead weight?"

"More or less, amigo. But let's just say that Theo got a little too...expendable for anyone's taste. And after things got too complicated after Yvonne Bader bit the dust no thanks to him, I decided that I needed to cut losses and ties to him."

Oliver and I faced each other, knowing that that meant. "You shot him?" I asked.

"You're welcome," he replied. "And for what it's worth, he was the one who pulled the trigger on you, Demario, alongside doing the same for Jillian and Artem, though I was the one who gave him the idea."

"A likely tale," Madame Endora sniffed, frowning at Ryan's nonchalance.

"Hey, it's the truth," Ryan defended. "I may have been lost in my bitterness over Demario and Oliver's rejection of me and all that, but even I knew that things were getting out of hand. But I will admit to gunning down Demario's ex-grandparents and his other aunts- the ones who hated him as they wanted an alliance to take away everything Demario had regarding his sanity. Theo and I thought otherwise and decided to end them and their campaign. Same thing that involves that crooked cop and his family, though I will say that I didn't expect the guy's daughters to end their lives after they killed their parents since the whole family is nothing but bad eggs. All the  same,. the Bader-Simmons-Ingram family is basically kaput, even though their fortunes are not coming to Demario's bank accounts."

As if I wanted any part of it in the first place, folks!

"But the main reason for my appearance is to see Demario," Ryan went on, his face serious. "And although I did a lot of shitty things to him back then, I guess you can say that I could never have enough of him...or even Oliver, the three of us sharing something sensual back at Vienna's after-game house party."

"Don't remind us," Oliver spat, eyes narrowed in silts.

"Oh, gag," Mark said.

"All the same, I still want him back to me and I just...well, let's just say that the time has come for me to make my case known to Demario now that there's no more people standing in my way." Ryan smiled thinly. "Although there's some haters in the mix who are...dead weight around him that sees things differently. I'm not the bad guy around here, just a guy who's looking for someone to love. Hence me coming back to make Demario and Oliver an offer that I hope they won't refuse."