Beneath the Stain - Part 3

Part Three

Mackey Sanders doesn’t do anything easy—rehab is no exception. Never one to follow orders for the sake of being orderly, Mackey needs a reason, something real, to make him agree to Trav’s terms of getting clean. Trav knows he can’t be Mackey’s only reason to rehabilitate, but before he can
convince Mackey of that, he needs to get to the heart of what’s been eating Mackey alive from the moment the band left Tyson.

Can Mackey’s family—can Mackey’s
band
—
survive the fallout of Mackey telling the truth? More importantly, can Mackey?

T
RAV
COULDN
’
T
see Mackey. One minute the kid was looking a little panicked as somebody’s son herded him into the back corner, and the next minute, nada. Trav had seen him reach for a beer, but even if he was off the wagon, he’d been out of sight one minute, maybe two at the most, and Mackey wouldn’t be
that
wasted. Not with the amount of shit that had been cruising in his bloodstream less than two weeks before.

The guy herding him had been insistent—and blatantly sexual. Had they snuck into an empty room for a one-off?

A kick of disappointment almost leveled him, and Trav shook it off.
Only bi when high—
no. If Mackey wasn’t high, he wouldn’t be having a demeaning one-off in a closet. He’d said it himself, and he might have been high and a pain in the ass, but he’d been nothing if not straight with Trav.

Trav needed to trust him.

Which meant Trav needed to worry. “Excuse me,” he said to the guy next to him—someone in a five-grand silk suit, so, important with money but no common sense. “My lead singer seems to have gone missing.”

The guy laughed and Trav took off through the crowd, using his shoulders and elbows enough to be rude. Well, he wasn’t
supposed
to be nice. He was supposed to book gigs and he was also supposed to manage the fucking band.

He spotted Jefferson, Shelia, and Stevie in a corner, and was jealous. They made their own damned group. Nobody intruded. They touched, talked, and laughed, and nobody asked questions, and people left them the hell alone.

Until Trav.

“Where’d Mackey go?” he asked, jittering with panic. “I saw him being hustled off by some weaselly asshole, and if someone’s shoving coke in his face, I’ll fucking kill them.”

Three shocked faces turned toward him, and he wasn’t even embarrassed enough to grimace. “Seriously,” he said. “The last time I saw him, he was being dragged toward the hallway. Have you seen him?”

Jefferson and Stevie picked up on his panic immediately. “Me and you can go through the back,” Jefferson said, nodding. “Stevie, you and Shelia—”

“Around the front.” Stevie grabbed Shelia’s hand and took off.

Trav and Jefferson turned around and went through the hallway that led to the other side of the building. Trav wanted to collapse all over Jefferson Sanders.
Thank you. Thank you for proving I’m not the only one who gives a shit.

They hauled ass down the darkened hallway, peeking through each door.

Through one, Trav got a good look at Blake, Kell, and two girls in tiny dresses snorting coke from a shared spoon. With a growl he flung the door open.

“Drop that shit,” he snapped, gratified when Kell literally dropped it on the ground. One girl squealed “My shit!” and bent down in a dress that could double as a Band-Aid, scraping the coke into her little purse vial with a well-manicured finger.

“What in the hell—”

“Your brother is fucking missing, asshole. Did
nobody
keep an eye out for him? He doesn’t need this bullshit after what he’s been through. Jesus, I’m surprised he fucking survived childhood with you, because you sure as shit aren’t any help as a so-called adult. Now get your ass out here and help!”

Blake sputtered, trying to laugh through a bloody nose, but Kell? Kell pushed his lower lip out and wrinkled his broad brow. Trav realized he’d hit him where he lived. He took Mackey seriously—and Trav had just called him on letting his brother down.

Trav turned around, not sure how to fix what he’d just broken. Kell followed him and Jefferson as they power walked down the hall. Trav ordered them to keep looking in the empty rooms—he was heading for the door to the alley behind the building.

He got there, hitting the bar release with enough force to make the clang resonate. The door shot open, and Trav sensed movement at the opening of the alley. He swung his head around just quick enough to see the flutter of feet as someone disappeared. Mackey was pressed against the wall, his face jammed against the rough granite of the building.

As Trav watched, he fell slowly, like he was falling through honey, listing to the side and collapsing in a heap of boxes. He didn’t even raise his arms to stop his fall.

Trav couldn’t breathe. His goddamned lungs froze like he’d been sucking on an AC pipe, and his heart stopped. Mackey’s weight shifted the boxes beneath him. The world spun hard, with extra force, sending Trav stumbling to Mackey’s side.

“Kid, c’mon. You breathing? What’d you take? Jesus, what could you take, you didn’t have time to take anything.”

Mackey groaned. “’S beer,” he mumbled. “Trav, ’s beer.”

“Beer? Yeah, well, this looks a lot more like….” Trav surveyed him, sprawled sideways in the garbage, and realized his pants were down to his ankles, his ass exposed for anyone to see. There was blood, he saw, feeling sick. Blood smearing his asscheek, and a slick white track of what must have been semen.

Oh God.

Trav took a breath, and another, and remembered that even when Mackey was high as a fucking kite, there were condoms in the trash.

“Oh Mackey,” he murmured.

And then he lost his mind. He must have. Mackey’s brothers were coming. What he
should
have done was call an ambulance, let them take a rape kit, let them do a blood test, but Mackey’s
brothers
were coming, and his bandmates, and his friends, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t let them see him like this.

Before he could acknowledge what he was going to do, even to himself, he pulled Mackey’s pants up and buttoned them around his hips. Then he scooped the kid into his arms—
Jesus,
he still weighed nothing—and leaned against the wall so he could fumble for his phone.

They’d taken a limo in, and he called the driver, who was waiting in the garage nearby, and had him swing around to that side of the building. He was going to call Jefferson next, but he didn’t have to. The door behind him exploded out, and there were frantic footsteps coming from the other direction, and suddenly everybody was there, even Blake, who was using a wad of paper towels to keep his nosebleed in check.

“Here,” Trav muttered, giving his phone to Jefferson so he could hold Mackey, arms dangling at his side, in his arms. “Dial the hospital. Tell them we’re bringing in a roofie victim. He’s going to need a blood test as soon as we walk through the door.”

“Roofies?” Kell asked, wrinkling his nose. “Isn’t that, like, a date-rape drug?”

“Shut up,” Trav snapped, clutching Mackey closer. His head had tipped back and he was breathing loudly from his nose.

“But I didn’t say any—”

“
Shut up!
” Trav snarled, and prayed for the car to get there. With the exception of going back to rehab, Mackey had done everything Trav had asked. Gotten up, gone to rehearsal, come back, eaten breakfast, eaten dinner. Gone shopping and bought clothes Mackey didn’t care about so they could impress people Mackey
really
didn’t care about—and what did Trav do?

Trav watched from across a crowded room while some fucker weaseled his way into the party and got a piece of Mackey Sanders’s ass.

God fucking
dammit
!

Jesus, Mackey. How many of us have to let you down?

The car swung around and the lot of them piled in, Trav going last with Mackey.

Halfway to the hospital, Mackey groaned and started to convulse. Trav tilted Mackey’s head and he vomited on the floor at their feet. Trav barked for water, and Stevie handed him a bottle from the bar while Shelia pulled out a wad of tissues to wipe Mackey’s mouth.

“How’d he get roofied?” she asked when he was as clean as they could make him. The smell was overpowering, but not one of them said a thing. They just stared at Trav with big, frightened eyes.

“Some guy—I didn’t see his face. Wrapped his arm around his shoulder, grabbed him a beer. Man, he must have used a fuckton of it too.”

“Why weren’t
you
there?” Kell asked.

Trav looked at him sharply. His eyes were puffy and his nose was running—he was pissed, but then, so was Trav.

“We were working our way to meet,” Trav muttered, remembering the relief on Mackey’s face when they made eye contact. “And….” He swallowed. “Goddammit.”

“Do we got any idea who it was?” Stevie asked.

“We’ve got some evidence,” Trav muttered, thinking about the semen. His stomach lurched, and he kept a tight rein on himself. “If the guy’s on file, we’ve got him.” Maybe. If Mackey wanted to press charges. If the guys wanted the world to know their brother had been….

Trav couldn’t even finish the sentence. For a moment he was almost overwhelmed—sick, like Mackey, on the floor of the limo—but he swallowed the tears back. These kids looked to him, and he’d already let them down.

“Gerry didn’t use to let Mackey hang out alone at those things,” Kell said softly, savagely. “Gerry and Mackey used to hang out together—”

“Popping Xanax and getting hammered,” Jefferson snapped. “Wasn’t perfect either, Kell. It’s our fault, all of ours. He never needed taking care of when we were kids. Just forgot how much of a kid he was when we got here.”

“Speak for yourself!” Blake snapped. “Kid’s not
my
responsibility. You’re the ones all overwhelmed with this brotherhood shit. I’m just the hired hand, remember? He wouldn’t hardly
talk
to me because I wasn’t the almighty Grant fucking Adams.”

“Who?” Trav asked. He wanted nothing more than to hold Mackey close until the roofies wore off and Mackey could fight him, argue about being held, tell Trav he could do it himself.

“Our first second lead,” Jefferson muttered. “Kell’s best friend. We grew up with him, but he knocked up his girlfriend right when we were signing on with Tailpipe.”

“Oh,” Trav said. The name meant nothing to him. Nothing. There would be a day when Trav would
yearn
for Grant Adams not to mean a goddamned thing.

T
RAV
HAD
to relinquish Mackey into Kell’s arms for a moment as they were getting out of the limo, and he resented the hell out of it. Kell held his brother easily, like maybe he’d been used to holding children once, and he didn’t get grossed out at the smell, but Trav couldn’t help it. Kell wasn’t good enough to hold Mackey, and he couldn’t change that.

He snatched that limp, unprotesting body back as soon as he could stand, and shouldered his way through the front doors of the ER. The nurse at the registration desk met him. Apparently Jefferson had done a good job at giving Mackey’s info, including his insurance number and his birthday, but as the nurse nodded Trav to a waiting gurney, Trav caught her eye.

“I need to talk to the doctor,” he said grimly. “Alone.”

He didn’t stay to hear the reaction from the rest of Mackey’s people. He stretched Mackey out on the gurney and charged through the double doors with the doctor and nurses waiting for him. They got to a prepping area and Trav pulled the doctor aside, sacced up, and said what he needed to.

“He’s been raped.”

The doc jerked back and frowned. “How do you—”

“I found him. He’s been drugged and raped—you’ll see when you do the rape kit. This kid is in the limelight—we’ll talk to the police, report to whomever you need to, but do
not
make a lot of noise, you hear me? When he wakes up, let me talk to him first—”