Who's Your Daddy?

Despite the suggestion to sit, none of the four girls took Kurt up on his advice. Once the name ‘Shawn’ had been mentioned they all went into high alert and were all too concerned and troubled by the news to do something as peaceful as ‘take a seat’. Instead they all began to bombard him with questions faster than he could answer them. Only Peter sat, amused by the show, like watching a pack of lionesses tear apart a gazelle.

“Shawn?” Ashley echoed, who’s bottom still stung, giving her another reason not to sit. Riding the passenger seat on the way home had been agony enough. “He was only supposed to be meeting Grace. What happened?”

“Apparently-” Kurt began.

“Is he okay?” Chloe asked, her face dropping, remembering the psychological **** Kurt himself has endured and the manipulation and corruption of Victoria at the hands of Shawn. “Did Shawn hurt him?”

“No, he’s fi-” he tried to answer.

“Does this mean Shawn and Grace are working together?” Heather mused, trying to fit all the pieces together in her mind. Her eyes widened as another thought struck her. “Wait…the video Grace copied from Hannah? She…she didn’t give it to Shawn, did she?”

“I actually don’t k-” Kurt attempted to reply a third time.

“Since it’s Shawn, he probably tricked Grace into helping her,” Madison insisted, thinking back to how she herself had underestimated him. “How do you know all of this though? How did Gavin get away if none of us knew he was in trouble?”

“Ok, everyone shut up,” Kurt growled, finally having enough of being cut off. “I’ll answer everyone’s questions, but you need to let me speak first of all. Let’s see…how do we know all of this? Well, it was really good fortune that Trent was at Oh Henry’s when Gavin went there to meet Grace. He didn’t get a good vibe and tracked them to a warehouse where he saw Shawn enter. He called Brandon and together they rescued Gavin, but they got there too late to catch Shawn.”

“Brandon?” Madison repeated, looking around herself quickly. “Brandon’s here?”

“Don’t answer that,” Heather snapped, not wanting to waste a question, as if they were finite. “What were Shawn and Grace doing together?”

“I don’t know about Hannah’s video, but they don’t seem to be working together exactly. He is a client of hers, just like Hannah was and he hired her to do two things. First was to provide the algorithm that he used to post the pictures of Victoria this morning,” he explained hurriedly, still much rather be looking for the tall blonde than doing the Q&A, even though he had assured Gavin that he’d fill the others in. “The second was to find me.”

“…because he still thought you were Gavin Westher,” Ashley inferred, and pouted. “But, it still sounds like Grace was helping Shawn.”

Kurt shook his head. “Gavin said that Kurt discovered her identity and threatened to use it to expose her if she didn’t continue to do what he wanted. The thing with the photos this morning was done without her knowing exactly what the algorithm was for. Once the papers came out and she realized what she’d been a part of, she used Gavin as the pretext to set up a confrontation and it all went wrong from there.”

“But, he’s okay?” Chloe repeated her question. “He’s not hurt?”

“Nothing he won’t recover from. A bit beat up. Shawn threw a few punches and Grace tased and tied him up, but it seems like he’ll recover,” Kurt informed her simply. “He’s resting up now.”

“Okay, well I guess the real question is, what did he want?” Heather said, folding her arms, unhappy about being in the dark about the fate of Hannah’s video but knowing that it would be very selfish to go demanding answers from Gavin when he was resting after all he had just been through. “You said he tasked Grace with finding you, but he wouldn’t have done that without a purpose.”

“He wanted to know where Victoria was. We assumed he knew she was here because he knew about the cabin, but he didn’t know the cabin’s exact location. I’m guessing he would have gotten some perverse pleasure from making me be the one to betray her whereabouts to him, but he managed to extract the information from the real Gavin instead. Though, apparently Shawn threatened to fuck Grace, so he only did it to protect her.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Shawn’s M.O.” Madison agreed, though she was only half paying attention to the conversation now, her thoughts focused on where Brandon might be.

“Either way, if Shawn knows where Victoria is then we need to get her out of here,” Ashley insisted. She may not have been on the best of terms with her best friend recently, but she wasn’t going to hand her over to Shawn if she didn’t want to go. “The police wanted to talk to her, so maybe if we send her to them, they can protect her until that Detective digs up something on him.”

“Oh, yeah, the police, fuck, I almost forgot that part,” Kurt said with a sigh as he rubbed his head. “Before Shawn left, Gavin heard him ask Grace if she had anything on the Detective. Grace said she did, so it’s very likely that he’s going to **** her too, which means we can’t trust the police at this stage.”

“I knew that fucking detective was useless from the first moment I saw her on my doorstep,” Heather growled as she cracked her knuckles. “There’s really nowhere safer for Victoria than here then.”

“Really? What about her parents? Or Ravers Manor? That place has walls and gates,” Ashley suggested, tilting her head in thought. “Out here, alone, in the middle of nowhere, exactly where he knows where to find her seems like a very bad idea.”

“Actually, up here might really be the best. In town the police have jurisdiction but up here, the park rangers are the first response,” Chloe noted. “The police won’t be able to sweep it under the rug as easily if it comes from another branch of law enforcement.”

“And then they sweep it up anyway. If Shawn has McClane under thumb, then she’ll make it disappear somehow. No matter who it comes from,” Ashley argued.

“Which is exactly why Victoria should stay here, surrounded by her friends,” Heather said, spreading her arms wide. “Here is where Shawn will come, and we know he’ll have to come here. In town, he can strike from anywhere, but out here, he has to come to us. And when he does, we’ll catch him, ourselves. It’s clear we can’t trust or rely on the police any longer. So, it’s up to us.”

“And then what?” Ashley asked. “Without the police, there’s no legal system, which means no justice.”

“We could tie him up and punch him a few times,” Chloe offered, thinking of how he’d beaten Gavin.

“Or fuck something he loves in front of him,” Madison suggested. “Then cum on his face and post the pictures online.”

“Kendra said Shawn won’t come for her immediately, but he will when he feels like it’ll play into his hands. So, we have to be vigilant,” Kurt told them, before adding, “I should warn you though, if we do manage to catch him, Brandon said that we should kill him.”

“Kill?” Ashley recoiled. “What the fuck is he thinking?”

“That killing a bastard like that is its own form of justice,” Heather said coolly, before sighing and shaking her head. “But I don’t think it’s something you can just do and come back from. How exactly did he propose that we execute him anyway?”

“Moreover, what did Victoria think about this?” Madison asked, the questions piling up again. “What does she want to do?”

“Well, she-” he began, only to be cut off once more.

This time though he wasn’t cut off by any of the girls in the room, but instead by a fifth woman, the brunette ex-lover of Shawn, Kendra McKenzie who came running into the room from the dining area, with her phone in her hand and flanked on their side by Trent and Brandon. Brandon paused, falling back when he saw his twin sister, staring at each other in silence across an invisible gulf. For those two, everything else in the room seemed to melt away, until it was just the siblings and seemingly insurmountable divide.

“Turn on the news,” Kendra shouted as she ran in, ignoring Brandon.

“Huh?” Kurt reached for the remote. “Is there something about Detective McClane? Maybe she did call Shawn’s bluff.”

“No, it’s-” Kendra began, but it was her turn to be interrupted.

“Wait, how are you here?” Heather demanded, furrowing her brow. “I thought you left.”

“Why would you think that?” The older brunette asked, slightly bewildered that this seemed more pressing than what she’d come to tell them.

“We passed your car on the way back to the cabin,” Heather informed her. “And I’m certain that it was your car. Go check for yourself. I bet it’s not in the yard.”

Kendra made to move towards the door, but Chloe’s words stopped her, as she, Ashley and Kurt tried to make sense of the news report they’d just jumped into the middle of. “Wait,” the redhead called out. “What does this mean? What is this ‘leaked paternity test’?”

Ashley’s face fell, eyes widening as she remembered Monica’s reason why she was looking for her son this morning. “Zack?!”

“Bingo,” Kendra confirmed. “Someone leaked the test results. Robert Ravers isn’t his father.”