twenty-four
Royal Dolce
I pull up on the side of the highway and turn off the car. It doesn’t matter who sees us. Nothing will save Harper now.
I should have known. That’s what I keep thinking. I should have fucking known.
She’s a Darling.
You can never trust a Darling.
The second I unlock the doors, she’s out of the car and running across the soggy field beside the road, some kind of farmland with rows of brown dirt and green sprouts, trenches of water between them.
“There are snakes in there,” Duke calls after her, a taunt in his voice.
She hesitates, glancing from us to the field. Then she runs.
Smart girl.
She’d be lucky to be struck by a snake. Snakes can’t hurt her half as much as we will. They’ll kill her fast. We won’t show her the same mercy.
“Guess she’d rather be with her kind,” Baron says, grabbing a bag from the trunk.
We start across the field, sloshing through the slippery, spongey mud. Cold water rushes into my boots. Harper’s already halfway through the field to the trees beyond, where the lazy spring sun filters through the budding branches. It’s almost pretty, her last sunset.
I’m not worried about losing her. She can’t outrun us. She’s just making our job easier. She could have made us carry her.
Not that any of it matters. It’s over for her. This was always the end, even if it came sooner than I wanted, even if it’s more final than the others. We usually don’t finish them off. We let them live their broken lives, remembering what they had and lost. Harper never had anything to lose. That’s what threw me off. She has only her life to give.
I’m calm, knowing what has to be done. The rage came fast and lasted longer, sank deeper, than usual, but it’s under control now. I know I’m not only angry at Harper, that my rage is bigger than her, than either of us. I’m furious at myself for my weakness. For caring. And even though I didn’t try, or even realize it, I trusted her in some small way. Not with information, but enough to let myself feel something again. She uncovered a weakness. That was my mistake. Now I’m paying.
She’ll pay, too. She should have known better than to cut through the stone crust inside me with her jackhammer claws. She should have known the fiery rage of lava below would swallow us both.
I fed it to the monster, and he came to life, came to protect us. Only he can cool the rage. He’s cold, focused. The monster doesn’t deal in the currency of emotion. He’s here to collect a debt from a Darling, and that’s all.
We reach the far side, and I point to the spot where she went into the woods. We can hear her sloshing through the water that sits around the base of the trees in this dreary, swampy wetland. She’s not hard to find, even when she stops and hides in the trees. The ripples in the water give her away. I stand back and watch Baron and Duke darting after her as she races away from them. They like to play, and I let them.
When they catch her, she slips through their hands. She falls, sinking into the water. I could make it easy for her, push her under and watch the bubbles come up from her mouth and the life go out of her eyes.
But my brothers drag her up. They want to play more. The weakness inside me rises, but I don’t push it down. I hold it up, forcing it to see, to accept. She’s not mine any longer. They can do what they want to her.
She throws a punch, knocking Duke back, then knees Baron in the nuts and smashes his face on her knee. He stumbles back, blood gushing from his nose.
The next second, she has a knife in her hand, slashing at Duke’s throat. He knocks her aside, and the knife tears through his shoulder instead of his neck, leaving a deep gash in the muscle. He swears, and she spins, raising the knife as Baron stumbles back, still holding his crotch. She lunges forward in the water, knife flashing, teeth bared, her eyes wild as a trapped animal. He holds up a hand to block her. She swipes the knife across his palm, striking swiftly and fiercely.
Red swirls into the water and pulses in my temple.
That’s enough. They’re done playing.
That’s the last Dolce blood this Darling will ever draw. I leap at her, catching her from behind before twisting her around and slamming her up against a tree, her feet lifted off the ground. She swings the knife, but I have better instincts than my brothers. I’m a fighter, too. I grab her wrist and twist, feeling the bones snapping and her cry of pain as if they’re far away. The knife tumbles into the water, and I wrap my hand around her throat and squeeze, just like I did the very first time I saw her. I should have killed her then.
She kicks and fights, but I don’t feel it. I squeeze until she stops breathing, and then I let her body fall. Instead of sinking under the surface, she lands on her hands and knees in the water, gasping and crying into the water. Fuck. I didn’t hold on long enough, didn’t knock her out. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve got time.
“Don’t kill her, dude,” Duke says. “You promised we could have her when you were done.”
Harper starts groping around in the water for her knife. She’s soaked and shivering, covered in mud and swamp water. This is where she’s always belonged, in the dirt and filth, and where she’ll return after the last moments of her short life.
Duke and Baron wrestle her to her feet and march her forward, to a little hillock raised from the water, a big tree standing in the center of it. I watch my brothers tie her arms, then bind the rope around a tree. “Royal,” she begs, twisting around to see me. Her eyes are wide with terror. I can tell she’s trying to reach me, trying to find the connection between us. But she severed that with the blade of her vengeance long before she took a knife to my brothers. “I’m sorry. Please.”