twelve
Royal Dolce
“That’s the new Darling girl, huh?” King says, not sounding too interested in the matter. Why would he be? He doesn’t live around here. For him, the fight with the Darlings ended a long time ago. He helped Dad get revenge on all the Darlings who wronged him, and he helped us get revenge on the ones who wronged Crystal. King didn’t see much point in going beyond that. In his mind, the only reason to hurt a man’s family is to hurt the man. But not everyone can be a fucking saint.
“Yeah, that’s her,” I say. “Got something to say about it?”
“She’s not as fun as Mabel,” Duke says, slouching back in an armchair and absently tossing a football in the air before catching it. Dad’s gone to his study, and Eliza is napping because apparently pregnancy makes her sleep fourteen hours a day, so it’s just us for a few minutes. But the comfortable ease between us died the year Crystal died. Since then, there’s a guardedness, a wariness. There are secrets and closed doors and rage, blame that is never spoken but sits in his eyes like a drop of water growing heavier and heavier, until eventually it falls. Only King never lets it fall. He’s a fucking fortress of control.
“Mostly because Royal won’t let us have any fun with her,” Baron says, unwrapping one of those fucking Dolce Sweets suckers he can’t stop putting in his mouth. “When he’s done, though… Then the fun really begins.”
I bristle at the thought of them fucking with Harper, even though I know it’s inevitable. When I’m done, though, I won’t care. They can finish her off. I just don’t know when that’ll be, when I’ll stop giving a shit, when I’ll stop feeling in those weak moments that she’s the only thing giving me life, bringing me back, keeping me breathing.
“You know, you don’t have to keep going after them,” King says, addressing me, though I haven’t spoken.
I shrug. “It’s not for Dad. It’s for us.”
“Okay,” he says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “But you don’t have to do that, either.”
“Now the family guy is preaching forgiveness?” I ask.
“The families forgive when it’s necessary,” he says, leveling me with a cool look. King’s the same but different. He’s still our brother, still tries to look out for us when we’re around. But he doesn’t live here, and it’s different for the three of us than it was for him. We’re different, too. Harder, like he is. We might not be out shooting people for our great uncle, but we have our own troubles. And he’s not a part of it.
“It’s never necessary to forgive a Darling,” I say.
He shrugs. “Okay, Royal. But it doesn’t make you less of a man to change your mind, if it comes to that.”
I know what he’s trying to do. To tell me it’s okay to like her, that it’s okay to stop now, to let her debt be paid by what we’ve done already. But he doesn’t know shit. He doesn’t live in this town, and we’re the only people he talks to around here. So how could he begin to know what we’ve done to her and if it was enough?
“It won’t come to anything,” I growl. “I don’t care if she’s never heard the name Darling, if she doesn’t know that’s who she is.”
“That makes it even more fun,” Duke says, laughing. “She literally has no idea why we’re targeting her. Sucker.”
King shakes his head and turns to me. “Is it helping you move on?”
Move on. When did he become a fucking therapist?
Oh, right. He was always like that, our counsel and safety. That’s over now. He needs to butt the fuck out of our business. He thinks he can still help, always asking what’s happening with us. But I’ve closed that door. The family that comes first for him is no longer the Dolce family. It’s the Valenti family. He can go fish for information on Dixie’s blog like everyone else if he needs gossip. I’m not telling him shit.
Still, I pause for a second to think about what he’s proposing. I let myself imagine the scenario in all its ridiculousness, what would happen if I didn’t care that the Darlings destroyed my family and my mind. I picture life at Willow Heights: Walking around holding her hand like a boyfriend, deciding what college to attend where I can play football and she can study psychology. Bringing her home without Dad blinking an eye. Taking her to all the places she’s never been, Florence and Fiji, New Zealand and New York. Introducing her to Ma and watching the horror and shock on my mother’s face—the most priceless of all the fantasies.
But that’s all it will ever be. A fantasy. Revenge is the magnet that holds me together, all my pieces forged in steel and clinging to this one goal because it’s the only thing keeping me from crumbling into a million useless shavings of the boy I used to be. And her family is the one that carved me up, filing away at my edges until there was nothing recognizable left of me, until the only thing I had to hold onto was the magnet, the force of my hatred that keeps me alive.
She’s not the reason that pumps blood through my veins. Destroying her is the reason.
I glare at King. “She has their blood. She’s an enemy.”
He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know about our lives anymore. This is how it works. Darlings must pay. I’m not about to go soft like Dad and start sucking their dicks because forgiveness is necessary for business. Next thing you know, we’ll all be in bed together.
Fuck. That. It’s not over until there’s not a drop of Darling blood poisoning Faulkner. If they don’t want to pay, they can leave this town like the assholes next door. When they lost their son, they ran crying to some other state to start over and lick their wounds. We stayed. We’re stronger than that. Stronger than any Darling. They can be smart and run like cowards, or they can be dumb fucks and face us, crowing about their bravery as we bulldoze them into the ground and bury their corpses. Those are the choices.
King doesn’t argue, but he gives me that look that makes me regret telling him everything that happened the week I was kidnapped. He and Dad are the only ones who know all of it—besides the ones who did it. At the time, it seemed like the right thing, to tell someone. People always say that shit, and I must have absorbed some of it growing up. But I wish I’d never told anyone. They couldn’t do shit about it, just like I couldn’t. It was too late by then.
And now, every time I look at his face, I know he knows. I know he pities me. That’s almost worse than what Dad does, using it against me, holding it over my head if I tell him to go fuck himself one too many times. I don’t need King’s concern or his prying. I’m doing fine. I’m getting revenge one Darling bastard at a time. When it’s over, I’ll walk away knowing I purged this town of that name like some vengeful god slaughtering sinners.
“How long are you staying?” I ask King. I used to appreciate his watchful eye, the leeway it gave me. When he was the oldest in the house, the pressure was on him. I could fuck up. When I became the oldest, I tried. At least, I think I did. But by then, I’d already destroyed this family, killed my twin, demolished the Dolce image. Now, I fuck up almost intentionally. There’s no point in trying to hold up the weight of this family. It’s already crushed us all. I might as well revel in the destruction with the twins.
I know King only wants to make it better, to swoop in like a hero because that’s what he does. But the dynamic has changed in the year and a half since he moved. He can’t save us anymore. Nothing can. So I shut him out and don’t tell him anything, even though he pries and tries to get me to talk to him, to let him know what’s going on with us.