I sit back, letting my head fall back on the seat, and I laugh. Fuck, it feels good to know I’m not a Darling. I got myself worked up enough to open the envelope without freaking out, but now I can let myself have this relief, this elation. My mother wasn’t lying. And I didn’t fuck my cousin.
Preston takes my hand and squeezes. He’s still grinning, looking as relieved as I feel.
“Can I see that?” Royal asks, his voice low.
Right. He’s the one who has to deal with the fall-out. He’s the one who got the result he didn’t want.
I hand it over, my laughter dying as I watch him read it, turn it over, then check both sides of the envelope. “Where’d you get this?” he asks at last.
“I sent away for it,” Preston says. “You can do the kits yourself now.”
“So, it’s just some online quack doing the testing.”
“No,” Preston says slowly. “It’s someone who has no stake in it. Not some local doctor your family bought off.”
“That’s right,” I say. “If you already got a test, and it said I was a Darling…”
“This has to be wrong,” Royal mutters, frowning at the paper. There’s no conviction in his voice, though.
“Why would your doctor fake a DNA test for me?” I ask. “I don’t even know your family, and I definitely don’t know any doctors.”
“He wouldn’t fake it for you,” Royal says. “He’d fake it for my father.”
“Why would your dad want you to ruin me? I’d never even met him, or any of you… Why would your dad want to target a poor nobody?”
Royal shakes his head. “It wasn’t about you. It was never about you.”
His voice sounds hollow and resigned, and his eyes are getting that hollow look about them, the one that used to be his regular look, when I met him. Now, I don’t see it much.
“Then what’s it about?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer.
“He found you,” Royal says. “He thought you were a Darling. We were already invested before he got the test. It didn’t say what he wanted, so he had the doctor forge one or did it himself, so he’d have something to show me.”
“Why?”
“So we’d leave the real Darlings alone,” he says. “He was working on the land deal last year. Preston’s family owns all the property where the mall is located. Dad just wanted to keep us out of the way, and you were a distraction so we wouldn’t fuck up his casino plans.”
I gape at him in disbelief. “So this was all just…Business?”
He gives a bitter little chuckle. “It’s Tony Dolce,” he says. “It’s always about business.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes, all of us putting the pieces together and battling with our own thoughts and regrets. He’s right. His dad would whore out his own children to close a deal. Why would he care about an innocent bystander?
At last, I turn to Preston.
“So that’s why you never leaked what I told you. You had everything you needed to bring down the Dolces, but you were already in business with them.”
“Fuck no,” he says flatly, glaring at Royal over my head. “I would never do business with murderers and conmen. Dolce money is dirty money. It doesn’t belong in this town, and neither does a fucking casino.”
“But your family—”
“My mother’s family,” he says. “The Delacroixs. And they refused to sell.”
“Then why didn’t you try to bring them down? Just because you don’t want to show your face?”
He swallows, his good eye searching mine. “I didn’t want you to have to relive that. But I still have everything from that night, if you want it.”
I realize he’s not talking about the information I gave him. He’s talking about the blanket he wrapped me in, the rope they tied me with, the hood they gagged me with. I shiver and close my eyes.