Preston works his jaw back and forth. “I would have fucked their sister, but Devlin took off with her. So that leaves their girlfriends. Isn’t that what they did to us? It’s called revenge, cousin. Look it up sometime.”
“Which of the things you’ve done is going to bring our family back?”
They glare at each other for a second before Colt answers his own question. “None of them, that’s what. They’re not playing the same game we did, and they never were. It’s over, Preston. Accept that before it costs you your life.”
Preston straightens, staring down his cousin until I stand from where I sank onto the arm of the grey sectional. “As enlightening as this has been,” I say. “I have to get to school.”
They both ignore me.
“If petty-ass revenges are all I get, I’ll fucking take ‘em,” Preston says. “I’ll take everything I can from them at every opportunity, whether they know it or not. I’ll know. And I’ll never stop.”
I picture him sitting up here on his fancy computer, reading my salacious tales, collecting them into a file he will never use. He has so much on the Dolces, but he can’t do anything with it. He can’t go to the cops because they’re in the Dolces’ pockets. He won’t show his face in town, so he can’t get anyone else to follow or join him. He was never going to help me. He just has to feel like he hasn’t given up. I can respect that. The man’s got his pride, if nothing else.
“I really do need to go,” I say again.
“Take my truck,” Preston says, barely glancing at me. “Bring it back this time. And don’t leave it running in the garage.”
I take the keys and head for the door. Somehow, it still surprises me when he does shit like this, like it’s nothing to let me borrow his fancy truck or pay my rent for six months.
The last thing I hear before closing the door is Colt answering something Preston said with, “Fuck you. You don’t get to bring my sister into this. Your sister is still here.”
So, I guess it wasn’t all for nothing. I saved Lindsey last spring, even if I couldn’t save myself.
eighteen
Harper Apple
It takes a week of runaround from the office staff at Willow Heights before I can get an appointment to see the headmaster, but I’m not too worried about it. I know not much goes on the first week, even at a prep school. I can make up the assignments. I just need to get in.
I text Preston before I go in for my appointment—we don’t use the app anymore, since he put his number into my new phone the day he gave it to me—but he just says he can’t show his face around town, especially there. In another lifetime, the Dolce boys said something about that, about him threatening Gloria and escaping to hide like a cockroach. Funny, that’s what they called me, too. I guess these two cockroaches found each other, though I can’t imagine any comparison that would be less apt to describe Preston Darling, with his impeccable house and wardrobe.
I go into school in the afternoon, when everyone else is in class. I decided too late that I was going to Willow Heights, but now that my mind is set, a little red tape won’t stop me. I’ve survived so much to get here. I’m not walking away with nothing. I’m done with the Dolces, done with the Darlings. I want no part of any of it. The only way out was through, and now I’m through. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what Mr. D was doing. He was the other piece of the puzzle, the Darling side that had to use up whatever was left when the Dolces were done. He finished me off, and now I’m so empty there’s nothing left but a perfectly polished shell.
That shell is hard, though, hammered into the fiercest, steely determination, the only thing left when everything else has been smashed into bits so small they can’t be broken again. They’ve all gotten what they want. They’ve all fucked me and used me until I have no value to any of them.
My mother would lose her shit and tell me I was beyond fucking stupid for letting them take everything from me and then toss me away. Both the Darlings and the Dolces might think I’m useless now. But I know the truth. I’m not worthless now that they’ve used me up, scraped every last trace of potential from inside my body.
I’m free.
And I’m going to use that freedom to fly right the fuck out of this town.
I’m not going to do it as a teenage runaway with no high school diploma, though. So, I steel myself with the hard, cold shell that hides my scars the way Mr. D’s mask hides his, and I march inside. Unlike Preston’s, my scars are invisible to the naked eye, but I can feel them, and beneath them, the hollowed out place where Harper herself used to sit. My identity is gone, my soul, my heart, half my mind. But some instinct for self-preservation remains, a dogged will to live that’s hardened inside me since the day I almost died, and with it, a poison seed of the most wretched of all torments—hope.
It’s not the shining kind that poets wax on about, but something ugly and deformed, a dark and twisted thing. This golem doesn’t tell me life will get better, that I’ll start over and everything will be fine. But it whispers that a future of nightmares is still a future, that though my heart and body have been decimated in ways there’s no going back from, even those missing a soul can keep breathing. Even a mutilated, broken thing can find the sun.
Preston told me that.
I sit in the office and wait until the headmaster can see me, and I don’t pay attention to the whispers and furtive glances from the office staff. When my heart starts to beat erratically, I remind myself Royal is not here. And when it’s time to talk to the headmaster, I walk in on steady legs.
“Your scholarship is not the problem,” he says after I lay it all out. “You didn’t enroll in this school. Every application goes before the enrollment committee, and you didn’t put yours in for consideration. You are no longer a student here.”
“Then make me a student,” I say.
He folds his hands on the desk in front of him. “I’m afraid it’s not that easy, Miss Apple.”
“One more thing,” I say. “I want my schedule arranged so I’m not in any classes with any of the Dolce boys, or Cotton Montgomery, DeShaun Rose, and Dawson Walton.”
“Several of those boys are no longer students here,” he says, adjusting his glasses on his peaky little turtle nose.