“I didn’t think so.”
We sit in silence for a while.
“Is your mom Mexican or something?” Preston asks.
I laugh and pull out my phone, thumbing back to a selfie of Mom and me that she made me take the other night at her retirement party. I show it to Preston, who visibly relaxes. He takes out his phone and scrolls for a minute, then turns it to me.
“This is our last family reunion before the Dolces.”
I take the phone and look at the picture for a minute. “Wow,” I say at last. “Looks like Hitler’s wet dream.”
Preston laughs quietly and reaches for his phone. I point to a single brunette head in a sea of blond. “Her mom married in,” he says. “She’s blonde now.”
“Then I’m surprised you didn’t bleach my hair,” I say, running my fingers through the end of my ponytail.
I wait for Preston to make excuses or explain why he made me into their sister, but he doesn’t say anything. I watch the dragonflies skim over the still water of the catfish pond.
“We could get a DNA test,” he says after a long pause. “Just to be sure.”
“I’m sure,” I say. “He was just fucking with us. My dad’s not even white. At least, the guy my mom thinks was my dad.”
I break off, remembering our conversation before her party again.
“If there’s any chance, though,” Preston says, gesturing to the golf course surrounded by old growth oaks. “This is the Darling estate, Harper. You’d be cut in.”
I laugh at that. “I seriously doubt your grandpa is going to claim some illegitimate lovechild of one of his disowned sons.”
“Then I’d cut you in,” Preston says. “When I graduated, he made me treasurer of the entire Darling estate. I’m good at it. I like numbers more than family drama. If he objects, you can have half my share.”
“Why are you so nice to me?” I ask, searching his eyes for answers that make no sense. “Is it guilt? Do you really think what they did to me is your fault?”
He lays an arm along the railing of the gazebo and turns to the water again, his jaw tight. The silence stretches until I think he’s not going to answer. Finally, he speaks. “They said to me once that everything we did to them, they’d do tenfold to us. That everything we tried to do but failed, they’d do to us and succeed.”
“Yeah, Baron told me something like that, too.”
“They think I tried to do that to their sister,” he says. “I always thought they were coming for Lindsey, that they’d do the same to her. But they went after you instead. Maybe that’s why. Maybe they really think you’re a Darling.”
It hits me then, what I didn’t even consider. I thought Baron was fucking with us, trying to make us think we’d fucked our cousin or keep us from teaming up because they don’t want the Darlings to have friends, and they don’t want me out of their sights. That he’d tell his brothers and they’d laugh about it later, replaying how we jumped apart when he said it. But what if they really believe it?
It explains so much.
I close my eyes, my breath shaky as I try to calm my spinning thoughts. As soon as Mr. D gave me the scholarship last year, they must have known it was donated by a Darling. They came after me hard, too hard to warrant the little rebellions I managed. They weren’t targeting me just because I was new, or poor, or defiant. They targeted me because they thought I was part of the family they were destroying, and I had to face the same sentence as the rest of them.
Or maybe they didn’t know it just yet, and they were just doing the usual hazing—making me bow and kiss their feet, tossing me in the dumpster when I put myself in their way. When did they find out? When did the hazing become something more serious, more sinister?
And how much did Royal suffer, thinking he’d fallen for the enemy? He accused me of plotting against him all along, but he’s the one who was plotting. He knew all along that he’d kill me at the end. He wasn’t even going to tell me why. They didn’t care that I don’t want to be a Darling, that I didn’t even know I was. They just picked a Darling at random to incur their wrath, the next punishment on their list of retaliations.
How long had they been planning to have the team rape me?
A chill races up my spine, and I grip the wooden bench seat under me so I don’t pitch off it.
“You tried to do that to their sister?” I ask, steering the conversation to something I can comprehend better than my own experience.
Preston shakes his head. “No. I’d never have gone that far. I was pissed that she was coming between us, so I did something to force Devlin’s hand, to make him admit he was putting her before family. That he cared about her, and she wasn’t just a piece of ass or the enemy. I’d never have done it if I didn’t already know what would happen, that he’d protect her.”
I swallow hard, remembering that night in the woods, when Royal didn’t protect me.
Is that what Preston did? Make Devlin—and the Dolces—think that the team was going to rape her if he didn’t step in?