“Where have you been?”
I spin toward the voice, my hands fisting, adrenaline pumping. I don’t like being taken by surprise.
“Out,” I growl. “What the fuck are you doing sitting in the dark?”
Baron switches on the lamp beside the couch. Duke is sprawled across the loveseat, his eyes glassy, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand.
“You’re going to get us caught,” Baron says. He picks up a sucker and begins to unwrap it slowly, his elbows resting on his knees and his eyes fixed on me. “This is a small town. It’s not New York. It’s harder to hide a murder when there are only a couple a year.”
“We didn’t murder anyone,” I snap, hating that he’s the reason for that. He reminded me that death is too kind. That we don’t kill Darlings.
“That’s right,” Duke says. “And I’m not afraid of the cops. They’re not NYPD. They’re hicks. What can they do to us?”
“If we don’t get sloppy, nothing,” I say. “No one but the three of us know what happened.”
The twins glance at each other, that fucking twin telepathy thing that pisses me the fuck off.
“Right?” I grind out.
“Right,” Duke says. “We didn’t say anything to anyone at school. We’re not stupid.”
No, not stupid. They’ve just never done this shit before. Sometimes I forget how little blood is on their hands.
And that’s by design.
Protect our brothers.
King would despise me if he knew what we’d done, what I’d let them become. I should have killed her like I wanted, kept them from her, kept myself from having to admit this truth about them—that I knew what they’d do to Harper when I finally let them have her after six months of denying them. It was both their reward for respecting my previous claim and her punishment for betrayal. But I can’t remember when they became the kind of people whose attention is a punishment.
The twins look up to King, though, and I’m supposed to fill his shoes. I think of what he’d say, not because I want to be like him, but because it will comfort them. Duke needs that, at least. I’m not sure Baron has whatever it is that makes a person seek comfort.
“We didn’t do anything the Darlings wouldn’t have done to us,” I point out. “We eliminated a threat to the family. That’s all. A man has a right to protect his family.”
That’s not what she was, and we all know it, just like we all know Crystal’s blood is on my hands. Harper was no threat to my family. She was a threat to me.
I finally, truly understand what they went through with Mabel. When it happened, I saw it from the outside, and I felt for my brothers, but I didn’t get it. I thought they were fuckwits for thinking of her as human at all. I didn’t think I was capable of caring about a Darling. But now I know what the Darling girls do to a person when they set their sights on you, when they decide to play. I know how they lie and twist everything until you start to believe that against every odd, even though you know it’s impossible, someone could give a fuck.
“Who was she talking to, though?” Duke asks. “Because he might figure it out.”
“I don’t think we need to worry about him,” Baron says, sliding the sucker into his mouth. “She hadn’t talked to him in weeks. She cut him off. He won’t think anything unless it makes the news.”
“So, it’s our job to make sure it doesn’t,” I remind them.
Our eyes meet. He gets it. He may not have blood on his hands, but he’s got the stomach for it.
“Exactly,” he says. He picks up the bottle of whiskey and pours a finger into a glass, then looks me over, his gaze taking in my wet jeans and shoes. “So, again, where were you? Because we’re being careful. But parking beside the road and walking across a huge-ass rice field into the swamp is going to get us caught a hell of a lot faster than anything we might say in the locker room.”
“I was looking for her phone.”
“Fuck,” Baron says, leaning back and closing his eyes. “She dropped it when she was fighting us.”
I nod. Even a dead phone is easily traceable. It doesn’t matter if it at the bottom of the swamp and will never work again. They can still track it.
If the Darlings go looking for her, they’ll get the law involved. They don’t play by our rules, taking care of their own problems. They have no honor.
Only a person without honor could do what she did, exploiting someone’s helplessness for their own gain. For a fucking scholarship of all things. Such a pathetic, pedestrian thing. All along, she was nothing but a gold digger.
We thought she didn’t know she was as Darling, but she must have known. Even if she didn’t, and she really didn’t know who she was talking to, he must have known. And if he gets the cops involved, and they suspect murder, they’ll get the FBI involved. And the FBI will find her phone.