“You’re okay with what we just did?”
I nod, and we sit in silence for a minute. I’m zero percent interested in being a murderer, but some people don’t deserve forgiveness.
“What did he have on you?” I ask at last. “Why were you still helping your dad after everything he did to you, and your brothers, and your sister?”
“You brought my sister back,” he says, staring at the mall as the Delacroixs pull away in their car. Royal pulls my car around, but he doesn’t follow the others from the lot. He stops in front of the restaurant and stares out the windshield where icy pellets are melting down the glass.
“Are you mad?” I ask.
“No.”
We sit in silence, the roar of the heater the only sound in the night.
“Want me to do the same?” he asks.
“I have a sister?”
“Yeah,” he says. “A half-sister, anyway. I’ve only found her so far. And your dad. You have a dad.”
I wonder if he’s regretting it, that we left his dad in there. He won’t have a dad anymore after tonight.
“No,” I say at last. “He didn’t want to know me, and I don’t want to know him. Whatever I am, it has nothing to do with him. He can’t take credit or blame. Just like I didn’t want to know if I was a Darling. I only did it for Preston. I didn’t want their money or anything from them if they didn’t bother with me all my life.”
“You don’t even want to meet him?”
“No,” I say. “If I ever change my mind, I know where to find him. In prison.”
“Okay.”
We sit there a few more minutes, until the first explosion sounds inside the restaurant. It’s muffled and unimpressive. I glance at Royal, but he’s staring straight ahead, expressionless.
“Are you afraid your brother’s in there?” I ask, laying a hand on his knee.
“No,” he says, placing his hand over mine. “He’s long gone.”
“Are you upset about that?” I ask carefully.
“I’m sorry I didn’t protect you from him,” he says, turning my hand over and lacing our fingers. “I should have done something about him sooner. I lost my sister, and I didn’t want to lose a brother, too. But the truth is, I lost him a long time ago.”
“He said he’s the one who blew up your car.”
“I know,” Royal admits. “I suspected as much when the report came back. It was an explosive he and Duke are particularly fond of. I didn’t know why, though. I told myself it was a coincidence that Preston was using it, too. But when he said he didn’t do it…”
“Baron was trying to get rid of me. I guess he got tired of waiting for you to dump me and was trying to stir shit up so you’d remember I was a Darling.”
Royal grips the wheel with one hand, his jaw tense. “When you said he tried to kill you tonight…” He shakes his head. “If I saw him right now, I’d put back in there beside Dad.”
There’s a minute of silence, and then a series of explosions that become progressively more violent, at first sending tremors through the ground and then rocking the car as the glass blows from the windows at the front of the restaurant and tiles rain down from the roof.
When it’s over, my heart is hammering, but not loud enough to drown the sound of the fire eating the front of the building. At last, Royal pulls away from the restaurant, and we circle the mall in the other direction, leaving the blaze behind.
“You never answered my question,” I say when we’re on the road.
“What question?”
I smile at the town slipping by outside the window of the Escalade. I can’t remember the last time he told me I couldn’t ask questions. I’m in his life now, and not just in it, but part of it. I affect his life. I know all his secrets, and he knows mine.
“Why were you helping your dad?”