“Dad promised he wouldn’t make any of you do it after I was gone.”
We stare at each other for a minute. Then I shrug and stand when Baron finishes mopping the table. “Somebody had to do it,” I say. “Dad wasn’t going to. He’s married. It’s adultery.”
“Unless she’s underage,” Duke says, cracking up. “Then it doesn’t count.”
King glances at him and then back to me. “He shouldn’t have asked you.”
“Yeah, well, he did,” I say, starting to rack the balls for another game. “And I wasn’t going to let the twins do it. They’re fucked up enough already.”
“Hey,” Duke slurs, fishing a few balls from the corner pocket and rolling them to me. “I would’ve fucked them if you didn’t want to. You can learn a lot from a cougar.”
“They’ve got the moves,” Baron agrees when Duke throws his arm around his twin.
Only King is watching me with that quiet intensity. He knows what it’s like. He knows why it matters.
“I killed our cousin,” he says after a minute. “It’s how I got my bones.”
“What about it?”
I’m being a belligerent ass. I know he’s telling me something he loses sleep over, but I’m too pissed at my brothers for telling him. Now he’s looking at me like I’m someone to be pitied, like I’m an abused puppy or some shit.
“I’ll do it,” he says. “You shouldn’t have that on you, Royal. You’ve done enough.”
I straighten, staring across the pool table at him. “You’re going to kill Dad?”
“Yeah,” he says, raising his chin and staring back at me with hooded eyes. “I’m the oldest. It’s my job to protect you.”
“You’re a Valenti now.”
“We all have Valenti blood, and we all have Dolce blood,” he says. “I’m one of Al’s men, but I’m my own man, too. If I tell him I have a job to do, he’ll tell me to take care of it.”
“To take care of us,” Duke says quietly, swinging his beer up to his lips and taking a swig. Baron stands soberly beside him, their arms still over each other’s shoulders.
“A man has a right to protect his family,” I mutter, the thing I say to the twins that King and Dad have said to me. Our defense for everything we’ve done.
“You’re really going to kill Dad for asking you to fuck a few clients to help close a deal?” Baron asks, tossing his sucker stem in the goblet with the others. He’d never let anyone know, but he’s the closest to our parents, the one most devastated by their split, by both of their actions since. I always hated Dad, always saw what he was about. If there’s one place where Baron has blinders, where he’s not detached and analytical, it’s about our parents.
“If you’d like to get a list of his crimes together to read him before his execution, it’ll be real fucking long,” I say. “But knock yourself out.”
I return my stick to the rack and walk out because I’m fucking done with that conversation. I don’t need King’s help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I respect them—even the twins—enough that I recognize they deserve to know. That’s all. They’re fucked up enough already. I know the reasons, understand them, and I give them a pass more often than I should. But I’ve already made them kill a man. They just turned eighteen. It’s time to let them grow up, and that means they get the burden of the truth, just like the rest of us.
I stop outside the door that used to belong to my own twin. After a moment, I turn the knob and push it open. For a fraction of a second, my brain skips, like it always does, and it’s like she’s there on the bed, half buried in a mountain of pillows and fluffy blankets, with a bowl of ice cream and her laptop on her knees.
Then I blink, and it’s just the guest room that Ma had converted after Crystal died, when we knew she wasn’t coming back. She didn’t come to the funeral, but the next time we visited, Ma had called in a decorator to redo the room completely, as if she couldn’t bear to leave even a trace of her daughter’s memory alive.
I hear footsteps behind me, but I don’t turn. I will my brother to keep walking, to let me have a moment here, trying to find that fleeting memory one more time, so she’ll be alive for one more moment, if only in my head.
“Royal.”
I turn and glare at King. “What?”
“I’m sorry.”
We stand there in the hall, the words hanging between us like something dark and ugly, a different kind of monster. The men in our family don’t apologize.
I shrug. “You didn’t do shit.”
“I should have known he’d do the same to you,” King says quietly.