Page 107 of Worse Than Wicked
“Blue,” Harper says, tapping the cigarette and frowning. “She was in a panic, talking a mile a minute about getting out of town. I didn’t want to let her leave, but she kept saying, ‘She’s mine,’ like I would try to keep her. She was crying and frantic,but fierce too, y’know? I’ve never seen her like that.” She glances at Royal. “Do you think she’s in some kind of trouble?”
“Yeah, obviously,” he says, scowling.
“Who’s Blue?”
“Blue is Jane,” Baron says.
“Who is Jane?” Harper asks.
But I’m already putting the pieces together, laying them down like stepping stones in front of me, horror dawning as I go down the path that leads from what I did in that basement a year ago to this moment.
As if he’s followed me there, Baron speaks.
“Duke is dead,” he says, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion whatsoever. Gone is the madman hammering the earth with his fists like he could open a portal to another world, a world where his brother lived; like he could turn back time if he hit the earth hard enough to spin it backwards on its axis.
Royal gives his head a little shake, blinking at us in shock, uncomprehending. “What?”
“No, he’s not,” Harper says, like the very thought is ridiculous, like we’re playing a joke on her that’s so unbelievable she won’t even entertain it. “He was just texting earlier today…”
I know how she feels. How impossible it is to picture a world without our messy, chaotic, beautiful boy in it, dancing and laughing and mocking everyone and everything, even death.
Tonight, death gets the last laugh.
“He died a few minutes ago,” Baron says.
He once called me a robot, but now he’s the automaton, inhuman and methodical.
“It’s not possible,” Harper whispers, but she must know it is, because she folds in on herself, a slow crumpling. Royal pulls her into his arms, rocking her, his face like marble. The broken boy with the swollen lips and bruised eyes, begging for help, no longer exists. He is a stone statue now, immovable andunbreakable. But inside, I know this will break him. Inside, it will break us all.
I always study them with fascination, this unlikely pair, but tonight, there’s no wonder, no curiosity that this spark plug of a girl could disrupt the whole Dolce engine, could bring it to a halt. Tonight, there are too many other thoughts, ideas, feelings I haven’t even begun to comprehend. I can’t look ahead. Not yet. So I look back.
I replay the moment. The car slowing. The window lowering.
Why didn’t he duck?
It was probably the drugs clouding his mind, making him slow. Even then, they might have hit him. A bullet is faster than a person.
Baron hasn’t accepted that yet. “I’m going to find her,” he swears. “I know where she lives.”
He doesn’t wait for me, just turns and storms off suddenly, leaving me to face the incomprehensible with these two strangers.
“What happened?” Royal asks me, his gaze unflinching. He always looked at me like that, like he was daring me to tell him that he should look away in shame, like he was forcing me to do it instead.
“He was shot,” I whisper.
“By… Blue?” he asks, less certain now.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
People like to believe things like that.
Harper lifts her head, wipes her cheeks. “Why would Blue shoot Duke?”
“She wouldn’t,” I say. “But she’d shoot Baron.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” I ask, cutting my eyes at Royal.
