Page 117 of Worse Than Wicked
“And then?”
“What do you mean,and then?” he demands, resuming his pacing, like he wants to run but won’t let himself.
Colt didn’t fail me like the others, but he thinks he did. To atone for his part in it, Dad covered up a murder for me, became an accomplice after the fact when he got rid of the body. Colt stays to face my questions, though I hold him blameless. He did what he could, and what he had to do, just like I did for him.
“You like men too,” I point out after a moment’s silence.
He never told me that, but I don’t watch men for nothing. I never brought it up because it didn’t matter to me. But I noticed it the first time he brought Maverick over to hang out. The way they touched each other, as familiar as he was with our cousins, though he’d only known Maverick a few months. The different nature of those touches, almost possessive, strangely intimate—Maverick giving Colt’s hip a little squeeze when he left the room, Colt’s fingers ghosting over the back of Maverick’s neck when he walked behind the couch. That made me remember just how many nights he spent away when things got bad, and how he talked about Maverick in a way he’d never talked about his friends before.
“It wasn’t like that,” Colt says, holding up a hand and stopping me from going too far down that path. “Duke was straight. He just wanted… Something extreme.”
I swallow hard, my pulse hammering as I stare at the evidence strewn across the floor. “He loved you.”
“What do you want me to say?” Colt asks, stopping and dropping his hands to his sides, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “That it’s my fault? That he’d be alive if I could’ve loved him back and gotten him away from Baron? Maybe you’re right. But I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I don’t even fucking know anymore. Does it really even matter? He’s gone, and yes, I fucking failed him. After what he did to me, and to you… Mom, Dad, our whole goddamn family was destroyed. I’m sorry I couldn’t forgive him. I’m not a fucking saint like everyone else in this town.”
“He tried to protect you,” I whisper.
“Bullshit,” Colt says flatly. “Don’t try to rewrite history now that he’s dead. He was there for all of it, just like his brothers. He enjoyed it. He doesn’t get to be romanticized now.”
“Do you want to tell Baron?”
Colt scowls. “Why would I do that?”
“To be honest about who he was, like you said. He didn’t get to live his truth. Shouldn’t he get to die in it?”
Colt thinks a minute. “If he wanted Baron to know, he would have told him,” he says at last. “I think we should honor what he chose in life. I think that’s how he’d want to be remembered. But none of us can really know. He was your boyfriend. You should do what you think is right for his memory.”
I go to the mess and start picking up the pictures. Tears drip down my face, but I ignore them. I need to get this cleaned up before anyone sees. Colt’s right. He left Baron with the image of him that he wanted him to have.
After a minute, Colt joins me, crouching to sweep the pictures back into a pile. When we’re done, we stand facing each other in my childhood bedroom, the room where he came to find me hiding when our parents fought, where he sat with me in the closet, our backs pressed to the wall, both of us knowing he was the reason for all of it, blameless or not.
“Do you think that’s why he was with me?” I ask. “I’m the closest he could get to you?”
“Maybe I was the closest he could get to you,” Colt says. “He loved you first.”
My throat tightens, and I think about what it must have been like for him after I left. Did he really love me that much? I didn’t know he was capable. Colt says he was straight. Would he look for pieces of me in everyone, even a man, just to feel close to me for a moment?
“I think you’re right,” I say at last. “I don’t think Baron needs to know.”
He loved you first.
The grief hits me all at once, not like a tsunami but like a lightning strike. I go to my knees on Duke’s bedroom floor, and Colt sinks to his knees beside me. He wraps his arms around me, and I fold into him. I let my tears drip onto his shirt, and I pretend I don’t see his falling with mine, soaking the fabric in our mingled Darling guilt and grief.
When we’re done, I tell Colt I’ll burn the folder, and we go downstairs together. Everyone is still up, lingering after the memorial, though the guests have gone home. When I see Baron there, guilt twists inside me. He looks at us like he knows. Or maybe, like he knows that we know.
Not for the first time, I’m reminded of the way he insisted on burning himself to match his brother, and before that, of all the times they switched places on me, until I didn’t know one from the other, right from wrong. Until I thought I was losing my mind.
They did that on purpose.
Like Colt said, Duke participated equally, reveled in our destruction, laughed as we screamed in agony. He wasn’t innocent. Now he’s paid.
And Baron has lost the only thing he ever truly loved.
I was always trying to figure out what it was, the way to hurt him, and now I know. There’s no way to hurt him anymore.
In a sick way, one I never would have chosen, I’ve won the game.
It’s over.
