Page 63 of Worse Than Wicked
At least the deaths I’ve orchestrated were well-deserved.
“Would you do something for me?” I ask at last.
“I would do a lot of things for you, little monster.”
“Would you take me to see my grandpa,” I say, swinging my legs over the side of the hammock. There’s one way to find out for sure if the Black Widow Killer is done. Maybe I can arrange for some more suitable targets than Jane. If she starts killing again, it will distract Baron from his project.
If nothing else, I can get closure before they send my grandfather away.
“What sort of visit are we paying?” Baron asks.
“A last farewell.”
He raises his brows and makes a noncommittal sound. “Just say when.”
A few days later, we’re heading that way. “Should we stop over at the other place and get Duke on the way?” I ask. “I don’t want him to feel left out.”
“I don’t think he wants to be involved,” Baron says. “He’s dealing with enough.”
“What is he dealing with?” I ask, though I doubt he’ll answer. If there’s one thing Baron won’t do, it’s spill family secrets to someone outside the family. Even I don’t get an exemption. Even here, in a relationship with both twins, I’m an outsider. They will always come first to each other. As long as we’re all together, the most I can hope for is second place.
“A guilty conscience,” Baron says, glancing over. “You should talk to him about it. A different perspective might help him.”
“I don’t have a guilty conscience,” I say, watching the old neighborhood slide by outside the window as we continue along the winding two-lane road toward my grandpa’s.
A few minutes later, we turn down the road towards his house, and then the bridge looms ahead. It’s not a covered bridge, but one with exposed wooden beams rising above it, as if that were the plan at some point before they abandoned it. It’s painted white now, rising stark above the river, the one-lane wooden planks underneath still weathered and uneven.
Baron glances at me as he eases the Lexus onto it.
“Brings back memories, doesn’t it?” he asks, and though his tone is casual, the cruelty in his words reminds me who I’m dealing with. I can never let my guard down again, can never let myself love him the way I did before, even when he’s being kind to me or protective of Duke.
“A few,” I say, my tone equally casual, as if I’m not curled into a ball in the fetal position inside the blank cardboard box that is Mabel Darling to the world.
As if the worst memory I have is jumping off this bridge and trying to die, when that’s nothing but a frustration to me, a failure. Baron only thinks about the bridge though, not the reasons that drove me here—them hanging me in the bathroom, standing there watching to see if I’d die or work myself free in time. And when I did, it was Baron who shoved the broken curtain rod inside me, Duke who kicked it. It was Royal who pulled me out of the river when I stumbled here after pulling it out, blood gushing down my thighs. It was Royal who didn’t let me die, who drove me to the hospital.
It was a nurse who said, “We couldn’t save the baby. I’m sorry.”
It was me who said, “What baby?”
It was a doctor who told me I’d been pregnant, but I never would be again.
I’d thought I didn’t want kids until it wasn’t an option.
From the corner of my eye, I watch Baron watching me from the corner of his. I wonder if he knows that. He probably does. He probably hacked my medical records at Cedar Crest. He wants me anyway, but I wonder if he wants me less. If he’d known what Jane told me, he might have wanted her instead. Or maybe he did know, and that’s why he didn’t kill her.
We pull up to my grandfather’s estate in silence. He punches in the code without asking, but nothing happens. We have to buzz in. Even now that the Dolces are no longer targeting our family, Preston is still paranoid.
When I saw him at my childhood home, I told him I was surprised to see him at Royal’s house. He always hated the Dolces the most out of all of us.
He said, “It’s not Royal’s house. It’s Devlin’s.”
I said, “Royal and Harper live here too.”
He said, “Only for the summer.”
Then he went on to explain that he was on “uneasy good terms” with Royal. “But things can change in an instant,” he added as a caveat. “This time, we’ll be ready.”
His paranoia lingers, an internal scar like mine. I don’t have the external scars that he does, that almost everyone in my family does. Preston is missing an eye and his face is burned. Colt is missing a finger and his arm is burned. I’m outwardly intact, but I’m missing a uterus, and I’ll be forever changed mentally. Dad is missing a penis and his leg was broken so badly he’ll never walk without a cane. One of my uncle’s was similarly dismembered. Another is dead. Preston’s dad is in prison. Mom is nearly catatonic. Nearly every Darling who stayed in Faulkner is damaged irreparably in some way.
