red blotches of skin greeted me with every punch. He didn’t stop me. He didn’t even argue. He took every ounce of pain until my arms were shaking and weak. And when my trembling legs nearly gave out, he scooped me up and carried me to the couch.
It felt like someone had poured concrete down my throat. We needed to do something. We needed to go to the police. We needed to…
“Violet once went to the house without me. We had a huge fight that morning. She was worried I was cheating or something. She was always so fucking paranoid about that. So I guess she decided to take matters into her own hands and ask him if I was. Fucking stupid.” My mind flashed to the hotel keycard I found in the pocket of her shorts. People usually deflected blame to throw suspicion off of their own behaviors. Was Violet cheating?
I tried to search my memory but came up short. If I were being honest, Violet and Kai were always fighting. About everything. If Kai didn’t immediately text her back. If Violet wanted to drag him to some party. If Kai worked too much. Hell, they even fought about me. Kai hated it when Violet tried to dress me up and parade me around town. Sometimes I wondered if he was just looking for an excuse to argue. It was rarer when they weren’t at each other’s throats. “What happened?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. Hank was the one that told me she was there, and when I called to see what the fuck she was doing, she yelled at me. I was shocked she even went in the first place. Violet hated going there, not that I blamed her. Lex lives in a dump.” My mind went back to the overflowing trash and the smell of rotten food. “At first, I pushed for an explanation, but she was really fucking shaken up. I try to avoid my family as much as I can, so at the time, I was okay with dropping the subject. But it gnawed at me and I brought it up again a few days later. I never could get her to give me a straight answer about what she was doing there in the first place. She always just brushed me off or gave me some vague answer or pushed it off on me being suspicious and her just looking into things. She was...never the same after that. She distanced herself a bit. I’d catch her talking to Lex around town. I asked her probably a million times what happened, but she refused to tell me. She even said they were friends—friends! Then she went on this tangent about me minding my own business. It was one of our biggest fights.”
It was so odd to me that Violet could have been going through something without me knowing. We told each other everything. We shared everything. I thought I knew her so well, I thought I would know if she was going through something. I was supposed to know all her secrets, wasn’t I? “She never told you? Why?” I asked.
Kai folded his hands in front of him and sighed. When his eyes met mine, I was hit with so much pain I had to look away. “Maybe it was because she knew that I wanted nothing to do with my family.” I didn’t understand what compelled me to do so, but I reached out and placed my hand over his. He continued. “I worked really fucking hard to move out. To escape. My father wasn’t a good man. Actually, Lex is a lot like him. And when my dad died, Lex started working with our cousins, pushing drugs until he was old enough to take over.”
I shivered at the thought of two Lexes being in this world. “That’s why you moved out?”
“Yeah. With both my mom and dad gone, Hank took over as our guardian. He didn’t pay much attention to us and let Lex do whatever he wanted. I don’t think Hank even noticed when I moved out. I meet my brother once a week because my mother made us promise that we’d always be together. It was one of the last things she asked of us. I think she knew she was going to die.”
My heart swelled with pain for Kai. His entire body was tense, as if bracing for the invisible punch of disappointment. I could see sweat breaking out on