a source that her lover’s family killed them both. They’re a member of the council as well. And I’ve never been able to prove it, but my father helped. I know he did.”
“No one knows?” I sat next to him, wanting to touch him, comfort him.
He gave me a look. “Not about Cord, but come on. Jonah doesn’t look like us. It’s obvious she was a cheater. And who could blame her? Her husband was a monster.”
I winced, hearing my own thoughts flung back at me, words I had spoken before too.
He stood, pacing the room. “Fuck. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” He stopped suddenly and shot me a heated look, one filled with anger and loathing and worry.
The worry got to me, melting me. His tone, not so much.
“I don’t care where you decide to go. I honestly don’t, as long as you’re safe. You’re not a captive, even though you snuck out like one. If you and Brooke had demanded to come to Milwaukee, what’d you think I would’ve done?”
“Taken away our phones and kept us locked away in a log mansion?”
His mouth closed with a snap. “Yeah. I see your point, but you’re not Brooke. You don’t have a boyfriend that could fuck everything up for this family like she does. You have a logical head on your shoulders. Brooke would get pickpocketed by teenagers at the mall if she didn’t have guards. That’s actually happened. She has no life skills. You saw what house we found her in.”
Yes. The house he had exploded.
He did care. He did love.
He was angry with me about flying. He was telling me about his mom. He connected them together, somehow. A way to lose me, another person he lost. I was going with caution, but I had a gut feeling here.
He needed to talk, if even for this one time.
“You said your mom died with her lover, but how exactly did she die?”
He closed his eyes, his head falling back. He let out a soft “shit.”
I waited. Instinct told me to wait, to be quiet, to let him fill the space.
“They made it look like a mugging. A random fucking act of crime, but it wasn’t. She was stabbed three times, once in the throat, and the knife lodged in the side of her skull.”
Holy fuck.
He didn’t move, his eyes fixed on a point in the wall. Unmoving. Unseeing. “The guy bled out. They nicked an artery to make it slow and painful. Their wallets were gone. That’s how they got it classified as a mugging gone wrong, but it was an execution. The only better way to have done it was a bullet to the forehead, have them on their fucking knees, but they didn’t go that route. I don’t know why. No one was fooled, except maybe my siblings.”
I itched to move closer to him, to touch his arm, his side. “How do your siblings think she died?”
The smile he gave me was ugly. My soul cringed.
“Sudden-onset cancer.”
I almost choked. “Are you serious?”
“My dad set up a doctor’s appointment, sans my mother. The doctor showed him a file, told everyone about the diagnosis, and she was ‘whisked off’ to hospice. She was supposedly dead days later.” He shook his head. “She’d been in the fucking morgue the whole time, her body on ice until the funeral.”
My head swam. For him. For his mother. For Brooke, and the rest.
“I’m—”
He turned to look at me. “Do not pity me. Don’t you fucking dare.” His eyes flared with hatred, but it wasn’t for me. I knew that. It still felt like another punch, though, almost as bad as seeing my dad’s articles earlier.
“This is how we die in my family,” he seethed. “Violently. Harshly. Cord’s death was made to look like a plane accident. I made my dad’s look like it was natural causes. My mom’s was a mugging. The end is the same. We die. You want to be here? You want to be a part of this? You want to be locked in like I am? Because the end is the same. No matter what. Today. Tomorrow. Ten years from now. Twenty, if you’re lucky. The end is the same. Someone will decide they want you dead, and it’ll happen. In this life, we wish for natural causes. I would love to die in my sleep, or even from an accident, as long as it’s a true accident. I don’t want to die because of