me, and I always thought she blamed me for our father leaving. When my brother and I were young, she brought home a new man. The bastard took a shining to my brother, just like she did.”
My brother could never do anything wrong. He was the star child, the one they sent off to school, the one who the town loved. Me? I was ridiculed, made fun of, spoken of like the child she wished she never had. When people asked about me, she told them I wasn’t right in the head, so she was homeschooling me.
Yeah. Another lie.
It was all a lie.
“After years of verbal and physical abuse, you tend to become numb,” I said. “That, or you lose it. I…I lost it when I was twelve years old. When they were passed out, drunk one night, I went into the barn, took the extra gas tank, and poured it in the hallway upstairs, and in their rooms.”
Beside me, Jaz was silent.
“By the time they woke up and realized the house was burning, it was too late,” I said. “I sat in the living room, waiting for the house to come down, wanting…wanting it to be over. I was twelve years old and I didn’t want to live anymore.”
God, the fire had been hot, too. I’d done everything I could to stay there, listening to their screams on the top floor of the house, knowing I’d go to hell for what I did. My mother had always said I would when I died, anyway, so why not take them with me? That had been my thought process when I was younger, and to this day, I still don’t know why I was here.
“I passed out,” I said. “Maybe from the smoke. When I woke up, I was in the hospital, nurses and doctors all around me. They told me there was a fire, that no one else had been pulled out of the house alive. They…they didn’t know who I was.”
I’d always looked at my brother and tried to be like him. I thought, if my mother could see us both as the same, maybe she wouldn’t hate me. A childish dream, but it was one that had stuck in my head, even as I’d laid there in that hospital bed.
“And so I told them I was Jacob Hall, and that I thought it was my brother, David, who set the fire,” I said. “I told them that David was a little off in the head, that Mom had been homeschooling him for years—to ask anyone around here to back me up. And so they blamed the fire on David, and I was sent to live with foster parents, since they couldn’t get ahold of any relatives.”
Jaz’s dark brows came together, and I could tell she was struggling to put it all together.
“Jacob always wanted to be a cop. He always wanted to go to a big city, where people always had plenty of food in their houses, so that’s what I became.” Well, what I became until Zane and Thorn fucked me over, but they were a different story. That darkness they’d claimed to sense inside me was merely the truth of what I’d done when I was younger, but unlike them, I didn’t relish in the sin. I hated myself for it.
I still did.
“Jacob…” she started, but she stopped.
“Jacob Hall is six feet under us,” I whispered, frowning to myself. “My real name is David.”
Jaz was quiet for a while, slowly bringing her gaze off the stones before us to stare up at me. I wondered if she viewed me differently now, if she thought I was nothing more than a psychopath who’d set fire to his family and burned them to crisps, then lied about who he was. That’s what I was. That was the truth.
But as I cautiously met her stare, as I met those warm eyes, I felt my heart quicken. She didn’t stare at me differently; she stared at me the same way she always did, with an expression that made my body react of its own accord.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that,” she murmured. “That’s terrible.”
I shook my head once. “I told you I wasn’t a good man, Jaz, and I meant it.” What good man killed his own family on purpose and then took the identity of his dead brother? Give me names, because I didn’t think they existed.
Jaz released my hand, moving to stand before me, between