“IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN you.” Ross Karahan averted his face from his mother. She was staring at the open casket of his brother, her younger son, gazing vacantly at his dead body. Her hands shook and her eyes watered incessantly. There were no sounds and his brother’s body was covered with blankets. Only his young face remained intact through death.
“I’m sorry.” Ross’s voice cracked. He whispered it often enough; once, twice, a hundred, no, a thousand times. It didn’t matter, he could never say it enough. There would never be a string of words that could manage to change the ultimate reality. It should have been him.
Not Roland.
Ross was the screw-up, the loser without any focus or goals. The rebel without a fucking cause, right? Always. He’d been the bane of his parents’ existence since he first started walking. He didn’t listen. Couldn’t learn. He pushed and prodded them. Unlike Roland, who glided through life so aware of his boundaries and always so careful to stay within them, Ross would deliberately knock them down and destroy them.
As he continued to do even as a teen.
His appetite for destroying and pushing and prodding was gone now. There was really nothing left when you stared into the face of your dead brother. He was so ghastly pale. His lips were overdone in a red that was too stark. Ross expected him to sit up and scare them all with a loud “boo” before he announced it was all a prank. He was just kidding. He wasn’t really dead. Not gone. Certainly not forever.
In truth, however, he was. No more life, no more energy, no more warmth. Just an empty shell that was routinely embalmed and painted in a futile effort to pretend the horror of this lifeless body didn’t exist. Ross would never have chosen this fiasco for a dead loved one. It was far better to burn a body to ashes. No one could stare down at his oddly colored face and remember the warmth that once glowed there or the vibrant color of his skin that pulsated with life. Ross was anticipating a long breath to rise in his brother’s chest before escaping his lungs. He actually could see Roland as he smirked and smiled, fluttering his eyes at Ross before ordering him to quit staring at me, asshole!
But Roland stayed frozen, lying on his back forever. His waxy body and makeup would eventually fade, decomposing and putrefying, no matter how hard anyone tried to avoid letting nature be nature. Ross didn’t see any reason for that.
Ross did a lot of thinking about nature in the days since Roland died. He thought about unseen forces. Decisions. Mistakes.
Consequences.
“Come on, Franny, let’s go.” The hand came around and gripped his mother’s arm, gently tugging on it and taking her to his side. Only then did his father, Karl, glance at Ross with a look of repugnance when their gazes eventually met.
His mother shared the same level of disgust and hatred. Ross deserved the blame. Along with the frenzied, vile hatred. But she still voiced her truest thought to him. His father hadn’t spoken to him since the moment they learned Roland was dead.
They both turned as they accused him, and their hot, steaming looks of rage made Ross step back. “You took him there. It was all your fault. It should have been you, not him.” His father said it first, but his mom echoed it many times since then.
With a snap of the fingers, they knew that. How did they find out so quickly? No details. No explanation. They just both knew.
“How could you do this to him? To us?” his mom bitterly demanded. How many times? Her hiccupping sobs punctuated his mother’s grief. Surely, they would not have collapsed into tears at the news of the death of their elder son.
Just the younger one. Roland.
Roland deserved to live a long life. He was the one his parents would have chosen to live if they had the power. They would no doubt have picked Roland if only they were given a choice.
And the one fact he firmly understood now at the ripe old age of fourteen was that they were completely right. Ross killed his brother, and now he was the one left alive. He shouldn’t be here. His parents were well aware of that and they didn’t want him.
Chapter 1
JODY LASSITER STRAINED HER neck to catch a glimpse above all the heads that were bobbing around her. As usual, it was