His eyes, beautiful and fiery and sincere, meet mine. “Don’t put yourself in the way.” It’s the softest tone he’s ever used with me. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Doesn’t he know that I’m already hurting? My father’s going to die tonight, or Mason is. My dad or—I don’t know what to call Mason. Saying he’s my lover sounds wrong, even in the privacy of my mind. He’s more than that, but he can’t be. A relationship between us is never going to happen. But I don’t want to watch him die. I don’t want him to ruin his life. I don’t want him to be in pain anymore.
I manage a smile through the heartbreaking sadness of all this, all these years, all these terrible things. “Our sides were decided a long time ago. You do what you have to for your family. I’ll do what I have to for mine.”
It feels like goodbye. It feels like the worst goodbye of my life, so heavy that he can’t possibly let it happen. But when I open the door and step out of the car, he stays behind.
Mason could catch me. Even with his knee, he might be able to outrun me.
He doesn’t. He lets me go.
I take the stairs up to the front door and go in. The house feels cavernous inside. There are so many empty spaces where furniture used to be. Where a family used to be. Now there’s nothing but echoing footsteps and the sound of my breath in my lungs. All the lights are off, but some leaks around the door to my father’s office. Another fear grips me—what if he came back here and chose something else? What if I’m not hurrying to warn him, but to discover him already gone?
I almost drop my purse in all this fear and break into a run instead. I go past the living room. Past the armchair where my dad rocked me once after I scraped my knee. Past the foot of the spiral staircase where we had our picture taken when he took me to my debutante ball. I swing myself into his office. He used to hang my childish artwork on the walls. There’s no artwork now.
I don’t want to look.
My father sits at his desk.
He looks up at me from the empty glass in his hand, his eyes red-rimmed. Old tears have dried on his cheeks. At the sight of my soot-covered clothes and disaster hair, his eyes go wide. Shock. Horror. Then fear. This room is the only one in the house that looks like it did before we lost everything. What’s changed is the man behind the desk. He’s not just drunk. He’s defeated and alone.
A gun waits on the desk in front of him.
“What did you do?” His voice sounds as ragged as mine, as burned up as mine.
“Me? What did you do, Daddy? Did you kill James and Natalie?” Mason never says their names, but we all remember them. They were my parents’ friends. They were good friends, and all these years later, it’s come to this.
He turns ashen. A pale gray that chills me to the core. “Sweetheart.”
I can see the confirmation in his eyes. Hear it in that single word.
It was him.
Some small, childish part of me wants to believe that my father wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t trap two people in a building and light it on fire. He wouldn’t gleefully murder his best friend. It couldn’t have been that simple. The horror in his face says it wasn’t. That it was monstrously complicated. My dad wishes he didn’t have to admit this to me.
I don’t forgive him for throwing the glass or for calling me a whore or for driving my mother out of the house. I don’t excuse him. But I can see, for maybe the first time in my life, the weight of this situation on his shoulders. It’s nothing compared to what Mason has gone through. I don’t forgive him for that, either. No one deserves to survive without their parents that way.
Jesus, I was so sheltered growing up. I didn’t understand a damn thing. How lives could be bound together and torn apart. How people I thought were good could do such awful things.
The enormity of it all weighs as much as the house, as all the structural beams and the shingles on the roof. It could all come down on my head. I feel hollow. Out of solutions. Out of things to do, things to try. I can’t stitch this together. There’s no pattern. Nothing to follow. It’s like trying to stop a freight train by brandishing a needle. It’s never going to work.
We don’t have time for questions. We don’t have time for anything at all. When I fled to Mason’s house a few hours ago, I didn’t think of what would come after. I never imagined a future where I’d want a few minutes to talk to my dad. To find out what the hell happened and demand answers. I thought I’d never come back here, never see him again. And now I might be watching his last minutes on earth. What am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to do this?
I don’t know. A clock on the bookshelf ticks, the sound softly counting down the moments until Mason arrives to take his revenge.
My father tightens his grip around the empty glass. He looks down into it, mild surprise crossing his face. Surprise that it’s gone, maybe. Or surprise that drinking it didn’t solve anything.
“I’ll go to Hill about it.”
The last strands of hope snap like pulled stitches. “It’s too late, Daddy.”
His eyes come back to mine again. He had to have known Mason was coming. He had to have known when I came into his office looking like I do. Confusion furrows his brow. “I know I waited too long, but—”
“No. Mason’s coming.” I hear the front door open. Footsteps now, on the bare floor, echoing in our empty house. “He’s already here.”
4
MASON
I never expected to hesitate when I found my parents’ killer.
Of all the decisions I’ve had to make, all the things I’ve had to sacrifice, this was supposed to be the easiest one. Killing Cyrus Van Kempt should be simple.
And it was, until I saw the pain in Charlotte’s eyes. Until she gave me that brave smile and ran into the house ahead of me.
I didn’t want her to go.
My heart followed her up the steps and into the house. I don’t want her alone with that bastard. I want her with me.
Somehow, using her turned into caring about her. I don’t want to see her hurt.
It sounds ridiculous. I don’t want to see her hurt. It’s not even true. Charlotte is so gorgeous when I hurt her the way I like. This is different. This won’t leave welts and make her wet. This will break her heart. She’s good that way. Her heart would shatter for her drunk fuckup of a father, though he doesn’t deserve it. It will harden her against me. Make her hate me.
What kind of consideration is that? I never wanted a future for me and Charlotte, but doing this destroys the possibility completely.
I get out of the car.
I can’t avoid hurting her. Not in the sense that earns me beautiful tears, and not in the sense that giving my parents justice will break her.
Up the stairs to the front door. It feels like something’s slipping from my grasp. Something important—even vital. It’s all wrong for the moment. I thought I would feel peace for the first time since I hit the ground and my vision went dark.
This house is an empty shell. There’s hardly any furniture to dampen the sound of my footsteps on the way down the hall. It’s obvious where she went, because of the light from the door, but also because her scent hangs in the air. I can still smell her. Through all that smoke and ash is her sweetness. I feel myself reach for it, follow it. Somewhere along the way I became attuned to her.