Gant
Darker and darker he turns, and when a blood vessel in his left eye explodes and his body grows limp, that’s when I finally let him go.
For a second.
I tug his long silver hair and drag him off the bed. He falls with a hard plunk to his knees on the hardwood. Fisting my new leash, I wrap it twice around my wrist before dragging him to the standing mirror.
Spit, blood and bile shoot from his nose and mouth and drip from his chin onto his pristine pyjamas as he coughs and gags, too dizzy to even fight back.
It's amazing. A second ago, he looked like an angel, and now, he resembles a mottled corpse like the death portrait. But the patchy purple is receding from his hue as he takes on a healthier, pinker shade.
“It looked just like that,” I hiss, tipping his head back to show him each red impression of my fingers. “But facing forward, like you strangled her from behind.”
“ — ”
“You touched my little dove. You hurt her. I came looking for a connection to my mother. I trusted she would be safe going to the bathroom alone, and in those five minutes that she was out of my sight, you touched her — ”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“What was it like?” I ask, crouching behind him and digging my knee into his spine. “Why else would you choke someone from behind if not to hurt them?”
I demonstrate until his eyes roll up to the ceiling. Until he’s back to plum and his knees give way as he collapses onto his belly.
Twenty seconds of spitty sputtering passes.
“I’m waiting for an answer. One that makes sense.”
I unravel his hair, just once so that I can drape it under his chin and hang him from it instead.
He quickly gets the point, noting how fast my patience is running out. “I told you she’s an opportunist!” he says breathlessly. “She never went to the bathroom. She ambushed me in the garage, in the car. She must’ve seen me pulling into the driveway. We talked about how much she wanted for her silence and the next thing I knew, she was on my lap, begging me to choke her while I played in her cunt in the passenger seat. She’s a little freak. You must know that already.”
“She is,” I say calmly. “Although she hides it well.”
Relief floods his features.
“Just like you hide a lot of secrets in this room.”
“You’re right about Delphine and me,” he says quickly, desperate to stay on my good side. “We’re going through a rough patch. I was vulnerable, and I didn’t know who Elle was, not until she mentioned Beaulieu, and it all clicked that she must’ve been here with you. Before that, I thought she was one of Delphine’s ballet students. But once I realised, I stopped.”
“That’s when you gave her the money, to shut her up about the car accident and the finger fuck?”
He nods. “That girl doesn’t care about you, . I told you that little bitch is just looking for a sugar daddy. Someone’s dick to rub on in exchange for cash. If you don’t believe me, call Sylo. He said she came onto him too, asking him for private dance classes.”
She had asked Sylo for private classes.
“I know,” I say calmly. “I strung him up from the rafters for accepting.”
“Then don’t you see the kind of girl she is? She won’t stop because no one is off-limits to her,” he says, trying to put some distance between us by crawling on his knees just like his pathetic brother. But I pull his hair, taut, gagging him. When I let up, his pleading eyes find mine in the mirror. “Look at all the chaos she’s already causing between us. Look at what she’s turning you into.”
“She calls me a fiend,” I say fondly.
He shakes his head. “No, that’s what she’s turning you into.”
Turning? Too late.
“But you can prove her wrong,” he tries to tug out of my grip to no avail. “She’s a no-one, . We’re your family.”
“My family,” I whisper. “My family wouldn’t hurt me like that, right?”
Silas shakes his head as much as my noose will allow. “Of course not. We’re after bonding and love. She’s just after money.”
“And you gave it to her.”
“So she wouldn’t press old wounds. Marisol’s death is nothing but a tragedy, but at least there’s one positive. You and Delphine no longer have painful barriers between you. Don’t let this girl put up a new one.”
The girl . That’s what Bart calls her, too.
“So yes, I did pay. I’d pay her anything to not reopen the distance that’s finally closing between us.”
How touching.
“You paid her for my sake? To get rid of her.”
“It was nothing,” he tries to wave his hand dismissively, but it trembles feebly. “It didn’t take much to make her happy. It never takes much to make girls like that happy.”
“And you know a lot about women?” I ask, fingering his neck again as I try to realign my fingers with the angry marks peeking through the silvery strands. He shivers at my touch. “Did you know a lot about my mother, Marisol? She looks so much like Delphine; it’s uncanny.”
“I didn’t know her, given her estrangement, but they are sisters. The resemblances make sense.”
“Nearly clones,” I say. “A clone is never as good as the real thing. My friends tried to set me up with clones of Elle, but I could never let her go.”
But you did. You accepted a knockoff.
“, Elle’s just a girl. There are millions of girls that’ll do right by you.”
“Girls like Delphine?”
He nods. “Like Delphine. Good girls who aren’t used up.”
Never mind that you had no problem using them up, too.
“You make them sound like cars.”
“Cars are rarer than pussy.”
“Especially the vintage ones. What are the odds that two dark green nineteen forty-two Packards could be in two different car accidents, twenty minutes apart in a town as small as èze?”
His eyes grow wide again.
“You and Elle talked about a lot, but not about your second accident that night?”
“ — ”
“The accident where you killed my mother? I guess you were too busy playing in her pussy and paying her off to remember that part.”
Why had they only discussed Elle’s accident? But then it hits me. After he choked her, she must’ve been terrified, too terrified to let him know what she did.
“, listen to me carefully. I had nothing to do with your mother’s accident.”
“That’s what you say. But we both know how much of a filthy liar you are. I wanted to hear you yap, you know? I wanted to see how much rope you’d hang yourself on.” I lift him by the throat pointedly, and he scrambles and fails to get his knees in an attempt to relieve the pressure because I’ve propped my foot on his back. “About that much,” I say, bouncing him like a yo-yo. “Elle would never let you touch her pussy. She’s too in love with me. So in love, she’ll pretend to be sleeping just so I can do whatever the fuck I want because she’s too obsessed to tell me no. Even though she’s pissed at me, she finds little ways to have me while trying to remain true to her boundaries that I can tear down with a simple blow on her clit.”
“, don’t do this. We’re family. You’re an idiot if you think you're special to her.”
“Maybe,” I say, pulling so that he has no choice but to flip onto his back. Until he has no choice but to burst another blood vessel as those irises take on the darkness as he eases into unconsciousness again. But only for a second. I don’t want him to miss the festivities downstairs. “But I’m not stupid enough to believe that you had nothing to do with my mother’s death.”
I drag him out of the bedroom, his eyes opening and closing at my whim depending on how much air I give him as I tug him down the stairs and into the foyer without incident, just like he promised.
Sylo nor Delphine comes out of their rooms thanks to those sleepy teas, and I’d ensured Delphine drunk a fuckton of it at teatime.
I release my grip on Silas’s throat halfway to the kitchen so that he can come to fully.
“Since you’re so family-oriented and willing to go to such extreme lengths for me,” I say, as his head bangs against the entryway to the kitchen. “I think it’s finally time you met mine.”
I use my back to push the kitchen door open, and I’m met with the sizzling scent of frying meat.
“It smells delicious in here,” I say to Zedd, who’s happily cutting into the last of the pork belly with his new birthday gift. The thinnest knife set in the world.
“Chicharron, like you asked.”
“Are you almost done?”
Zedd nods, barely sparing Silas, who I’ve dropped at my feet a glance. “Yeah. I’ve made more than enough. It was a lot easier than I thought for my first time.”
“I told you it was easy,” I smile. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“Good. Pack it away. We don’t want any cross-contamination,” Bart says, wiping his mouth and tossing the napkin onto his plate. “, I saved you a plate.”
I tuck into a barstool behind the island and crunch on the thin layer, ignoring Zedd’s erotic gaze as he watches me nibble. He’s so obsessed with food and his little knives that it’s almost like he’ll do anything to use them.
“Silas, Bart Auclair. Bart Auclair, Marisol’s murderer and her first baby’s father,” I say, waving a piece of chicharrón between the two.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Silas,” Bart says, pulling Silas’s collar until he’s on his knees. “And to think you’ve been right under my nose all along, or rather Delphine’s cunt. Sit .”
“ — ” Silas gasps, pleads.
“We insist,” I say, forcing him into the chair between Bart and me and in front of a manic Zedd. Oil sizzles in the background, smoke wafting between us.
Silas swallows, resigned. “What do you want? I’ll tell you anything.”
“Just the truth will do,” Bart says.
“I told you I don’t know anything about Marisol’s accident.”
It’s so fast that I barely see the fork stabbing through Silas’s hand. I just see blood and move my plate over. His knees buckle, a cry trying to escape his lips as he falls over the island, but it’s like the scream can’t escape his bruised throat.
Bart is gracious enough to let the fit pass.
“B-but I can tell you about Marisol. We dated,” Silas gasps finally, tears rolling down his cheeks. “A long time ago. Before I ever married Delphine.”
“You had a baby with her, a son,” Bart says.
“A baby?” he asks quizzically. “Marisol was never pregnant for me.”
“ Liar .”
“If she was, she never told me. I don’t know anything about a son.”
I look to Bart, wondering if he believes that. Do I believe that?
“I want to play nice. I want to be fair,” he says coolly. “Zedd. Show us how sharp those knives are.” He offers Zedd Sylo’s arm. “That’s it. Slice off the thinnest layer.”
Zedd does so without a seco nd thought, not because Bart’s ordering him but because he wants to. He’s mesmerised by the thin membrane, full of silvery hairs. I watch as pinpricks of blood ooze onto the raw, pink flesh left behind as Silas cries rather softly to his credit.
“Fry it,” Bart barks.
It crackles, sizzles, and pops, the sweet scent as horrifying as it is satisfying.
Zedd pulls it from the oil and lays it on a plate he pushes in front of Silas. Just like the chicharrón, there are fat bubbles, and Silas’s cries and snorts sound as piglike as his flesh looks as he melts into animalistic noises.
“Talk,” Bart says, gripping the back of his neck and pressing his lips against the crispy skin. “Or eat. We can go all night. You have so many layers we can peel back.”