Chapter 9
CHAPTER
NINE
LYDIA
“Don’t leave me like she left you.”
An ache fills my chest. Not at the request, the plea, but the way Lele phrased it: Like she left you.
Not us. Because he doesn’t remember her.
He’s told me as much. In his mind, he never had a mother.
No one but me, and I wasn’t really that.
Too busy with every escape I could wrap my hands around because in our house, I was raised to be who I am: the empress, maneuvering all the intricate pieces meant to keep the money coming in, the drugs distributed out, and the police pacified.
The anxiety pushed away into the smallest vault in my mind, one with a bank-worthy lock. I don’t have time to feel it, and when I think of how I got this way, how I found myself indifferent to anything but Lele and his moods, his feelings, his pleas, I know I deserve the emptiness I’ve earned.
The dreamers think it’s bad, feeling nothing.
The dreamers don’t have nightmares to remind them just how blissful a void can be.
Lele stares at me, his shoulder brushing against mine as we sit side by side on the couch in our entertainment room. There are rules to this, me with Lele, in here.
No true crime. No horror.
This is the rigid framework that helps my mind keep going. And so we watch anything else and right now, we’re in the middle of Wuthering Heights. But he is looking at me, and his fingers are circled around a tumbler of rum on the rocks.
I have nothing. Drinking after I’ve communed with the devil is on my no list, particularly when I have a meeting in the morning with the transporter who runs my shipments northward.
He’s getting prickly about the weight of the product and I need to assure him we have state police bought and paid for nearly to the Canadian border.
Lele’s green eyes hold mine.
“Lydia,” he says. He reaches for me with his free hand, his fingers on my bare thigh, beneath my sleep shorts.
The touch sends nervousness bolting through me. Lele would never hurt me. But the only people who touch me…
No.
I refuse to think of it.
My brother is not them.
We may be barely a year apart, but he’s aggressive and he drinks too much and he fucks too much but even still, he isn’t vile. Not to me.
With me, he’s emotional. Like now. These requests come out of nowhere.
Or after he breaks the heart of some girl he fucked out of his system.
His messy white-blond hair and puffy lips tells me that’s probably where he was tonight before he stormed into my bedroom and asked if I’d sit with him in here.
He’s spoiled.
I want to keep him that way. It’s better than the alternative, which is what I am.
The anchor who will drown if I’m not careful.
His long fingers flex around my thigh. “Lydia,” he says again. The rough edge to his words he gets when he’s angry bites at his tone. “Tell me you won’t.”
I smile at him. I only ever do. But I still say, “Get your fucking hand off me, and I promise I won’t.”
He looks down where he’s touching me, and he doesn’t move. “Tell me why you hate it,” he says softly. “Tell me why you never hug me. Or Fox. Or Berlin. Or…” His mouth presses into a thin line. He looks up at me then. “Or Lynx.”
My heart picks up speed when I think of Lynx, and what it is Lele is asking me. My nostrils flare. The void is filling up quickly.
I snatch his hand off me, flinging it toward himself.
Then I turn to stare at the screen. There is a memory begging to be released. Bloody and sticky and cold and there is a boy, but I don’t know him.
“I’m not interested in a therapy session with you, Le.”
It’s been a week since my brother had a seizure in my arms.
A little less than that since I found out the identity of the man responsible for the drug he took.
The darkened moment we shared inside a funeral home has played on a loop in my mind, and I no longer wonder why my uncle didn’t tell me he was nearby.
If he had, would I have been able to stay away?
Less than six years between then and now, but it’s like an entire lifetime for me.
Yet I still remember it.
His hand around my throat.
The way his eyes flashed when he saw my broken fingers.
No one had ever been mad on my behalf; not until then. Even Lele didn’t know what really happened to me; all my injuries were stitched up with excuses for my brother. An unspoken agreement between my uncle and I, it was easy to use them on anyone who asked.
But somehow, Storm Leary knew.
Now I have an excuse to go after him.
And his possible girlfriend.
I saw her outside the gym on Ely University’s campus two days ago, sitting on a bench and staring into a fountain like she might drown herself in it. She’s gorgeous, sunshine and southern, and it’d be tragic if Storm Leary found Sloane Stevens shattered into pieces on his fucking doorstep.
And he might.
I haven’t decided yet.
It depends on if Lele wakes up from this coma.
He has to. I know that. But right now, he’s still in it. Still at Astor Memorial. Still unresponsive.
And my uncle is avoiding me. I need to know how long Storm has been in Ellicottville, why Lynx thought I should be so fucking close to him, and what it will take to call off this truce Lynx and Storm’s parents have that I don’t even understand.
That’s why I’m tailing a very much alive Storm tonight from a distance as he drives his zippy little black WRX through an empty stretch of the mountains between my territory and his, rounding up and up a hill that I know has one exit to a gas station and a shit coffee shop, and nothing else.
It’s the middle of the night, and we’re thankfully not the only cars on the road. But soon, he’ll realize I’m following him. And soon, he’ll know I want him dead.
The thing is, though, I can’t kill him yet if I plan on murdering Sloane.
If my brother doesn’t wake the fuck up soon, I want Storm to watch his blond haired, pretty-eyed girlfriend die.
That’s the only fitting punishment. And maybe Eve was right. Maybe I’m more like my uncle than I thought.
He always told me to stay away from the Learys. They don’t deal in drugs, he said, and they have powerful allies, including lawyers who would pin me for anything in a heartbeat. Even if I got off, the scandal would ruin my empire.
But I don’t even know if Lynx is aware Lele is in a coma, and he certainly doesn’t fucking know the secrets Eve spilled about him. Either or both of those facts should change things. Lengthen my leash that much more.
I don’t know if what Eve said is true, but she seems to think I don’t know what he’s capable of.
She has no idea he learned his limits from me.
My ringer blares through the speakers of my Infiniti and I flinch, tearing my eyes away from Storm’s taillights for half a second to read the caller ID.
I answer the phone with the button on my steering wheel. “What is it, Fox?”
“When’s the last time you saw your uncle?” My bodyguard’s voice is surly. I made him stay home. I don’t need a fucking babysitter, and he knows it.
I roll my eyes at the question because it’s a waste of my time. “I talked to him just before Lele—”
“No, Lyd. I said, when is the last you saw him?”
I bristle at Fox cutting me off but I think through his question as I swallow, my ears popping with the elevation change.
I could run Leary’s car off the road right now.
I could kill him by fear alone. If he survived the drop from the mountains, he’d live the rest of his life incapacitated.
Maybe that’s what we call justice, considering Lele in the hospital bed, hooked up to machines doing the work to keep him alive.
I try to focus on Fox.
Saw? I haven’t seen Lynx in a while. Maybe over the summer when I met him halfway between here and Falls Church. We had dinner. He gave me updates on shipments and product and cops.
Nothing we couldn’t have done over the phone but Lynx likes to lay eyes on you. He’s paranoid in his control.
Once upon a time, he knew how to lay hands, too. But now I think he knows I can hit back.
“I don’t know, Fox, why are you wasting my time with this?”
Storm rolls to a stop at one of the few intersections on this road, then he throws on his signal to turn into the Deer Café, which serves the sludgiest coffee known to humankind.
I glance in my rearview. The car behind me has their signal on too.
All three of us turning won’t look so suspect, but it’ll be best if I keep driving and circle around in someone’s driveway.
Of course I’ll have to turn in and back up because these mountain pathways aren’t circular and they aren’t for the faint of heart.
“I saw him on camera,” Fox says.
My stomach drops.
The light turns green.
Storm turns.
My pulse races and I can’t risk getting honked at and drawing more attention toward my car so I go with my gut and head straight through the light, leaving Storm behind.
“You what now?” I ask Fox, even though I heard him just fine.
“I checked the feed. You said you sensed something outside, before you got the call about Lele.” Fox clears his throat, correctly giving me a moment to seethe. “I looked at the cameras facing the woods first. Then around the pool. Nothing but animals there. A couple of wolves, by the way.”
I ignore that and keep driving, aware I need to turn around so I can keep my eye on Storm but my mind is racing with everything Eve said about my uncle and all the ways my brother keeps his distance from him. Then there are those blank holes in my memory, too.
And the places that are full.
But I recall learning. I recall feeling confident. Strong.
Lynx wasn’t a monster.
That can’t be a lie, right? And Lynx could’ve never hurt Lele as bad as he trained me. We’re related. Brother and sister. If he despised one of us, he’d hate the other, and what Lynx did with me was for my own good.