3. Theo
Chapter three
Theo
“What do you mean, she’s back ?” Monty asks, glaring at Killian as if he brought her here himself.
“I mean, she’s fucking back . It was her.” Killian shakes his head, his jaw set in rage. And yet, as pissed as I can tell he is, his eyes are burning with an excitement we don’t often get from him. He’s usually only so alive in the moments before and after he kills, feeding his demons. He barely even does that nowadays. “And she’s fucking married to a pretentious lawyer prick who doesn’t give a fuck about her.”
“I don’t care.” I shrug, popping the top off my beer and letting the cap clatter to the bar. “Who gives a fuck about that bitch?”
Killian scowls at me, but it does little to change how I feel, which is because I don’t feel anything about it. So what? The girl who we tortured for years left town after the best fucking summer of our lives and then disappeared. Who cares that she’s married to a fucking lawyer with more money than sense? And who cares if she dies in the hospital Killian took her to in an attempt to save her? She’s been dead to me for years anyway.
“You do.” Monty snorts. “Don’t fucking act like you don’t.”
“Nope. You act like you never saw this coming.” I laugh. “You think she really wanted to stick around here with us? We all know her parents dragged her back here every summer. That whore was dying to get away for good. She’s not like us.”
“She’s ‘ not like us’ ?” Monty mocks me with a roll of his dark eyes. “Of course she’s not like us. She’s a spoiled little bitch, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, who wanted more than any of us could give her… More than all of us could.”
I know Monty better than he knows himself, and I know he’s still hurt. Beneath all of the rage and vitriol he’s spewing, beneath every insult, is pain. Because we all liked her, but I think Monty loved her from the minute they met.
Hatred flashes in the glare Killian pins me with. “Don’t act like you weren’t obsessed with her from the moment you saw her. You started this thing.”
Yeah, I started it. She doesn’t know it, but I saw her first, a sallow girl with hair the color of a flame, plucking petals off of those orange flowers planted in her backyard. She was enchanting from the first moment I saw her, unlike anything I’d seen before. I remember telling the others about her, leading them to the perch in the woods so that we could see her with her fingers pressed against the glass window of her room, drawing little designs in the fog from her breath. We watched her a lot, trying to figure out why she never came outside to play, trying to figure out why our parents told us to stay away from that family. We poked around the cabin enough during the rest of the year, but every summer when the family came to live in it, the reminders increased. “Stay away from those people.”
“And she ended it. Or was the last four years of no contact not enough of a ‘fuck you’ to make that sink in? Her family has owned that cabin for thirty years. We knew she’d show up again one day.”
“Yeah, and I planned every fucking word of what I’d say to her when she did.” Monty spits, like thinking of the words is enough to put a nasty taste in his mouth.
“I planned every fucking thing I would do to her.” Killian smirks. “But if she dies in that fucking hospital, I’ll never get the chance.”
“Or you’ll never get the chance,” I roll my eyes, “cause she has a husband.”
It’s so typical of Killian, really. He loves broken things, but only when he gets to be the one to do the breaking. I’d say he was a psychopath if I hadn’t seen real , genuine emotion from him, not the least of which was the day she got into the back of her daddy’s Land Rover and fucking disappeared from our lives for what we all thought would be forever. Because, regardless of what I may have said out loud, I didn’t think my little Tiger Lily was dumb enough to ever show her face around here again.
“She fucked all of us in the same day.” Monty laughs, dragging a hand through his spiky hair and prompting it to stand on end again. “You think a fucking husband is going to stop our sweet little slut from begging for our dicks?”
“You think her fucking husband is going to stop me from taking what I want?” Killian laughs, too. “No, she’s going to get what’s coming to her. And if I’m feeling nice, maybe I’ll even let her come, too. Good little pets deserve it, every once in a while.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask. My interest is piqued. I know it shouldn’t be. I know somewhere in the back of my head that it’s fucked to want to torture her just because she couldn’t love us. I mean, who the fuck could, other than each other? “What’s the play?”
“Tie up the husband and make him watch.” Killian says, as if he’s been thinking about it from the very moment that he met the man who caused the pile-up. Shit, I think he planned to make this fucker pay regardless of who his wife was. But the fact that he’s saddled to Ivy D’Aquino is a sweet bonus.
“Can I fuck him while you fuck her?” Monty asks, a predatory gleam lighting up his dark eyes. “I can take his ass while you take hers; we can see who breaks first. I bet it won’t be her.”
“I’ll take that bet.” I smirk, digging into my pocket and finding the keys to the ‘69 Cutlass. I hear his gentle inhale, the thrill of a potential new toy. “I’ll fucking break her into a million pieces. And when she’s good and shattered, you can fuck her husband on the shards.”