Chapter 13
Calder
The food tray's gone.
I set it outside Sonny’s door around noon. Came back up an hour later and the hall was empty. So he at least opened the door, took it in, and shut himself back in.
Other than that, he’s been a recluse.
I put my hand on the door and listen. No bedsprings. No feet. Nothing.
Then the furnace kicks, the draft comes down the hall, and I get a lungful of something warm and sweet. It’s Sonny.
I’ve scented it off him before, just tiny whiffs here and there when he was too close to avoid. It’s like fiery cinnamon with an undertone of flushed, warm skin.
My mouth waters as I keep my hand on the door a beat too long.
I stand there breathing through my mouth until the tingling sensation at the base of my spine dies down.
It doesn't–not all the way.
I go back downstairs anyway and decide to find something to do to take my mind off things.
The kitchen tap's been dripping since last August. I pull the aerator, strip the cartridge, lay the parts out on a towel in a line.
Seat, spring, O-ring. The O-ring's shot, which I already knew, which is why I've got a new one in my pocket.
It's a four-minute job. I make it last an hour, and the whole time I'm listening to my damn brother.
Killian's been walking the ground floor since this morning. Kitchen, hall, front room, back to the kitchen. He does a lap every ninety seconds or so. I've been timing it against the drip.
He’s been keyed up ever since this morning, after I practically had to haul him off the kid. I don’t know what the hell I walked in on or why it had my chest constricting to hear the tiny whimper that left Sonny’s lips. But I was ripping my little brother off him before I even decided to.
Killian's had a bottle of whiskey in his hand for an hour and still hasn’t cracked it open. That's the part that's got me a little on edge. He's stone sober, and there's sweat through the back of his shirt in a house I keep at sixty-eight.
"Sit down," I tell him.
"Don't,” he snaps at me.
I roll my eyes. My brother doesn’t scare me. "Killian."
He turns and comes at me across the kitchen and I get my weight back on my heels before I've decided to. His pupils have swallowed the color out of his eyes. There's a wet shine at his hairline.
"Something's wrong," he says.
"Yeah. You. Sit down."
"Not me." He drags his hand down his face, hard enough to pull the skin. Then he stops. Tips his head back and breathes in through his nose, slow, all the way down. Something in his face changes and doesn't change back. "Cal. What is that?"
I set the cartridge down on the towel. I know what he’s talking about. I’m all too aware of the scent that’s been leaking from his room all day. But I play dumb. "Old house," I say.
He looks at me for a second too long. Then he turns and heads straight for the stairs.
I get there first because I’m faster and stronger than him. My palm lands flat on his chest and he shoves into it and my boots skid a foot on the boards. He's got a fistful of my collar. I've got his shirt in both hands. We haven't done this right since we were sixteen and nineteen—
Headlights swing across the front windows and lay a white bar down the hallway floor.
We both stop.
Gravel. The car door. Boots on the step. And for about four seconds my shoulders come down. Dad’s home. He'll say Killian's name in anger once and my brother will sit down.
That's how it's always worked.
Kill loses control. Dad brings him back.
Then the door opens.
My father's got his keys still in his fist. He doesn't put them down or take his coat off. He stands on the mat with the cold coming in around him and looks past me at Killian. His eyes are moving. I've never seen them move like that—flicking, fast, taking inventory.
Killian's pupils. The bottle. My hand on his chest. The stairs behind us.
"What happened?" He asks.
"Nothing happened." Killian's got both hands in his hair now. "That's the problem. Nothing's fucking happened yet."
"Calder." My father’s eyes slide to mine as he searches for answers.
"He's been like this all day." My voice comes out level considering I feel like I’m buzzing all over. Can’t shake the adrenaline or something. "Worse the last hour. He's been trying to get up those stairs."
"He smells—" Killian stops. Starts over. "Cal. Dad, the kid. He smells like—"
I grit my teeth as Killian stops and starts.
"Two hours I've been pacing this fucking floor like a dog on a chain." He says it like it disgusts him. "Every lap ends at the bottom of those stairs. Like my insides are steering me up there."
"So go outside,” I snap at him.
"You think I haven't tried?" He laughs. There's nothing in it.
"And I don't even know what I'd do when I got up there.
That's the fucking problem, Cal. I want to break his face.
I want to hold him down and fuck him until he can't walk.
Both. Same second, same want, and I can't tell them apart anymore. "
He drags both hands back through his hair and then shoves me further off him. He looks wild, like he’s seconds from losing the last shred of his sanity.
"There's something wrong with me!" He shouts.
He looks up. His eyes are wet.
I blow out a breath as I realize how serious he’s being. He’s freaked out, unaware of what’s going on and his body is out of control.
Hell, I’m barely in control of mine.
Killian shakes his head and points up the stairs. "He can't stay here."
"Killian." My father's voice is stern.
"He can't stay in this fucking house." He swings a hand at me without looking.
"And don't let him stand there like he's the reasonable one.
Ask Cal what he's been doing? He took food up there and then he’s listening at the door like a fucking stalker every hour.
" He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. "And you.”
Kill whirls around and points at our father.
“You've been strange about him since the apartment and everybody in this house has noticed and nobody's said it. So I'll say it. Get him out! Sell him, ship him, put him back in that shithole apartment, I don't care. Get rid of him or I'll handle it."
"You'll handle it," my father says. Not a question.
"I'll end it." My brother says it and I can tell he means it. "I'll go up there right now and end it and then everybody in this house can breathe."
I'm between them before I've thought about it, hands up, saying his name the way you'd say it to a horse. "Kill. Kill. Look at me—"
And then something surges down the stairs and hits us like a wall.
His scent.
All three of us react at once. Killian stumbles back into the bannister hard enough to rattle it in the floor. My father's hand shoots out and catches the doorframe. I get my palm flat against the wall and lock my elbow and that's the only reason I'm still upright.
It isn't just a sweet thread under the cinnamon woodsmoke anymore. The whole hall floods to the ceiling with Sonny’s scent, warm and sweet and thick enough to chew. I inhale deep, my eyes flutter shut, and my hands fist.
Killian makes a sound I've never heard before.
"There." His voice has gone thick and wrong. He's looking straight at our father. "That! Tell me you don't feel that!"
Nobody answers him.
I can’t find any words.
No other words slide through my mind except…
Mine.
This feeling inside me, it’s… not as simple as a want. I've wanted things, people, before. This is–this is the floor shifting underneath me and rearranging everything.
Sonny is… mine.
The shame lands a second later but it does nothing to quell my instincts.
I’m a second from bolting up the stairs when my father's phone rings.
It cuts through the hall, sharp and stupid and normal, and all three of us flinch like someone fired a gun.
Dad pulls it out of his coat. Looks at the screen. Something moves across his face that I don't catch.
"Quiet," he says. “It’s Starla.”
Oh, shit.
Dad sets the phone down on the low table by the door, hits speaker, and a woman's breathing fills the hallway.
"Vinny." She sounds like she's smiling. Like she's calling to say she's running twenty minutes late. "God, you're persistent. Was me leaving not a strong enough hint?"
Nobody moves. Killian's chest is going like something trying to get out of a box.
"Starla," my father says.
"I almost didn't call. But you've got men asking questions, following me around, and it's getting tedious.
" There's a rustle. A clink. She's doing something else while she talks to him—unpacking, pouring something, I can't tell.
"So let's be adults about it. I used you.
You were useful. It's finished. Get over it. "
Dad traps his bottom lip between his teeth on a sneer. "I have your son."
My father’s eyes snap to mine. I nod.
The rustling doesn't even stop.
"I know you do. I got the photo" A sip. A small satisfied sound after it. "I was in the middle of something."
My father's hand closes on the edge of the table.
"He's twenty years old, Vincent. A grown man. If he wandered into your house and got himself stuck there, that's his business. I stopped being responsible for that boy the day he could reach the sink on his own."
Something about the callous way she talks about Sonny has my teeth itching.
"He's sick."
"He's always sick." She groans as if she’s rolling her eyes. "His whole life in a nutshell. If you're waiting on me to come running, you've misunderstood the arrangement badly."
"What arrangement?"
She laughs. It's a real laugh, delighted, and my father's shoulders come up half an inch.
"Oh, Vinny." Ice against glass. "You've been sitting on that boy for a week thinking you're holding something. He's been sold since December."
Sold.
The word goes into me cold and sits there. Sold, like a truck. Like the fine china Starla stripped out of this house.
Killian's head comes up off the wall. Whatever was riding him thirty seconds ago drops straight out of his face and what's underneath is just confusion, plain as a kid's. "Sold?"
My father hasn't moved.