Chapter 8
EIGHT
“I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
—Hatter, Alice in Wonderland
She’s here.
At Folly House—my sanctuary, my dominion—and she’s absolutely fucking stunning.
She also looks like she’s having far too good a time effortlessly mingling with everyone except me. But I see her game, and I’ll raise her mine because this simply will not do, not at all. Not even a smidge.
Alice’s mere presence is a gift among this godawful privileged crowd of Wonderland’s future overlords—the offspring of the wealthy and powerful, poised to become corrupt lawyers, overpriced doctors, greedy politicians, and greedy CEOs.
They’re too dense to recognize the single drop of true beauty.
But I see it, I see her, and I relish every nuance of that fierce, Gothic goddess.
Oh, and she is fully aware of my hungry gaze fixed on her, and that’s why she’s deliberately avoiding looking at me. The delicate blush, however, blooming on her cheeks is the giveaway.
Alice can play pretend to everyone else, but not with me. Never with me. I know her too damn well.
March crashes onto the couch beside me, a red plastic cup in hand filled with his ‘infamous’ bathtub gin.
Out of morbid curiosity, I sampled it before everyone got here, only to have it rip through my insides like molten lava.
No, thanks. I prefer a smooth bourbon, having already downed four shots of Buffalo Trace to numb the brewing primal jealousy of watching Alice deliberately cozy up to men who are not me.
March stops singing along to “Hokus Pokus” by Insane Clown Posse to nod at Alice—who’s still chatting away with Brantley-fucking-Benson, making it painfully apparent that she’s engrossed in their bullshit conversation. “That’s the reason you’re looking murder-y?”
“I don’t look murder-y,” I insist, even though I’d love nothing more right now than to rip Brantley’s heart clean out of his chest. “Just sitting here minding my own business, fantasizing about your mom,” I quip, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
The brawny fucker shoves me so hard, I nearly topple off the loveseat. “Astrid O’Hare was a saint,” he retorts with a smirk.
As if he’d know if his mother was a saint or not.
Astrid died from a ruptured aneurysm when March was a toddler.
Finlay O’Hare, his deadbeat dad, was killed years later when he was shot during a failed attempt at robbing a liquor store over in Pleasant County.
His parents are nothing more than ideas rather than memories, and following Finlay’s death, Roman snatched up March and brought him to Horizons.
March was there two years before I arrived, and within seconds after I got here, he and I became as close as brothers.
Our dark humor has always been a coping mechanism, I suppose—with one of our favorite topics to tease each other about being our dead mothers.
“Okay, fine, you win.” I toss up my hands in mock surrender. “It’s your dad’s luscious ass I’m dreaming about—Ow, fucker!”
…or our dads, because why not, right?
If March hadn’t pulled the punch, his heavy fist would have definitely cracked a few of my teeth. But he did go easy on me, with the hit landing soft enough to silence me but not hard enough to stop my laughter. “You’re a jerkoff,” he growls with no real bite.
I rub my jaw. “True, and yet here you are, my brother from another mother. What the fuck does that say about you?”
He slouches against the back of the loveseat, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, and arms folded across his broad chest. “Simple,” he says with a shrug. “I’m stark raving insane, same as you.”
“Ah, okay, using the ol’ insanity excuse.” With a roll of my eyes, I pull out my watch to check the time before stuffing the gold timepiece back inside the pocket of my black vest. “Anyway, why are you down here and not upstairs, buried balls-deep in one of these willing ladies?”
With a bitter snort, March’s visceral disgust says everything without speaking a word as he surveys the motley crew gathered in our living room.
They’re a sorry spectacle, these foolish pick-me girls vying for our attention.
Clowns, the lot of them, here to amuse us, completely unaware of how ridiculous they are.
They’re sheep, oblivious to the metaphorical slaughter awaiting their inflated egos.
The air is thick with the worst kind of entitlement, and every individual here embodies the most negative stereotype of spoiled offspring hailing from a gilded upbringing.
I suppose March and I are victims of this same cliché, despite growing up in an orphanage where survival of the fittest was the rule of thumb.
We’re trapped in the web of arrogance and disillusionment, perhaps even more than these silly creatures.
We’ve merely twisted our dysfunction into a different mold, yet we’re still snared in the same toxic cage.
When Brantley Benson moves in a touch too close to her, it takes every drop of self-control not to pop off this loveseat and lay claim to her right here, right now.
My insides curdle and my muscles tense with the need to beat him bloody.
His casual confidence is infuriating, especially when he leans back just enough for her hand to rest on his hip, a gesture that feels far too familiar, too damn intimate.
Her every slight movement feels deliberate, as if she’s testing the boundaries I’ve earned and fought hard to protect.
But what really pisses me off is the way he steals a glance my direction, a snide look that’s practically begging me to hurt him. His expression is pure gloating satisfaction that fans the flames of my jealousy. He knows I’m watching, and I take his actions as a silent dare for me to respond.
See, the thing is, everyone knows for damn sure that Alice is mine. It’s been an unspoken declaration since we were seven. For Brantley to flaunt his proximity to Alice, well… I never liked the prick, and tonight’s as good a night as any to crack his fucking jaw.
“I’m not in the mood to stick my dick in a random,” March remarks, reminding me I asked him a question before I got distracted by Alice and Brantley.
But he’s not looking at me, and when I follow his gaze to Ivory, I understand why he’s down here rather than upstairs.
She’s talking among a small group of women, standing head and shoulders above them.
He’s been secretly obsessed with her for years, but because she’s Roman’s daughter, he’s kept his distance.
When she slides a covert glance at him, her cheeks bloom to a lovely shade of pink, and a ghost of a grin lifts her blood-red lips.
“Would you please fuck that woman already?” I nudge March with my shoulder. “Get it out of your system.”
“Eat shit, asshole,” he snarls. “It’s not like that. Ivory is…different.”
“You don’t want to fuck her?”
“Keep it up, and I’m busting every one of your fucking teeth,” he growls, and at my laughter, he nods at the insipid girls circling us like hungry sharks. “Any of them will gladly ride on your dick, but I don’t see you grabbing one to take upstairs.”
“I’m selective,” I counter, noting Alice has yet to remove her hand from Brantley’s hip.
This won’t do. No, it won’t do, not at all.
Alice is practically begging me to murder the man.
Am I aware this is a game? Of course, but one with very real consequences.
The maddening woman has the audacity to peek at me from the corner of her eye, and it’s a glance I would have missed if I wasn’t sitting here watching her like a goddamn stalker.
Without a word to March, I push off the loveseat and go to the kitchen for another shot of bourbon.
I toss back the amber liquor, relishing the smooth burn as it slides down my throat.
I slam the empty plastic cup on the counter.
The shot doesn’t do a damn thing to stop my demented brain from fixating on exactly how I’m going to dismember Brantley-fucking-Benson.
I take another, the sweet and spicy liquid hitting my stomach like a punch.
The glow from the industrial-style chandelier is an annoying glare, with Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” fueling my temper.
The loud din of conversations that swirl around me becomes nothing more than annoying background noise as my entire focus centers on Alice.
A passing member of Gamma Kappa Rho stops to talk to me, but I don’t give a shit about what this jerkoff is saying.
Not when my entire focus is on that fucking hand Alice still has resting on Benson’s hip.
The little tease.
She’d have never pulled this bullshit before.
Before she did her big one when she fled Wonderland.
Before she went radio silence on me for three fucking years.
Alice limped away a shattered shell of a person. Apparently, she returned ballsy.
The carefree girl who once danced with me in the rain to “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star is dead. That person is buried six feet under the dirt alongside her father. In her place is a stranger who won’t let me near her.
Ivory comes up behind Alice to whisper something that finally has her stepping away from Benson.
When he moves back, he grabs her arm, but she shakes him off.
She swirls to face Ivory, with the movement sweeping her hair across her back.
The depraved piece of shit I am, I imagine hauling her upstairs to my room to bend her over the edge of my bed.
I want to grab that blonde ponytail and tug her head back to expose her elegant throat.
Lift the red-and-black checkered miniskirt and fit her body against mine.