Chapter Forty
FORTY
Rocky
Now
Claudia’s funeral has double the turnout of Emilia Wolfe’s. Trent Waterford makes sure of it.
“He doesn’t want an autopsy. He’s adamant,” Jake told me at the florist shop down the street from Baubles & Bookends. Several days before the funeral.
We met there since Trent wanted me to ensure Jake didn’t order the wrong type of flowers for the memorial service. He’d never said which flower that was, but it didn’t matter if it was tulips or carnations or fucking lilies—as long as Jake didn’t choose it, it’d do.
The florist snipped stems of pink peonies at the counter. Phoebe’s favorite. We browsed the vases near the shop window, out of earshot of the florist. “Let me guess, Trent doesn’t want her body tampered with,” I said quietly.
“Yep,” Jake said, just as hushed. “He thinks it’s a desecration, and the coroner is already ruling it as a stroke.”
We’re going to get away with this.
Because of vanity and ego. Because Trent can’t even consider, for one second, that foul play might be involved. Because he was there the night she died, and surely, he’d know if she were murdered.
But it’s not how we do things. It’s ruined everything, everything we had planned. “Did you talk to the lawyers?” I asked.
“We’re reading the will tomorrow, and it’s likely everything will be split fifty-fifty between me and him. We might be fighting over some of the properties. But my father told me it’s legit. She did update the will to include me.”
Turns out, Claudia didn’t want to give her favorite son everything anymore. Because it wasn’t smart to leave a hundred percent of her family’s legacy to Trent, a son who’d been dragged in the mud for something so…minor—an audio leak. What if an uglier skeleton fell out of his closet? That’s what Addison and Elizabeth stressed to Claudia for days. That she needed to hedge her bets.
Claudia had listened to them. And so it really turns out, we did need the godmothers after all.
It’s good that Jake walked away with something, but Trent was supposed to have nothing . Now he has ten times more power than he did. And killing his mother has only endeared him to the town. They knew he was Claudia’s favorite son, and he’s milking their pity.
We’ve been slowly setting him on fire. It extinguished with one wrong move, and he’s risen from the fucking ashes.
Jake plucked out an orchid, twisting the stem between his fingers. Hailey’s favorite. “Honestly, man…I wish we were burying him instead.”
I nodded stiffly. “Sentiment is shared.”
Phoebe has said my brother killed the wrong Koning. If there were a choice, I think we all would’ve targeted Trent over Claudia.
Why had Trevor chosen her? He’d given me a runaround answer. “It was a one-step solution. It helped, didn’t it?”
Not really.
Claudia was never blackmailed. She never made Jake sole heir before she died.
Trevor chose to kill her either because Phoebe was the principal and he wanted to show he could execute it better than her, or because Claudia was threatening Sidney. And he cares more about Sidney Burke than I thought.
Whatever the motive, the Koning matriarch is gone.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Jake.
“I keep waiting for the guilt, the sadness, but it’s just not there.” He set the orchid back. “I keep thinking about Kate.” Jake faced a giant poster on the wall.
I turned with him.
It said Victoria’s most celebrated flower with an art sketch of a giant mountain laurel—prominent pollen stems arched toward purplish-pink petals like spider legs. The mountain laurel is on lamppost banners. It’s on the logo of the country club. It’s on brochures for the town. It’s everywhere.
Including in Claudia’s bloodstream.
I started laughing.
Jake side-eyed me, and then he started laughing, too. “Your brother either loves poetry or has a sick sense of humor.”
“The latter, probably.” He killed Claudia with a mountain laurel. Toxic if consumed. Lethal in large quantities. He muddled it in her bedtime tea.
Before we left the florist shop, Jake asked me, “How old are you then? For real?”
“Like you ever knew my real age,” I said under my breath and slipped my sunglasses on. “How old did you think I was, Jake?”
“I never believed you were younger than me. I’ll just say that.”
“You could just keep believing that.” I flashed a tight smile.
Jake ground out an annoyed sound, like I was a shithead little brother. “Or you could tell me the truth.”
The truth. “I thought I was going to turn twenty-six on the nineteenth.”
His brows jumped. “Holy shit,” he said with a laugh, like I just descended into puberty.
I made a face. “That’s barely younger than you.” He’s twenty-eight now.
“Meh, it’s pretty young.” His lips rose, and he shoved his wallet in his back pocket. “Real age then?”
“I’m turning twenty-seven.” Addison and Everett found me when I was one, but they made me believe I was a year younger. One when I was truly two. And so on, and so forth.
“You were born in ’85.” He smiled at me like he saw me. “Do I call you Brayden, Grey, or Rocky?”
“From you, I prefer jackass .” I backed up to the door. “Every time Victoria’s Sweetheart curses, a baby bird dies in the sky.”
He laughed. “Phoebe did say you’re afraid of geese.”
“Christ.” I rolled my eyes.
“Bye, jackass,” he called out.
“Bye, sweetheart.” I middle-finger exited.
Now at the funeral days later, it’s setting in. The finality of what happened that night. Not just with Claudia.
But in the storm shelter.
All of it.
Us.
Once the crowds disperse and the casket is lowered, I distance myself and walk the old cemetery.
It takes me several minutes.
But I find them.
I stuff my hands in my leather jacket and stare down at four headstones—the engravings badly chiseled. Names and dates nearly illegible. They were reburied farther back in the cemetery in the nineties. Away from the other Wolfes.
Left to be forgotten. To be written out of history.
I crouch down to one. The earth is soft beneath my boots, and I pick up a fresh white rose at the base. Since they’ve been back in town for a couple hours at a time, the godmothers have made a point to leave flowers at the graves of the Wolfes, they told me. Find the ones with the fresh white roses. That’s your family.
A knot is in my throat. My eyes burn as I make out the start of a name. Ev …for Evan. I run my tongue over my molars, and I somehow manage to get out, “Thanks for saving my life, big brother.”
I didn’t think it mattered to know where I came from. I didn’t think I’d care.
Because I wouldn’t trade the family I have for another, but this one—this one was ripped out of the ether. I was what was left. And the man who did it has parasitically consumed their entire legacy, all they ever built through the generations— his .
All they were— gone .
They weren’t the type of people we prey upon.
“I hate cemeteries because I don’t like disturbing the dead,” I say quietly.
I’m not talking to myself.
I sense her beside me. Phoebe sinks her knees into the grass.
“But I hope they feel me,” I say. “I hope they know I came back. That I didn’t leave them.” Fuck. I pinch my eyes and bury the crashing, searing emotion.
She places a hand on my thigh.
We check over our shoulders. Jake waits by an old poplar tree, keeping an eye out.
Our gazes return to each other, and I touch her hand on my leg.
“They know it, Rocky—I believe they do, and everything I believe is true, so…” Her emerging smile floods me and centers me.
I lace her fingers with mine.
She swallows hard. “I still can’t believe it. Like when I say it out loud, it—”
“Sounds ridiculous?”
“And fucked up. My father killed your whole family.” She lets out a sharp laugh. “I didn’t even want a dad. I never felt empty without one. And now that I have one, I’d really like to give him back.”
“Yeah? How are we going to do that? Send him to the returns and exchanges at T.J. Maxx?”
“I would a hundred percent return him for a knockoff purse.”
I laugh a little, but the sound fades as I gaze at the headstones of two brothers I never knew. Of a mother and a father who never got the chance to see their children grow up. “The Alcon blue butterfly,” I say under my breath.
“What?” Phoebe frowns.
“It’s something Hailey once told me about ants and this specific caterpillar. How it can take over an entire colony by tricking the ants into believing it’s the queen.”
“Like what Varrick did,” Phoebe realizes.
I rise with her hand still in mine. She follows suit, and I stare one more time at the headstones. At Christian, Josephine, Evan, and Griffith.
Defenseless, unsuspecting, prime, easy targets for him. But I’m not one.
I was raised to mimic the fucking queen.
As we walk back to Jake, my fingers slowly, slowly, slowly slip from hers, and then I stuff my fists in my leather jacket. She’s still his girlfriend in public at the moment. With Claudia gone, there’s no reason for their fake relationship to continue, but Phoebe breaking up with her “boyfriend” the week of his mother’s death is callous and would do irreparable damage to her reputation in this town. We all agreed to give it some breathing room.
I try not to fixate on her hand in his hand as they head in the opposite direction of me.
Looking backward, I catch Phoebe risking a glance at me, too, and we share a furtive smile made of passionate, loving, volcanic years.
This isn’t forever. But her hand always staying in mine—that will be. One day.
It’s just not now.
I put my sunglasses on and hike down a hill. To the Pontiac GTO idling on the street. Nova waits outside for me with crossed arms and tension in his stern-lined face. Some things never change.
And then some things do. “No more mustache?” Stubble has grown along his jawline. His dark brown hair is even an inch or so past the buzz-cut stage.
“You hated the mustache.”
“Yeah. But now , I’m worried you’re reversing to eleventh grade where you looked like Crash Bandicoot.”
“You want a ride or not?” he retorts.
“Am I driving?”
“Fuck no.” He gets in the front seat.
My lips tic up, and I stare around the cemetery one last time. History. My history. Then I climb into the passenger seat, and I look ahead as Nova peels out onto the road, driving into town. Home.
How do you make a place safe when you’re the thing that tears homes apart?
For the first time, I want to find out.