nineteen
Rumor Has It… The former usurper is making moves to take back the throne she stole for so long. Will her devious methods push a king down a path so dark he can’t see clearly who she really is—the villain of his story?
Colt Darling
I lay in the bed of my truck staring up at the hazy, colorless sky. Dense summer heat blankets the evening, and the drowsy drone of insects lulls me in and out of a doze as much as the pills do. I can’t remember how many I swallowed—too fucking many. I needed them to tamp down the fury this morning. I don’t know where the day went until I see the dozen beer bottles haphazardly strewn around me, along with a whiskey bottle standing upright, the lone survivor of my binge. The cap is missing, but a few inches of amber liquid remain in the bottom of the bottle.
I sit up and reach for my smokes, only to find the empty pack on the tailgate, butts littering the gravel around my truck, which is parked at the edge of the quarry. I sigh and hop down, gathering them and dropping them back into the pack before I toss it into the bed. My head is pounding already, so I grab the whiskey bottle and take drink. A hiccup erupts from me, my body rebelling against my mind’s urge to self-destruct.
I take another swallow anyway, relishing the harsh burn.
Everyone knows.
That’s what she said. They all knew, and no one said anything.
I didn’t expect someone to run up and tell me everything the moment I became king again, but this… All along, I was the joke, and I didn’t even know it.
It’s one thing for everyone to keep their distance and not say anything. They didn’t owe me shit, and most of them didn’t know what to think of me regaining the throne after years of being stomped back into the gutter every time I tried to crawl out. They were probably too scared of Dixie to tell me the truth.
But what about the elites, other founding sons, the guys I grew up with?
Even they had an excuse, flimsy as it was. They were never really my friends. When I came back, I never trusted them, and they knew it.
The ones that really get me are the ones I did trust.
Harper.
Dixie.
Gloria.
The world tilts with the whiskey bottle this time, and I steady myself on the tailgate.
How could she not have told me? She told me what she did, that she lied to me, that she fucked me. But she didn’t tell me I was sleeping in the same bed as a snake all that time.
Why the hell not?
It doesn’t make sense. If she liked me all that time, which she says she has, why didn’t she tell me? If she’d told me then, I would have ditched Dixie a long time ago. Gloria would have gotten what she wanted, if that’s really me. We would have been together months ago. I could have taken her back up with me instead of letting her pay her dues in the gutter.
I spot a lone cigarette butt that I flicked further, right at the edge of the drop into the pit. I set down the whiskey bottle and approach slowly. The ground sways and tilts with every step. I know I shouldn’t go up to an edge like that when I’m this fucked up, but some urge draws me, the same urge to self-destruct that rose in me every time I clawed back an inch of the ground the Dolces took from me. Like talking to Harper when they said I couldn’t. Like flipping them off and telling them to go fuck themselves. Those times, I only lost a little. A month of memories. A finger.
I pick up the butt and flick it into the abyss below. Dusk has fallen, and it swallows the white filter as it goes end over end. And then I’m staring down into the drop, which isn’t quite a vertical plummet like you’d see from a natural cliff. It’s a slight incline, gravel and scree, with the edges of the rocks they mined jutting out, a few twisted saplings here and there growing where they could find purchase. A fall like that might be worse than a straight shot to death. You’d still tumble a hundred feet, but you’d look like you got beaten with a cheese grater by the time you reached the floor below, beaten to death by all the rocks you hit on the way down.
My gaze sinks to the bottom, and my stomach lurches sickeningly, the whiskey threatening to come back on me. I force myself not to stumble away from the edge. Instead, I spread my arms wide and close my eyes, picturing the fall. The way everything in my body would clench like a fist. There would be nothing but blind fear for a few seconds, and then nothing.
No pretty liars and gilded fakes, no one with ulterior motives to question, no betrayal.
No mother who doesn’t know me, sister who doesn’t call, brother who doesn’t get that even though we’re back in power, nothing is like it used to be.
No craving scrabbling inside my skin like rats clawing to get out, maddened with need.
Just blissful oblivion. Sweet nothing.
I hear footsteps running on the gravel, and I open my eyes and turn. When I do, my foot slides on the gravel, and my stomach plummets in advance. I have one second to remember that crack that rippled from Destiny’s skull, up her arm, down mine, and into the center of my brain where fear and pain and memory nestle like a seed.
Once, before that, I jumped out of a helicopter. I was probably too young, but my family has a way of getting what we want, and I wanted to go skydiving for my birthday. I liked jumping off things back then—swings and high-dives when I was little, then bluffs and balconies and buildings. It wasn’t the weightlessness of being in the air that I liked, the freedom of flying, or the complete absence of control. It was the rush that came after the careening terror, the rush that made me feel alive and invincible when I walked away. And then I learned that walking away was a privilege, not a guarantee, and I stopped jumping.
Now I have that one moment to feel the ground give way, the gravel rush under my boots, the sickening wave of terror rising like bile up my throat, to see the chasm beckoning, as inviting as blue sparkling water, and then I’m airborne.
The next second, my back hits the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.
“What the fuck?” a voice thunders, a man standing over me on the gravel lot, breathing hard.
I blink up at him, struggling to draw a breath, to comprehend the face swimming over me. My vision doubles, acid burns in my sinuses, and my guts churn and twist. I can still feel the gravel sliding, the ground giving way, the pitch of my stomach as my vision swam over the beckoning, fatal drop.
“Your fucking family,” he says, spitting the words like a curse. “Next time, I’ll let you jump.” Then he turns and stomps off across the gravel lot towards a bright yellow Hummer, as conspicuous as a school bus parked up here.
Damn it.
I sit up slowly. “Duke.”
He hesitates mid-stride, but he doesn’t turn back.
“I wasn’t jumping,” I say. “I almost fell. Because you startled me.”
He snorts and pivots back to face me. “Nice try, asshole.”
I pull my knees up, needing to feel my feet on solid ground, and drape my arms over them. I sit there picking gravel out of my elbows, where it gouged into my skin from the force with which he threw me down. The sky overhead is the muddy purple of a bruise as sunset fades, but it gives me enough light to find each piece. The sound of the insects increasing as evening settles in swells around us, and then the crunch of his shoes on the gravel as he returns. He settles his oversized frame beside me, my whiskey bottle dangling from one hand.
“Wanna tell me why you’re doing the same shit as your sister?”
“Wanna tell me why you give a fuck?”
“I don’t,” he says, tipping the bottle up and taking a few deep swallows.
“Yeah, that’s why you came running when you saw me standing there.”
“Fuck off,” he says, shoving me hard enough to knock me sideways.
“I was just looking,” I say, pushing myself up and brushing off my hands. “I think.”
The truth is, I’m not sure. The drop had me hypnotized, and I can’t say it wasn’t inviting. I was imagining what it would feel like to jump. I don’t know if I wanted to. I wasn’t thinking about death, exactly. I just wanted it all to go away.
I am my mother’s son too.
“Asshole,” Duke mutters, taking another gulp of whiskey. He hisses through his teeth at the burn, then hands the bottle to me.
“I think I’m fucked up enough,” I say. “Have it.”
“I won’t say no to that,” he says, downing another mouthful. Then he pulls a new pack of cigarettes from his pocket. I could kiss the guy when I see they’re even my brand.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“Since today,” he says, peeling the tab on the cellophane around the top. He crumples the top of the plastic and fingers it into the pocket of his jeans, then thumbs open the top of the pack and sniffs it. The tip of his thumb is red and shiny, smoothly scarred. “I’m not playing college ball. I figure, what do I need virgin lungs for? Might as well fuck them like everything else.”
“Once you start, you’ll never quit,” I caution, digging out my Bic.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” he says, pulling out a cigarette and tucking the filter between his lips. I flick open my lighter, and he leans toward me, resting his weight on his palm and angling his head while I bring the flame to the tip. His thick fringe of black lashes cast down to the fire and then up, his eyes meeting mine as he sucks. The cherry glows bright in the gathering dusk.
Duke takes a deep, long pull and then blows out a stream of smoke. “Gonna die anyway.”
“To dying anyway,” I say, taking the cigarette from between his fingers as he reaches for the bottle. I take a drag, and he takes a draught, and we sit there in silence for a minute, watching the lightning bugs blink in the woods and the pit below. A single, long cloud floats along the horizon, a deep purple in the darkening sky. The last shreds of twilight cling to the evening, lingering like the early summer heat. Above us, the first star gleams.
Tonight is the night I should have brought Gloria up.
“What are you doing up here, anyway?” I ask after a while.
“Oh,” he says, grinning like he suddenly remembered why he’s here. “I was having a threesome in the Hummer.”
“You better get back before your Dolce girls revolt,” I say. “I’m surprised they’ve survived this long without a dick in them. You’ve been over here a while.”
He shrugs. “I told them to keep going until I got back. It’s amazing what straight girls will do for some good D.”
I smirk at him. “Not just the girls.”
“Fuck you,” he says. “I should have let you jump.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging again. “I don’t know why I do most of the shit I do.”
“Probably because you love me so much,” I conclude.
“Maybe I do.”
I snort at that. “You wouldn’t know love if it bit you in the ass.”
“I know it doesn’t look like one thing,” he says, dragging on the cigarette. “I have to believe that, coming from my family.”
“So that’s why you’re so fucked up? Your parents didn’t love you the way you wanted?”
“I don’t think there’s a right way,” he says. “Everyone has their own way. Maybe it’s not the way you think it should look, so you don’t recognize it. Doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
I give him a look. “You’re really going with this? Fuck. If that’s your version of love, I can see why my sister would rather jump off a bridge than accept it.”
“You can’t see shit.”
“Maybe not,” I agree, watching him finish off the bottle of whiskey. “It’s hard to see straight when you’re fucked up all the time. We both know that.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve got to do something. I fucking asked a girl to marry me, Duke. I don’t even remember wanting to.”
“Maybe you didn’t.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I did a lot of dumb shit to make her happy.”
“See, that’s your problem,” he says. “I never do anything to make someone else happy. I do want I want. If people don’t like it, there’s the fucking door. See yourself out.”
“Not everyone can be that selfish.”
“Why not?” he asks. “How happy did all that dumb shit make her in the end?”
“Not very,” I admit, reaching for the pack of cigarettes.
His hand closes over mine, and he gives me a little smirk. “Aren’t you going to ask?” he says, stroking his scarred thumb over the stump where my middle finger was. “Maybe say please?”
“That’s your job,” I remind him, smirking back. I draw my hand from under his, take out a cigarette, and light it before tossing the pack back on the ground between us.
“You gotta do what you want, or you’ll never be happy,” he says, pushing up and swinging himself forward on his hands a few paces, until his legs are hanging over the edge of the pit. “Anyone who doesn’t like you doing what you want doesn’t want you to be happy, so they’re not the right person.”
“Lean wrong and that gravel slides,” I warn. “It’ll dump you a long way to a bloody death.”
“Told you I was going to die anyway,” he says, patting the space beside him. “Come sit.”
“Weren’t you just lecturing me to do what I want instead of what other people want?”
“Yeah, but you gotta face your fears,” he says. “I don’t like the dark, but here I am, sitting on the edge of a black hole. You don’t like high places, so come sit next to me and we can face our fears together.”
“Duke Dolce, afraid of the dark,” I say, shaking my head. But I approach the edge, a little more cautiously than he did, and lower myself beside him. My stomach drops, but I get my ass planted before I can pitch over the edge. Slowly, I lower my legs into the pit, but I have to lean back on my hands so more of me remains on solid ground. My heart is jackhammering in my chest.
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” he says. “I just don’t like not knowing what’s out there. Anything could be hiding there, just waiting to grab our legs.”
“You sleep with a nightlight too?” I taunt, flicking an ash into the quarry.
“My fear is rational,” he argues. “We can’t see if someone with a gun is standing there, ready to pull the trigger, or a kidnapper’s waiting to grab me and drag me to hell. You’re literally afraid of a distance to the ground. Or are you afraid the ground is going to jump up and bite you?”
“Why are you up here, again?” I ask. “I mean, you said it was to fuck, but you’re not fucking the girls you brought, and why do it in your car anyway? You don’t have parents to stop you from bringing girls home.”
“Asshole.”
I look at him from the corner of my eye while I take a drag. “And?”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t feel like my house. Not since Dad died and Baron left. Now it’s like I’m living in a honeymoon resort—all these fucking couples. Plus, all these kids. It doesn’t feel right to bring girls home.”
“That’s surprisingly decent of you.”
“And?” he asks, mocking my earlier tone.
“I thought you did what you wanted and fuck everyone else.”
“Maybe not everyone,” he amends, smiling a little and reaching for my cigarette.
I hand it to him, watching his lips curl around the filter. “Who’s exempt?”
“Kids,” he says, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. “My brother. Maybe someone special, someday.”
“Weren’t you giving me shit for trying to make my girlfriend happy?”
“Dixie’s not special.”
“Fuck you.”
He cracks a grin. “You know it’s true.”
“You chose her for me,” I point out. “You must have thought she was good enough for a leper like me.”
“Nah, she was never good enough for you,” he says. “That’s why we chose her.”
“To punish me?”
“That was Royal’s reason,” he admits. “He hates her, but he never underestimated her. He knew she’d make your life hell.”
“Bastard,” I mutter.
“Baron had other reasons,” he goes on. “He wanted intel. Someone on the inside.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “She hates y’all.”
“Maybe,” he says with a shrug. “We didn’t like her either. Doesn’t mean we can’t work together when one of us needed something. How do you think that video of your sister got on her blog? And the one of Harper too.”
“Dixie said it was hacked.”
“Convenient, right?” he asks. “Baron’s a known hacker. No one questioned it.”
“And what was your reason?” I ask. “Don’t tell me you were gathering favors from the start.”
“To humiliate you,” he says flatly. “She’s a dog. I wanted everyone to see you couldn’t get anyone hotter, and that I could get them all.”
“You’re psychotic.”
He flicks the cigarette into the chasm below and leans toward me, pressing his shoulder to mine. His gaze dips to my lips, and he lifts his hand, thumbing my lower lip. “And maybe I didn’t want anyone else to know what this mouth could do.”
For one moment, I think about drawing his thumb between my lips, running my piercing over the pad of it, letting him feel it again, what my mouth can do, this time with experience. He’s only felt it that one time in the basement, when he didn’t deserve what I can give, when I didn’t show him by choice.
This time, I have a choice.
I shove him away.
“If you didn’t want me to have anyone else, why give me Dixie at all?” I ask. “You could have cut me off completely instead of giving me a girl I could fuck in all three holes, and her titties too.”
“You’d already had her,” he says with a shrug. “Doesn’t count.”
“Counted every night I got to stab it,” I say with a grin. “You might think she’s ugly, but that doesn’t mean everyone does.”
“She’s fugly as fuck and you know it,” he says flatly. “Hard one to handle, though. I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t have expected it freshman year. But Baron knew she’d be important. He’s the one who convinced Royal that her connection to our dead sister lasted beyond the grave. We had to give her something that would give us leverage over her without breaking our promise to Crystal.”
“So you didn’t give me Dixie,” I say slowly, working it out in my mind. “You gave Dixie me.”
“Yeah, obviously,” he says. “Why would we give you anything? We already let you stay at school.”
“What a fucking privilege.”
“Was I just supposed to let you go?” he asks, scowling at me. “I had to put my ass on the line more than once to talk them into it. Until you went and fucked with Harper. I couldn’t help you then.”
“Yeah, that’s where I fucked up,” I admit. “I miscalculated Royal’s attachment.”
“I think we all did,” he says. “No one knew he was capable of caring before that.”
“And before that, you knew having me around would keep my sister at school,” I say, nodding. “I kinda figured, since I made it all the way through junior year, but as soon as she graduated, I was fair game. Surprised I made it two months into senior year.”
“Don’t be,” he says. “I might be your brother-in-law one day. We might as well get along.”
“You’re not marrying my sister.”
“Probably not,” he says, sounding glum. He rubs his heels on the gravel edge, sending a few pebbles tumbling down the impossible slope. “She’ll probably end up with Baron. He says he hasn’t made a move yet, but I don’t know…”
“You talk to him?” I ask, drawing back.
“All the time,” he says, giving me a funny look. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Of course he does. Most people don’t ghost their entire families. Baron left, but he didn’t change his name and identity and disappear off the face of the earth like my brother and sister. He didn’t make them think he was dead. He keeps in touch with his twin brother like someone who moved to another state, not someone on the run for his life.
“Never mind,” I mutter.
“I’m not dumb, but I’m not Baron, either,” Duke says sourly. “He’s the mastermind. He’ll figure out how to get her before me, even if I’m right there with him.”
“We all saw how well that worked out last time.”
He leans forward and pulls a flask from his back pocket. His eyes are already unfocused, staring out over the empty chasm below.
“You don’t owe me,” he says, slowly unscrewing the cap. “In case you thought that’s why I pulled you away from the edge tonight. I didn’t do it so you’d owe me.”
“Good,” I say. “Because I don’t. I didn’t ask you to save me.”
“I know,” he says, leaning back on one hand and tipping the flask up. When he finishes, he holds it out to me. “But maybe you’ll forgive me for some of the times I didn’t.”
“Maybe,” I say grudgingly, pulling my gaze from the fucking spectacle of him innocently licking whiskey from his pouty lower lip. “If you’re part of the family—not from Mabel, but because my brother married your sister—I should probably start on that.”
“I tried,” he says, his dark eyes serious. “Only a few times, but I did.”
“I know,” I say, taking a swig. The whiskey goes down hot, the liquid inside the flask warm from his body heat. “At homecoming, and then Bye Week…”
“And senior project,” he says. “You know, I’m the one who got you in our group, not Baron. People think he makes all the decisions, and I’m just the fuck boy who likes to party. But I know how to get the shit I want.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask, watching him warily.
“I like having you around, y’know?” he says, holding his cigarette butt between his thumb and middle finger. He flicks it out into the quarry, and it tumbles down through the air, disappearing into the dark long before it reaches the bottom. “I wanted you near.”
I rub my temple and close my eyes for a second. “I’m not going to help you win points with my sister.”
He takes the whiskey back and takes a drink, then wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and grins. “Not even if the alternative is Baron?”
“Not even if the alternative is the river.”
He screws the cap on the flask and sets it down between us, reaching for the pack of cigarettes next to it. “What if it’s not about your sister anymore?”
“Then what’s it about?” I flick open the lighter, holding it out to him. He angles his face, the flame casting golden light over his olive skin, his sculpted jawline and chiseled cheekbones. He sucks once, his cheeks hollowing, and then his dark, luminous eyes sweep up to mine.
They hold for a second, and then his hand clamps around the back of my neck. He yanks me forward, the cigarette tumbling from his lips a second before they crash into mine. His fingers tighten, pinning me to him, and his tongue sweeps over mine hungrily. A tremor goes through him, and then he growls into my mouth, his tongue thrusting harder, his fingers plunging into my hair and fisting at the nape of my neck. He tastes like whiskey and cigarettes and pure, raw masculinity.
I shove him back, hard, and wipe my mouth on my hand. “What the fuck, Duke?”
He looks down at his lap, where his donkey dick is straining against his jeans, and sweeps the lit cigarette off his thigh. Even in the dark, I can see the hole it burned in the denim and the dark of the burned skin beneath.
“Christ,” I say, scowling and turning to spit into the dirt on my other side. “How drunk are you?”
“I felt it,” he grumbles. “It just wasn’t worth stopping for.”
“You’re delusional.”
“Why?” he asks. “You can’t tell me you don’t feel it. We’re fucking dynamite together.”
“Exactly,” I say, picking up the pack and getting a new cigarette. “Explosive and destructive.”
“Maybe that’s because we’re fighting it.”
“What, you want to be my boyfriend?” I challenge. “Walk around holding hands with me? Buy me rainbow sherbert at Two Scoops of Love?”
Now it’s his turn to scowl. “No,” he grumbles. “But we’d be good together.”
I snort. “We are the worst parts of each other. We’d burn out and self-destruct like dynamite in a matter of days.”
“We could fuck whenever we wanted.”
“Whenever you wanted,” I clarify. “When no one’s around.”
“So?” he asks. “You’re not fucking anyone else.”
“I’m fucking Gloria.”
He takes his flask and swings his legs forward and back, like he’s just sitting on my tailgate and not on the edge of a deadly drop. My stomach bottoms out, but I give him his space. He takes a shot and hisses at the burn before speaking. “You love her?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I do.”
We sit listening to the insect chorus ebb and swell around us, watching the fireflies blink and the moon creep up big and yellow from behind the trees.
Finally, he breaks the silence. “You think, if you weren’t with Lo—”
“No.”
He reaches back and gets a cigarette for himself. “What if we’d never fucked with your sister?”
“No.”
“Why not?” he demands.
“Because I hate you.”
“But we fucked.”
“Because I wanted to hurt you,” I say. “And I wanted something that could hurt you again, so I’d have power over you, and you couldn’t put me back in the gutter if I disobeyed you.”
“Bullshit.”
“And you only did it because you wanted to be hurt,” I go on. “Because you think you can pay for what you did to Mabel with some fucked up form of self-flagellation. In your warped mind, you’ll be even when you’ve suffered as much as she has. But you can never atone for what you’ve done, Duke. Only god can forgive a sin like that.”
He visible shudders, then sucks hard on the cigarette before answering. “You don’t know that. Maybe she could forgive me.”
“I know you don’t earn someone’s forgiveness by getting wasted or fucking their brother,” I say. “If you really want her, then stop being a coward and looking for pieces of her in the closest person you can find. If you want her to forgive you, you have to be willing to make yourself vulnerable and ask. And you have to be willing to accept that she might not.”
“What if I can’t accept that?” he asks quietly.
“That’s why you never went to find her, even though you know where she is, isn’t it?” I ask. “That’s why you’re here drinking yourself stupid with me instead. Because you know what you did is unforgiveable, and that no matter what you do now, you can’t undo what’s already been done. And you don’t want to face that.”
“I face it every fucking day,” he snarls, swiping the flask from the ground. “I face it until I hate myself so much I want to throw myself over this edge just like you, and the only thing stopping me is this bottle, because if I didn’t have that, I couldn’t stand to look at my own family, let alone my reflection in the mirror. You think I don’t know what we did was twisted and evil? You think I don’t regret it? That I’m not sorry? That I don’t spend every goddamn minute of every goddamn day wishing I could go back and undo it? And knowing I fucking can’t is the worst part of it all. Do you have any fucking idea what that’s like, Colt?”
“I know what it’s like to fuck up,” I say. “I don’t know what it’s like to be a monster.”
He finishes the whiskey and then lifts the flask, his shoulder muscles bunching and flexing as he draws back before pitching it far out over the pit. “Then why don’t you go beg forgiveness?” he snaps. “Until then, don’t talk to me about shit you don’t know.”
“You’re right,” I say, pushing myself up to standing. “I do owe Dixie an apology. I fucked up too. It wasn’t just her.”
“You’re just going to go ask her to forgive you, just like that?”
I shrug. “Yeah. Because I can live with myself if she doesn’t forgive me. That’s the difference between us. I hurt someone, but it wasn’t someone I can’t live without.”
“You never hurt Lo?” he challenges.
“I have,” I admit. “But I’ve never done something unforgiveable to her. I’d never risk that because I know I couldn’t survive losing her.”
“Because you’re fucking weak.”
“She’s my weakness,” I agree. “I’m damn proud of it too.”
“You’re so fucking whipped.”
“Better than living in denial. How can you live with yourself, knowing you’re doomed because you’ve already lost the person you can’t live without? That she’s gone, and she’s not coming back, and it’s your fault?”
“Fuck you, Colt,” he snarls, scrambling up from the edge, his eyes dark and desperate and miserable as he sways there in the silvery moonlight. “I’m not in denial. I know exactly what I’ve lost. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am.”
I slam the tailgate of my truck and turn back. “The demon king is self-aware. Who would have guessed?”
He glares at me, but his eyes are hollow. “You laugh, but I am a fucking demon, Colt. It takes me over, and I don’t know how to get rid of it. It’s inside me, and every time I let it out, it hurts someone. So tell me, if you’re so fucking smart, how am I supposed to get it out without it ruining more lives?”
“You’re a smart boy,” I say. “I’m sure you can figure it out.”
“I can’t,” he yells, throwing up his hands. “Why can’t you understand that? I don’t want to live with this fucking demon another moment, but I don’t get a choice, because unlike you, my family actually gives a shit about me, fucked up as they are, and there’s no way to kill it without killing the body we both live in. Is that what you want me to do? Jump off the bridge like your sister? Maybe tie a rope around my neck first?”
“I want you to admit the truth,” I say.
“What truth?” he yells, sounding so defeated and frustrated I almost take pity on him.
Almost.
“There is no demon, Duke,” I say. “There’s only you. And you have to live with that.”