Chapter 30 #2
“Stars and smog,” Scarlett murmurs with a strange laugh, weaving her fingers into her hair. “Organ theft? Black market organs? I cannot deal with these people. Who the fuck would want to associate with people like this? Your aunt, Widow. Your…aunts…”
“Your family is as shitty as mine and Kellin’s.” Ash extends his hand to indicate me. “Possibly shittier.”
“Fucking seriously?” Scarlett paces, the jar with the black widow still held under her armpit, snuggled close. “Even if Burt had never asked, taking care of Jonas and Chet would be my absolute top priority. How dare they mark baby Adrian as a donor? That’s fucking sick.”
“Organs…” Something strange flashes in Ash’s face.
“Oh, that sounds like something Jonas would do. Take my organs. He has a bad kidney, and I already know I’m a compatible donor.
” Ash swallows. “He had both me and Aspen tested to see if we could…maybe give him one. Seems like Widow might’ve been on a kill-list if Scarlett hadn’t picked him up. ”
“Alone. No family. No friends. Nobody to miss me. Getting me right after I left juvie would’ve been easy. Runaways aren’t exactly uncommon in Prescott.” Widow puts his hands on his hips and closes his eyes, dropping his chin. “Holy shit.”
“If Papa had accidentally uncovered something about this…” Alexei lets the thought rest unfinished.
“Stars and smog.” Scarlett sounds crazy, but then, she’s also carrying around a spider that she used to expertly torture someone without leaving any definitive proof of said torture.
Even describing the act would sound absurd, despite the fact that it’s the truth.
Nobody would believe Trish, even if she did tell.
“Well. That fills in some blanks, but it doesn’t do much except reinforce my original thought: making Jonas into a liability is crucial.
We need all these people he’s affiliated with to turn their backs on him. The Van Gordon thing should help.”
A long silence follows, a space for me to examine each of their faces and figure out what they’re thinking.
If they were to look back at me and try to do the same, it’d be obvious.
I’m letting my feelings show. Why shouldn’t I?
They saved me from death’s cold doorway.
Risked their lives for me. This is my…family.
“Trish and Valeria…” Alexei begins and Scarlett sighs. She knows what he wants to do to them both. We all want that.
“It’s never enough for these people.” Scarlett takes the jar with the spider over to some winter-sleeping rose bushes against the side of the cottage, setting the glass on the wood chips between stalks.
She leaves the widow there to make its own way out, rising back to her feet with a sigh.
“I’m not sure if you guys are at all shocked by any of that.
It honestly didn’t surprise me in the least. Pissed me off, of course. Didn’t surprise me.”
“Leaving me to be raped was worse than selling me for my organs.” Widow lifts his head and opens his eyes, finding mine.
He’s not hiding his feelings either. We look at each other, a pair of barefaced Prescott boys.
I’m barely eighteen, and Widow has five days left before he even qualifies to be an adult under the law.
Neither of us asked for this life, an upside-down, topsy-turvy mess of broken expectations and violence. “Why is the world so goddamn bleak?”
“Adrian.” I reach out a hand and put it on his bare arm, my palm cold against his warm skin.
He looks down at it briefly before turning his face back up to mine.
In another timeline, he doesn’t go to juvie and we’re friends even without Scarlett, by virtue of our own dark, obstinate natures.
“We’re lucky because we know the truth.”
“We know that normal is filth,” Scarlett adds, her dark eyes lit with an impossible fire.
It can’t be snuffed out by darkness. Or lack of oxygen.
Not by burning through its fuel. It’s a fire that comes from the spirit, an inexhaustible unknown that occupies a block of temporary flesh.
It’s that flicker that drew me to Scarlett in the first place, like a death’s-head hawkmoth that knows suicide by heat is better than an endless lonely night.
Ash’s black eyes flick between me and Widow, eager and open in a way I didn’t see before.
He was so closed-up, so good at protecting himself that the only person able to pierce that mask was Scarlett.
Alexei has his arms folded tight, green eyes clouded with fresh ideas about his father’s death.
His attention is on me, too, waiting to see what I’ll do.
What’s normal here? Normal is hating these other men. Normal is being jealous. Normal is wanting them to never touch Scarlett again. Normal is selling your friends and associates out for a quick buck. Normal is anything but living in truth, peace, and love with Widow, Ash, and Alexei.
“Normal is complacency. We are not normal, Adrian. We don’t have to be filthy like the world.” Then I do something entirely atypical.
I hug him.
Widow stiffens up briefly before relaxing, one might say sagging, in my arms. He clasps my biceps with his hands and then just stands there, two lost boys in a cold garden with blinding white sunshine falling across us. I’m surprised that my pale white skin isn’t steaming under its weak rays.
Boom. Boom. Boom. I can hear Widow’s heartbeat.
Not for the first time. When we’re with Scarlett together, it’s not like we’re having sex, but we’re definitely close.
I can feel his heat and his breath and his heartbeat there, too.
I close my eyes and it’s not the worst feeling in the world, to have a close friend.
That’s not normal either, I don’t think. True, honest friendship, rich connection and support. Rare.
Abnormal.
“In the book, The Count of Monte Cristo,” Widow whispers, maybe softly enough that I’m the only one that hears it, “the main character says that he’s descended from a planet called sorrow. That’s how I feel, like I’ve descended from that cold place into a warm circle of purgatory.”
We pull apart, still clasping one another’s hands, and I allow myself a small shred of vulnerability, looking into Adrian Arden Lawless’ eyes. If a man can learn to love and trust his rival in love, then there’s nothing he can’t do. I believe that, truly.
There are tears on his face, though I’m positive that he isn’t crying. Using the overly long sleeve of my hoodie, I reach up and Adrian closes one eye as I swipe first one tear and then the other away.
“There, there, now,” I say, trying not to look at Scarlett as she overflows like the bubbly teenage girl she was never allowed to be.
She’s biting her lip, happy tears clinging to her lashes, nearly bouncing up and down on her feet.
A very un-Scarlett-like reaction, peculiar and extraordinary.
“Don’t fret, Adrian. Maryanne isn’t the only Lawless woman who’s going to end up like sushi in the end. ”
“I quite feel you’re taking the piss with me,” Ash whispers, hiding his laughter in his hand. “Sushi? Sashimi? If we’re going to talk Japanese food, please, let me make you some nabemono or karaage.”
“One of those is boiled and the other fried, right?” Scarlett muses, swiping her own happy tears off and leaning into Alexei as he slips an arm around her.
Between us, they’re the only two who know what it means to be loved by family.
Ash, Widow, and I will have to be taught.
“Gives me some ideas for Chet and his crematorium.”
“Kellin.” Widow is still holding onto me, looking at me with a shred of his own vulnerability.
We exchange soft pieces of each other’s inexhaustible spirits, a gift that can only be given and received in turn.
We, too, will be buried in the same mausoleum, bones tossed together in an ivory heap that’ll tell no future excavators what a happy life we led together.
“Thank you, Kellin. You’re right: normal is just whatever people are most used to.
I don’t want to be used to backstabbing, double-deals, treachery, lies, and pain.
You’re weird as fuck, and I’m happy to be weird alongside you. ”
We both drop our hands at our sides, offering sly smiles to one another, like boys in the schoolyard.
“Karaage or nabemono, that sounds good right now.” I’m not even being subtle about it.
I absolutely adore having Ash around as a housekeeper, a chef, and a killer.
He excels at all three duties. “Alexei here could use a nourishing meal, seeing as he’s meeting with the board on Monday. Think you can handle it, Mr. Borisov?”
“Can you handle wearing a suit and standing beside me?” he returns with a smile of his own.
It’s not the smirk of a hotblooded Prescott fuck, like it is with me and Widow.
Alexei wears the sleek, sharp-edged saber of the sophisticated underground on his face, impertinent pink lips instead of a sword.
“Please. You’d have to kill me to keep me out of that boardroom.”
And then we all laugh, like this is a game instead of a war.
Meanwhile, the black widow crawls from its jar in search of something to kill.