Chapter 2
I turn to Uncle Warrose, throwing my arms around his waist in relief.
“Hey, kid,” he breathes.
“Missed you,” I grumble into his massive shoulder. He smells like a winter storm and a heated cabin.
“Feeling a little neglected over here,” Aunt Ruth announces.
Uncle Warrose and I both chuckle. But Krimson leaps from his chair to rush to her with wide, open arms. He hugs her so hard and so fast that her wheels roll backward a few inches. She lets out that beautiful fairy laugh I love so much.
Everyone rises from their seats to greet them. Grandpa trudges in shortly after, bringing in firewood as DaiSzek moseys in to casually nudge his nose against his house guests. I scratch his head as he passes by.
I tune in and out of the conversations, my eyes trailing over anything else in the house to mentally escape the two individuals I want nothing to do with at the table.
I look to the stone hearth in the center of the living room.
The mantel’s lined with trinkets Uncle Warrose and Aunt Ruth brought back from Vexamen.
Dried herbs hang from the fireplace, filling the house with the gentle scent of lavender and sage.
For a while, I watch the fire dance absently, wishing I was alone in the woods. To cry over a ruined friendship. To process the knife to the back I just received.
The dinner carries on with stories of the prison or the asylum, and it all sounds dramatized for our entertainment.
We’re old enough to hear some details now, but they still manage to hide most of the horror we learn about in school.
Their adventures together as a group sound like a grim fairy tale.
“The only dining party I wish I could seriously attend was Meridei’s little get-together…” Uncle Niles reminisces. “God, she was a psychopath. Hey, Ruthie, didn’t you have a run-in with her mother?”
Aunt Ruth stops chewing her food to roll her eyes. “Apple May, yes. Don’t remind me.”
“You did?” My mother looks surprised.
“Yeah. At the infirmary during my recovery. She really had it out for me.”
“What? You never told me that. What happened?” Mom asks.
Uncle Warrose and Aunt Ruth exchange a look before she responds.
“We all had a lot going on during that time. After the war. Ah, let’s see.” Aunt Ruth dabs her napkin along her lips. “She tormented me a few times.”
“Details,” my mother insists.
“Not at the dinner table.”
“Why was she tormenting you?!” I ask.
“A couple reasons. I was getting more attention than her for my injuries. And, well, she was an incredibly vain woman. She was attracted to Uncle Warrose, and he clearly didn’t feel the same.”
Krimson and I bust out laughing. The distraction of a positive feeling doesn’t outweigh the bad ones, but it does help.
“No need to laugh that hard,” Uncle Warrose says with a glare.
We laugh harder.
“Then when she threatened to go after you, Skylenna, I…”
We all lean forward, collectively very invested in this story.
“What?” My mother blurts out.
“Aunt Ruth clawed Apple May’s eyes out with her thumbs,” Uncle Warrose finally reveals.
“Jesus!” I slap my hand down on the table.
Aunt Ruth waves off the gasps. “Back to that dining party with Meridei. He loved to put on a performance, didn’t he?” she snickers into her hand.
I glance down the hall paneled with dark red oak, exhaling against the ominous energy floating along the walls and into his room like a cemetery of disgruntled spirits.
“What’d he do?” my brother asks. This part is not in the history books. So, when we hear about new stories regarding our father, Krimson is always the first to ask. I’d rather leave well enough alone.
My mom shifts in her seat. “It’s not appropriate for the dinner ta—”
“He made them think he poisoned their champagne!” Uncle Niles announces excitedly. “But he just made them puke their guts out and have…you know, diarrhea!”
Grandpa promptly pinches the back of his arm to which Uncle Niles hisses and pulls away.
“Why’d he do that?” Niklaus asks on this rare occasion. He never wants to hear about my father. In fact, neither of us do. It’s the one thing we have in common.
Grandpa and my aunts and uncles all turn to look at Mom. And there’s this weight in the air. A blanket of respect that seems to fall over the table.
Mom sets her glass down. “They were mistreating and bullying me for trying to stop the cruel treatments in the asylum.”
Niklaus levels his gaze with hers. “And he came up with that plan to ruin their dinner party when you told him about their mistreatment?”
“I didn’t have to. He saved me from their hazing methods every time. He saw what they were doing to me and wanted to make them suffer for it.”
Aunt Ruth turns to Krimson and me. “Your father was a cold, calculating man… But when your mother walked into a room, that ice would melt for her. He was terrifying to all except her.”
Something like admiration glimmers across Krimson’s face. He’s always craved stories about our father, always wanted to be strong, fearless, and powerful just like him.
“Sounds like a real stick-in-the-mud,” I say with a flat tone and blank expression.
Uncle Warrose burns me with his hazel glare. “You certainly have his sour, stick-in-the-mud personality. So go on, keep insulting his memory.”
My blood goes cold in my seat.
Mom usually lets me make dry comments or insults about my father in her presence because she feels bad I’ll never get to know him. She thinks this is a coping mechanism.
But Uncle Warrose has no such leniency.
“Why’re you sitting all the way over there?” Uncle Niles barks, changing the subject to relieve the tension.
Uncle Warrose does not tear his roasting glare away from me.
I slouch under the weight of it.
“I’m right next to you,” Aunt Marilynn laughs.
“Too far.” He scoops her up from her seat and plops her butt down on his lap. “Much better. Niles happy.”
“Christ,” Niklaus hisses, dropping his fork down with a clank.
Mom shifts around the table, serving everyone this weird, pancake-glazed cake. It’s an inside joke. Something about the prison for Uncle Niles’s birthday. Forks scrape against plates. The heat of the oven permeates the dining room in subtle waves.
“So, how serious is this, Niklaus? Love? Fling? Getting married soon?” Mom asks with a small laugh.
The redirection to the two people in the room I’m refusing to look at tugs at an old feeling that has been buried. Something that makes me feel small and insignificant.
It reminds me of a time when I was little, sitting at my father’s bedside, watching the snow fall across his frosted window.
I held that limp hand close to my chest, trying to go into the void like Mom.
I was trying to find him in Ambrose Oasis.
But to my immediate disappointment, I’m not like my parents at all.
There isn’t anything special about me. And when I realized that I was holding the dead, limp hand of a man I would never meet…
I threw a fit.
I screamed and cried and destroyed his room. Dresser drawers were yanked from their slots, chucked into walls. Picture frames were shattered. Curtains ripped from windows.
And Uncle Warrose just happened to return home to surprise me.
He found me screaming cruel, cruel words in my father’s face.
All I remember after that was being held in his lap while I cried. He rocked me back and forth in front of the fireplace, singing a sad song, reminding me that he’s always going to look out for me.
Mabel Rose opens her mouth to answer. Her pink lips curling into a grin of utter happiness, like this is one topic she’s been eager to talk about. And clearly, she’s forgotten I’m in the room, sneering in her filthy direction.
“Fling.” The word comes out with such finality to it in Niklaus’s smooth voice.
Fling.
Mabel Rose isn’t subtle in the twist of her frame, creaking the chair as she gawks at his lean profile. The betrayal darkening her gaze is unmistakable. She’s mirroring the expression that has yet to slip from my grasp. That has yet to remove its dirty claws from my spine.
“Oh, okay.” Mom nods as she sits down. “Nothing serious then.”
I bite my tongue in sickened disbelief. It’s as if I’m meeting Mabel Rose for the first. A devious version of her. A liar. A soulless individual who takes pride in watching me burn.
How did I not see it?
Embarrassment hits me square in the face as tears glide over my eyes.
It was right there in front of me…
Niklaus eyes me before he replies. Like he is enjoying my reaction as he pokes at a bruise.
Don’t you fucking cry in front of him. Don’t you dare.
“Just having fun.”
Mabel Rose is a statue. No longer a human woman with a splitting, aching heart.
My upper body quivers first, then I bubble into hysterical laughter. It weaves and flutters up my throat in a contagious fit.
“Fun?” I place my hand over my mouth to contain myself.
Niklaus glides his stare to me. Cold, curious, creeping amusement.
“You think you’re showing her a good time?” I swat Krimson’s steadying hand away. “Fun would require your dick to be bigger than a pencil. Fun would require you to know what to do with a woman’s pussy in order to make her come. Fucking you wouldn’t be fun. It would be charity.”
I smile wider as my mom rises from her chair to stop me. The rest of the table does something similar.
Niklaus raises a devious brow. “You want me to pull it out to measure, Spitfire?”
I don’t pay him a second glance. “And you.” I rise from my seat to point at the traitor. “My best friend? You actually fell for him, didn’t you?”
But it’s the way she stares back at me, unyielding and prepared for this reaction that summons a thought. My brother once warned me about Mabel Rose when we were twelve. He connected the dots when we met her parents. He told me she is the distant cousin of someone our mother killed in the asylum.
Belinda was her name.
I told Krimson that meant nothing. Mabel Rose swore to me she didn’t even know Belinda and their families weren’t close… But what if they were?
And all I can see is red. Fire. Brimstone. Ash. Betrayal. Betrayal. Betrayal.
“Come on, sit down,” my mother barks.
But Mabel Rose continues staring at me. The vacant eyes of a trickster that has little regard for their victim. A mask of innocence with a hint of relief that I’m making a fool of myself in front of my family.
It’s what Krimson warned against, isn’t it?
Belinda.
Belinda.
Belinda.
“You did it on purpose…didn’t you?” I say breathlessly.
My throat tightens up as I wait for her answer.
Krimson’s chair groans under him as he adjusts his weight.
Mabel Rose holds my gaze without blinking.
“You should drink some water, Sapphire. You’re becoming hysterical.”
My last bit of patience explodes.
The glowing memories I had of our childhood together melts under a flame. The edges of each fond recollection I have of her curls and blackens at the corners, burning and fraying. This new Mabel Rose I have yet to see. Yet to interact with.
She is no longer my childhood best friend.
Mabel Rose is Belinda’s cousin.
And as my face turns bright red, Mabel Rose lowers her lashes to smile, perfect and porcelain at my expense.
A wolf stirs inside of me.
The same carving under my thumb.
And I let it loose.
I allow another beat of uncomfortable silence to suck the oxygen from the air before I respond with what I deem to be appropriate.
“I’m so glad my mother killed your cousin like a rabid dog. Let’s hope you’re not next.”