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It would be unrealistic to harbor a grudge against my town over weather that we couldn’t control, but if I were them, I might be bitter. It’s understandable. I’m just impressed he knows the City of Weston is to blame too.
The water filled this neighborhood like dirty water in a shallow teacup, and even though these houses sit six feet off the ground, relatively safe, the businesses downtown didn’t survive. The owners, many of them Knock Hill residents, evacuated.
“And most of Weston never came back,” he says.
Even after the water receded…
It was this week, twenty-two years ago, in fact. The same year the last girl from Shelburne Falls was a prisoner here.
She was in this house.
There were brothers.
Pranks, parties, the big game…
And rain. There was lots of rain.
But no one knows what happened in this house. I don’t think people in Weston even know that their story started in the Falls, either.
In Carnival Tower.
It’s an old speakeasy hidden away, between Rivertown—the bar and grill on High Street—and Frosted, my aunt Quinn’s bake shop. Only a few of us know it’s there, tucked away between the walls to unsuspecting people walking by on the sidewalk.
Our story tells of a Weston guy in love with a Falls girl, but she hated him. In his desperation, he killed himself, and his best friend—along with his crew—invaded a house one night while she was babysitting. Some say he intended to kill her. Get revenge. But the story says he seduced her instead, up against the floor-to-ceiling mirror that still hangs in Quinn’s shop.
And some say the boy who reportedly killed himself over her watched his friend get revenge for him from the other side of the glass.
We discovered through old cell phones left in the tower that they weren’t friends at all. They were brothers—twins—and maybe, just maybe, the one who loved her faked his death to plot revenge. Or maybe, he was the one pinning her up against the glass, finally getting what he wanted.
The story goes that they decided to prolong their payback. They let her live that night and invented the tradition of the prisoner exchange to get her across the river and into their house instead. This house.
“You want the place?” Farrow asks me.
I turn my head. “What?”
He approaches me, hands in his pockets. “You’re going to have freedom here you’ve never known.” The vein under the Green Street tattoo on his tan neck throbs. “No supervision. No curfews. And we’ll get you keys to a bike.”
My eyes widen.
“Yeah, I know all about you and your daddy not training you.” He smirks, suddenly looking twelve instead of nineteen. “You’re going to have a great time here, kid.”
A bike? They’re really lending one to me? Maybe this won’t be so bad—
But then he grabs me, circling my waist with one arm and squeezing my neck with his other hand as he backs me into the wall.
I gasp, immediately planting my hands on his chest and shoving as hard as I can.
He just comes closer, biting out words in my face. “But you will stand with us through everything we do to Shelburne Falls over the next two weeks,” he grits out. “And I promise…” He tightens his arm around me so hard I can’t breathe. “Dylan Trent, you will sweat in this house.”
I suck in a breath.What?
“Your virginity won’t leave Weston.”
I stare at him, and then he pinches my jaw, jerking my head to the side, so he can bite out in my ear, “I want your blood on our sheets.”
What the fuck? Anger boils in my stomach. I shove him away, and he finally releases me, holding up his hands, chuckling.
“Oh, make no mistake. You’re going to consent the fuck out of that, you’ll want it so bad.”
