“Tell me what?”
Asher backs up my question with a threat. “Tell her or Wyatt will cut off your finger.”
Watching Wyatt approach Vaughn on screen with a large pair of tin snips isn’t any less worrisome than witnessing him being brutalized in person. It has bile racing up my esophagus as quickly as tears fill my eyes.
I’m about to scream for Wyatt to stop when Vaughn shouts, “Okay! I’ll tell her.”
Wyatt moves far enough back that Vaughn’s fingers are nowhere near the snips, but close enough the flickers of silver remind him of how close he came to losing his pinkie.
Like I can be any more confused, Vaughn adds to it. “I was only a kid, Z. I didn’t know what he was planning. I just thought we were playing a game.”
“Okay. . .and?” I’m stunned I can talk with how fast my heart is racing.
Its crazy beat triples when Vaughn stutters, “Uncle Nesti gave me something to put in mom’s drink. He said it would make her be funny like she was at Christmas. I didn’t know what it was. If I did, I wouldn’t have given it to her.”
I try to extract the truth from Vaughn’s eyes, to get a grip on what he’s telling me. When I fail, I shift my eyes to Asher. Bad decision. His sorrow-filled eyes spell everything out in painstaking detail. With my little brother’s help, my uncle killed my mother. There has to be a mistake. My uncle Nestiwas like a father to me growing up. Vaughn and I had our own rooms at his house, and he even offered for us to celebrate Asher’s sixteenth birthday there so we didn’t have the prying eyes of our parents ruining our fun.
“This can’t be right. My dad loved my mother. He would have killed Uncle Nesti if he even had an inkling he was involved with her death.”
Asher clears away my tears before attempting to unjumble my confusion. “Vaughn never told anyone what he did. He buried the glass they laced her drink with in the backyard and kept quiet.”
Anger rushes through my veins so hard and fast, I feel like I’m about to burst an artery. “Why would you do that? She was our mother!” Vaughn should be thanking his lucky stars he isn’t in the room with me, or I may have finished what Asher started.
“I was ten, Zariah. I didn’t know what I was doing—”
“Back then, but you have no excuse now! God, Vaughn. I thought you were one of the good ones.”
He comes back with nothing—not a single fucking thing. No excuse. No reason. Nothing.
Just when I think I have a grip on reality, Asher swipes it out from beneath me for the second time. “Keep going, Vaughn. Tell hereverythingyou told me. It is, after all, the only reason you’re still breathing.”
I inhale and exhale several times in a row, truly unsure if I can handle much more. Everyone around me is a liar, manipulator, and cheat. I can’t trust anyone but myself, and even then, I’m a shadow of the woman I used to be.
My brows furrow when Vaughn mutters, “Uncle Nesti wanted to play the same game at Asher’s sixteenth. He said he had halved the dose, and it wouldn’t hurt you like it had mom.”
The room closes in on me. “Me?”
My chest rises and falls in rapid succession as I struggle to secure an entire breath. I feel like I’m choking, like my entire world is about to be flipped.
“When you grew sleepy, he told me to leave your room.”
No. No. No. No.As the voice inside me screams out my frustration, I hyperventilate. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. I must be still sleeping.
When I attempt to slap myself out of my nightmare, Asher seizes my wrists and pulls my hands down from my face. He knows I don’t want to hear this, but he also knows I must.
A whizz of air squeezes through the grip on my throat when Vaughn murmurs, “As I was leaving, I passed Asher. He was sneaking into your room like he always did when you were asleep.”
My watering eyes snap to Asher to seek confirmation on the second half of Vaughn’s statement. He doesn’t hide anything from me. Everything is relayed in his beautifully tormented gaze.
“You saved me?” You can’t deny the prayer in my voice. Asher has changed a lot from the boy I once knew, but even now I don’t see him standing by and watching a child being hurt and not doing anything about it.
The air I’ve just sucked in is forced out in a whimper when Asher weaves his fingers through the hair stuck to my temples. My head is pounding, so I’m not surprised it’s aching, but this feels like more than a general headache.
“Only half a minute before you saved me.”
I don’t understand what he is saying. What does he mean?
Air hisses between my teeth for the second time when he lifts my hand to trace the same section of my skull he just did. There’s a scar hidden beneath my thick hair. It’s around an inch or two in length and about half the width of my pinkie finger.
