“Andrea,” Oli prompted, creeping closer with his arms folded over his chest. He shifted his weight between his feet nervously.
“Right.” I rubbed the back of my neck before tilting my chin to give KC room to clean me up. “Andrea was my babysitter. Shewas around Luke’s age. About sixteen or something. She liked him. A lot. I don’t know if he realized. Anyway, she came into my room one day crying. She knew she could hide there. I was ten and she’d been like a big sister to me. She always protected me. Always took care of me. I asked her what was wrong, and she said Luke called her fat. Said she was bigger than Trisha Morgan. I don’t know. She was a teenage girl. She took it to heart. I guess....”
KC grabbed a pair of tweezers from the kit and pointed at a stool with wheels near a tool cabinet. Oli grabbed it and shifted it over, and KC gave him a smile in thanks as he sat down. Then, he slid closer and began to remove the glass from my arms.
“I guess Luke is right, though. Trisha had her own issues. She was anorexic. Fighting her own battle. But like I said, I was ten. Didn’t see it that way. Just knew Luke had insulted Andrea and made her cry—fuck!” I winced away when KC yanked out a large shard of glass.
“Sorry.” KC flinched. “Hold still. This needs to be done.”
A sound suspiciously like a chuckle spilled from Oli before he slapped a palm over his mouth and smothered it. “You can handle a body full of tattoos but not someone pulling teeny pieces of glass from your arms?”
“This is different,” I grumbled. I’d grown used to the feeling of getting ink, and this pain was new. It better not ruin my tattoos. The thought made me sick. I loved my artwork.
“You were saying about Andrea,” KC said quietly, voice kinder than I’d expected.
Since I’d started, it had grown easier to tell them. Words fell from my lips, not giving me time to overthink what I was saying. It was funny how much simpler this was than lying.
“Yeah. So, Luke left LA a couple years later. Went to live with our uncle here in New Gothenburg.” I frowned, the rejection still raw despite the time that had passed. Luke was the onlysibling I liked, and he’d left me without a word to deal with our parents and robot brother and sister on my own. I hated him for abandoning me.
“Andrea spiraled. Like I said, I was a kid, so I didn’t understand. Sometimes I heard her in the bathroom, vomiting. I just thought she was sick. But it was constant. I was worried about her and told my mother.” The corner of my mouth raised in disgust. “Luke’s probably told you about our parents, but they aren’t the best people. Mother came from money. She’s always been coldhearted. She told me every young woman went through what Andrea was. I believed her. I didn’t realize it was a problem.”
KC’s mouth downturned sadly as he continued to clean me up. He was careful, dropping the shards onto a hubcap near the first aid kit. I didn’t know if it’d been there the whole time, but I looked at the growing amount of glass. I was lucky the table seemed to have been made of some sort of safety glass—which meant it busted up into little pieces—or I could’ve been headed to the hospital instead of sitting here.
Oli shifted even closer, his hip bumping my shoulder.
“Another year went by, no one helped. I still thought it was normal. She wasso skinny.” I ground my teeth, forcing back the anger that burned in my chest. If someone had helped her, maybe she wouldn’t be dead. If I’d known what had been happening with her, maybe I could’ve convinced her to get help. “She killed herself. Took too many of her absent mom’s Xanax while drinking alcohol. I don’t know if she meant to do it, all I know is that the cops turned up at our house. Her mom wasn’t home, they couldn’t get ahold of her, and they knew Andrea worked for us.” I laughed, caught in the rage. “Imagine that. The only real family she had was the family she worked for, and not even my parents gave a shit. I was the only one who cared. The only one who grieved her.”
I shook my head, pressure settling heavily in my lungs. I’d spent so many years with the festering anger and the promise for revenge. Her mom had died a few years after Andrea from her own drug overdose, so I could never get my vengeance with her. And the rage that boiled inside me focused on Luke. On the words that started Andrea’s downfall.
“So yeah, I came to New Gothenburg for retribution.” I hissed when KC yanked out the last piece of glass, then grabbed an alcohol wipe to begin cleaning. The alcohol burned my cuts, but I knew they needed to be disinfected. “I had plans. First, I wanted to destroy the people around Luke.”
Oli gasped. “PD.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “You targeted PD’s shop. That’s why yours is too close to his.”
My shoulders slumped. How the fuck was I feeling guilty about this? Okay, the answer to that one was easy. Oli and KC. They’d changed everything in ways I hadn’t predicted. “Yeah, I did.”
“You asshole.” Oli punched me on the shoulder, and while it wasn’t hard, the anger and frustration was there. And I understood. “Who else were you going to hurt?”
“It was a long-term plan. PD was the beginning. It’s easy to mess with someone’s business. KC was the next objective.” I steeled my jaw, glad I couldn’t see the wounded expression in KC’s eyes while he cleaned me up. “You were supposed to be later, but things changed when you showed up at PD’s. I improvised.”
“Improvised?” Oli’s voice wobbled. “Fuck.”
I tensed. Oli didn’t swear that way unless he was really upset. He never dropped F-bombs in casual conversation. Regret lanced through my chest as KC began placing bandages on the bigger cuts on my arms. His fingers were gentle but also firm, like he was struggling with the decision of whether to hurt me or not.
“I’d prepared to be here for years, slowly dismantling Luke’s life. Brick by brick. But then things changed.” I lowered my chin, studying their faces with careful consideration. KC was better at keeping the pain hidden, but it was there under the layer of nonchalance. Oli was more open, raw, and exposed with emotions bleeding from his gaze. “I fell in love with both of you.”
A distressed sound spilled from Oli’s lips, and KC stopped working on me to curl an arm around his shoulders, holding him tight.
“I don’t know when it happened, and I know we haven’t been together for long, but you make me want to be a better person. I don’t even know if I had plans to continue going after my brother. I didn’t give myself time to think about it. All I could focus on was you and how happy I was with you.” I reached out both hands, letting them hang between us. “I’m not a good person. I didn’t grow up in a good family, but I love you both more than I should be allowed to. I would do anything for your forgiveness.Anything.”
My hands hung there between us and my heart hurt.
The worst part of the entire thing was that while I loved them and they’d changed my life, a slice of me was still annoyed my plans went sideways. Failure had never been an option, but it happened, and now I had to recalibrate. And Iwantedto because of these two guys. That vicious part of me that thrived on chaos would need to take a hike. There were always other ways to feed my need for manipulation.
Oli leaned into KC, using his bulk for comfort, and I wished I could offer my own. “You said you wanted to break our hearts.”
“I know and I wasn’t lying. I did, at one point.” I laughed at my own stupidity. “Seeing Luke made me crazy. He left me when I needed him the most. He packed his shit and took off to New Gothenburg when I was a kid. He was the only one who cared about me in our family, and then he was gone, withouta goodbye. One minute he was there, then the next he wasn’t, and Mother was telling me he’d gone to live with our uncle. She lectured me on what a horrible person he was and that if I ever turned out like him, she’d send me away, too. My parents ended up shipping me off to boarding school anyway.”
I shrugged, detached when it came to my family. By that point, nothing they did surprised me. They hated me as much as they hated Luke, and I was a problem they needed to get rid of.
