Page 98 of Circus From Hell

My little stepbrother is still crying and trying to get away.

“Please, Pipsqueak. Let me clean the blood off you.”

I reach to swipe my fingers through the thick coating of blood on his cheek, like he pressed his face up against his mother’s bloody body. He slaps my hand away with a force that surprises me. He kicks his foot out, and I catch it quickly, not letting him fight me anymore.

I can hear sirens in the distance.

“We need to go. Now.”

He shakes his head quickly, and I release his ankle to stand. It takes almost no effort to sling him over my shoulder. His fights and protests are weak. He’s still malnourished and partially drugged up from dinner, which makes it easy to manoeuvre him.

The sirens are getting louder.

“Let me go, Micha!” he shouts, kicking his feet to hit my stomach, but I push forward.

I step over his mother, over the suited man and the dead woman aside him, and run towards the back door, purposefully avoiding the man I was biologically related to. Arlo stops fighting and starts crying at the sight of his mother’s lifeless body getting further and further away.

The police sirens blare outside the front of the house, and I kick open the weak back door that’s always locked. I don’t know where the key is, and there’s no time to waste.

I have no plan.

I just need to get Arlo out of here.

I run into the back yard, and my boots crush the dying grass as I head into a sprint. We have nothing—no clothes or food or water. But as I jump the fence into the neighbours’ garden and sneak out their gate into the woods behind the row of houses, I keep reminding myself that Arlo is safe, alive, and with me.

And nothing will change that.

Present Day

Arlo walks in time with me as we head back to the apartment. He’s holding the little white bag with a cartoon dog printed on either side, and I bite back a laugh at the thought of what Soren might have in mind for the use of its contents. Whatever it is, I’m glad its purpose is for Spiral and not me.

Although I wouldn’t mind seeing it on my brother.

I can tell Arlo’s been in his head since the situation with Karma in the late hours of the night—or early hours of the morning, depending on how you look at it. I had a feeling all the blood and violence would get to him and bring up the past at some point, and despite how hard he’s trying to act, I see through him clearly.

When I shut the door behind us, Arlo’s already putting the bag on the counter and heading to his room. I grab his wrist and tug him back to me, and his hands find my chest in the rush. He looks up at me beneath his platinum and pink curls.

“Talk to me, Pipsqueak.”

He swallows, shaking his head. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“I know.” Despite how hard I can be on him, it’s only ever because I want to protect him from the world. I made him feel like he couldn’t talk to me once before, when I was a teenager trying to forget about the murders I’d just committed, but that pushed him away, and I know that made it harder for him to trust me. We’ve come a long way since then. “But you need to tell me what you’re feeling. I can help.”

I lead him over to the couch and pull him down to sit on my lap.

It’s finally time that I let him in and we put the past behind us.

He comes willingly, but he doesn’t look at me, sitting sideways on my thighs. This couch will always remind me of the time I nearly kissed Arlo and rejected him, of the time I licked Karma’s surprisingly sweet pussy as I fucked her throat. And now we’re talking. That’s the scariest one.

“What’s going on in your pretty little head?”

“If I speak about it, I have to properly think about it, and it still makes me sick. I know why you did it. I know you were protecting me. I know⁠—”

I press a soft kiss to his lips, effectively cutting off his mindless, panicked rambling.

“Everything I did, I did for you. I wish you hadn’t seen it.” I bring my hand up to hold the side of his face so that he knows I mean every word. “If we’re going to stay with Karma, we need to move past what happened.”

“When you killed our parents.”