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Just like Ramses and Royal before him.
All of the boys before did. They all did what they wanted, and knowing my sister, she would have been the same. No one would have been able to stop her that night. Not if she truly wanted to do something.
It made me want to throw up just thinking about it, but I waited. I waited for Royal to speak and to tell me the goddamn truth.
“Tell me, goddammit.” Full-on crying now, the tears streaming down my face. “Was my sister out there because she made a choice?”
It was obviously the wrong one, one that went bad, and he knew the truth. If he did, he needed to tell me, and finally, he turned around, that rough exterior completely gone. Emotion filled his eyes to the point he needed to squeeze them, a torture lining his face I’d never seen. It brought out the emotion in me, the sickness rising again.
His throat jumped. “I begged her not to, Em.”
My breath caught, wavering right there in the hall. From behind, Jax’s arms moved from in front of his chest. He didn’t approach, lingering in the distance, but he was watching this.
He was there for a fallout.
He was there for Royal, Royal’s hands coming up to grab mine. He squeezed them. “I begged her to the point of getting on my knees. I pleaded there was another way, another way to…”
“To what?” The ache I heard in my voice, more tears blinking down my face. Royal captured my cheek, wiping them away.
“To get revenge,” he said, that emotion in his eyes making him blink. “She wanted revenge, December.”
Revenge… something I wanted not long ago but now felt like a lifetime away. My mind was a haze, and I didn’t know what to do with it all. I didn’t know what to do about him or this or anything that happened.
I gripped his hand, but he wouldn’t let me hold it long. He let go, putting distance between us. He shook his head. “I’ll never forgive myself. I should have fought harder, fought her.”
“Royal—”
He shook his head. “Please stay out of this, Em. Forget about what you think you know about it, and stop talking about all this. You need to get out of this town and as far away as you can get from me after graduation. I couldn’t do this anymore if you got hurt too.”
He hadn’t explained with “this” was, but I had a feeling it was darker than I ever wanted to question. It was darker than I could even think, and before I knew it, Royal was talking to Jax down the hallway. They were whispering something, something about making sure I got home safe. Royal had said that part, and after he left Jax, Jax came to me.
His expression was grave, his hands in his hoodie pockets. “I’m going to take you home and after, this needs to end between you two. You’re making things worse for him right now, worse for all of us.”
I wanted to ask him in what way. I had so many questions, but hell if he let me ask them. He passed me, leaving me there in the hallway. Royal had been long gone, off somewhere in the house, and eventually, I had to leave too. There was nothing else to do.
They were clearly shutting me out of whatever this was.
Seventeen
December
I drove downtown in my sister’s Ranger Rover, taking a second to breathe with my hands on the wheel. I was about to embark on something I might not be able to come back from. Something that scared the boys, something having to do with what happened to Paige. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything out of them, so I was trying the next best thing…
Knocking on doors myself.
The only clues I had regarding my sister’s intent to even be out at Route 80 at all that night came from Royal. He’d said she wanted “Court involvement.” The “involvement” so obviously meant joining Court and she wanted to do so because he’d said she had gotten in a fight with someone, a girl she’d been seeing. He never told me who that girl was, but if my sister wanted to join the Court in order to do some kind of revenge on this girl, I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to stare her in the
face and make her take some kind of responsibility. I idly wondered if I had already met this girl or at least, had seen her. She very well could have come over to California for my sister’s services.
Here we go.
I slid my sister’s journal off the passenger seat, gathering another shuddered breath. I wagered, out of all people, my sister’s counselor, Lena Hastings, may know something about the people my sister used to hang with. I knew she hadn’t worked with Paige since her freshman year, but that didn’t mean the counselor didn’t keep up with her. This was a moderately small town, and considering my sister’s friends wouldn’t talk to me, maybe her counselor would.
She gave me her journal after all.
Google said Principal Hastings’s wife had a small practice she operated out of in the heart of Maywood Heights. It was actually right down the street from city hall and held a view of the hall’s steeple and several shopping centers.
Lena Hastings, PhD, LCPC
