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Mason spun to face me, the movement so sudden it made me jerk in surprise. If I’d thought the walk back to my place had calmed him down, I’d been dead wrong. He seemed more angry now than he had back at Craydon, and I could almost see the bolts of electric energy zapping from his body.
“Ten. Weeks.” He moved toward me, bearing down on me like a boulder rolling down a hill. “That’s how fucking long it’s been since your wreck, Princess. Ten goddamn weeks. And what? What have we done about it? What do we know? Nothing!”
“Are you talking about Adena?” I pressed away from the door, straightening to meet him as he reached me. “You’re right. We don’t know. So maybe it wasn’t her. She hasn’t tried anything else since—”
“It fucking was her! I know it!”
He spun, pounding both fists against the breakfast bar that separated the open kitchen from the living room. Everything on the counter jumped from the force of his blow, and I winced. He was so pissed off he was liable to hurt himself.
“Mason!” I grabbed his arm, spinning him back around, trying to get him to focus back on me. “What the fuck happened? What did Preston do to piss you off? Did he say something? Did he admit they did it?”
His eyes narrowed, and for a second, he hardly looked like himself. Maybe he would’ve said the same thing about me, because he was looking at me like he didn’t even know me. He shook his head, his lip curling slightly as he stalked slowly toward me.
“Jesus, Tal. You don’t get it, do you? Sometimes you don’t get proof. Sometimes the bad guys don’t fucking confess and ask for penance. Sometimes you just. Fucking. Know!”
The way he was looking at me turned my stomach.
It reminded me too much of the way he’d looked at me during my first semester at this school. As if he’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I had wronged him somehow. As if I’d deserved whatever was coming to me.
“Yeah?” I pushed against his chest as he neared me, not wanting him in my space, in my bubble. “And who elected you judge, jury, and executioner? Who gave you the right to decide who’s innocent and who’s guilty? Who gave you that fucking power?”
“I gave it to myself, Princess.” His hand reached up to grip my chin, his touch shockingly gentle despite the tension thrumming through his limbs. “Because I take care of the people I love. I don’t let them get hurt while I’m waiting to see if the people who want to hurt them are guilty or innocent. I don’t wait.”
I smacked his hand away, yanking my head back. I’d meant to bring him back here to calm him down, but my own anger was churning beneath my skin now.
Everything Mason was saying reminded me of the person he’d been when I’d first met him, and I hated it.
“Yeah. I’m well fucking aware of how you mete out your own particular brand of vigilante justice. Jesus! Have you not realized by now how fucked up that is? And I don’t even mean toward the other person! I mean, toward yourself. You’re killing your own goddamn soul, Mason, and one of these days, you’re gonna do something you can’t come back from! And for what? Why? Just because you believe? That’s not how justice works!”
“Sometimes it doesn’t work any other way!”
He was in my face now, whatever peace had existed between us for the past weeks forgotten as he glared me down. My heart was beating so hard I thought it might crack my ribs as a mixture of re
membered fear and dormant anger swept through me.
There’d been a time when I might’ve cowered before Mason, might’ve let the animal force of him overwhelm me. But it’d been a long time since I’d stepped down in front of this boy, and I wasn’t going to move backward.
Only forward.
I squared my shoulders, looking him dead in the eye and keeping my voice steady as I spoke.
“If you really think that’s true, then you should’ve kept coming after me. You never should’ve stopped.” He winced at my words like I’d physically hit him, but I kept going. “You should still hate me. You know who my mom is—you know what she did. Why don’t I deserve to be punished for that? I’m the last of the Hildebrand line. Doesn’t the buck stop with me?”
He and I had only discussed his mother’s death once, the night I’d snuck into Clarendon Hall to question him about the past. I hadn’t brought it up since then because I knew how much it hurt him. I had never wanted to poke the raw, exposed wound.
But I was poking it now.
Because he needed to feel this. He needed to understand it on a visceral level.
That there were consequences to his pain.
That his own hurts didn’t give him the right to hurt others indiscriminately.
His eyes widened, a flash of overwhelming grief sparking in his bright emerald irises. His nostrils flared, and he shook his head slowly, the animalistic movement of a bull about to charge.
“That’s not the same, Princess. You didn’t do anything. I understand that now. Adena and fucking Preston—”
“It is the same!” My voice cut across his like a whip. “It is the exact goddamn same, Mason. You love so intensely that you let it destroy you, let it turn into a monster! You take something that should be good and beautiful, and you turn it into something awful. Do you think that’s what your mom would’ve wanted? For you to go after me with everything you had? Do you think this is what I want? For you to go after Preston in the fucking hallway, to risk getting yourself expelled just because you think he hurt me? Even if he did, even if he and Adena are guilty, I wouldn’t want you to become a monster, something you’re not, just to defend me!”
