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Clean as he could be, Dante walked back to the grave, to see Tristan almost finished with covering it up. It was unexpected, this little assistance. Considerate, even. He never would have described the boy like that.
Swooping down to pick up the clothes in a pile beside him, Dante found his own white sweater and jeans and shoes. Frowning, he looked at the seventeen-year-old dedicatedly covering the ground.
“Did you break into my house?” he asked, mildly surprised.
Tristan shrugged, a fine sheen of sweat on his face. “Wasn’t hard to break into.”
Dante shook his head. Quickly dressing, he went to sit down by the lake, and looked up at the mansion on the hill, crowned above the woods, flexing his fingers. Tristan came to sit beside him after a few minutes, throwing the shovel to the side, handing him a bottle of Jack Daniels from Dante’s stash.
Dante almost chuckled at that, before sobering. “Are we friends now?”
“No.”
“So what’s this? You watch my back and I watch yours kinda deal?”
“Fuck off, asshole.”
What he expected.
Taking a swig from the bottle, he passed it to Tristan even though they were underage for it. They were underage for a lot of shit they did. What was the right age to kill someone, after all?
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Tristan spoke after a long beat of silence.
“No,” Dante agreed. “It shouldn’t have.”
“You gonna do something about it?” the other boy asked, the most he had said in a conversation with Dante.
“Yeah,” Dante nodded, his eyes on the mansion lights turning on. “But not today.”
“Good.”
The clouds got darker, the wind chillier as night approached. Minutes went by.
“How do you move past it?” Dante asked him quietly. “How do you forget?”
“You don’t.”
Yeah, he didn’t think they could.
“Thanks,” Dante muttered after taking another swig from the bottle. “I appreciate this.”
He was met with silence, but for once, it was companionable.
And so they sat that night, two young killers, one fresh and one seasoned, swallowing down alcohol to drown the chaos inside them, and knowing that love truly didn’t have a place in their lives.
She never told anyone about the body.
That day, walking deep in the woods, Amara had witnessed the two big boys burying a young girl, the same pink-haired girl she had seen Dante kissing all those years ago. Scared out of her mind, she had run home and stayed in bed for a week after that, worried that someone would come after her for seeing what she had seen.
Nobody had. Her mother had simply thought it had been a bad period, and let her stay indoors. She hadn’t gone to school, hadn’t even met Vin that week, giving him the same excuse. However, after a week of anxiety and a whole lot of nothing, she had finally accepted that nobody had seen her and slowly gone about her life.
Her feelings for Dante though? Conflicted.
She didn’t know what it said about her. On the one hand, she didn’t understand what kind of a man – and he was a man now – would bury the body of his lover. On the other hand, she still found him attractive, more attractive in fact, as time went by. Perhaps, it was because she had grown up on the compound, and had always known that the people around her weren’t morally white. Hell, she was seeing her own best friend training himself into a weapon. She saw his bruises, saw his muscles build over time because he was being conditioned.
What was morality, anyway? That night had triggered her into giving that some serious thought. Being a good person and doing good things weren’t always the same. As she was growing older, Amara realized there was a very fine line between them. Her hero could be the villain in someone else’s story. Though she hated blood, if one day someone threatened her mother or even Vin, would she not hurt them? Was she incapable of taking another life?
People weren’t black and white, and sadly, neither were emotions.
