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“She was going to be famous, you know? Julia Clayton. The rising star; that’s what they called her.”
“Is she the woman in the photograph?”
He nodded, and I remembered the black-haired beauty from the picture frame on his dresser. I’d honestly thought it was whatever had come stock with the frame. The woman in the photo too beautiful to not have been retouched and edited to within an inch of her life.
But it made sense, if Rook was her son. Beautiful, lethal, Rook.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Is that how you ended up at Barrettes Home for Boys?”
Something in his gaze shifted and his hand curled back around the necklace until his knuckles turned white.
“You’ve done some digging.”
I shrugged. “And you haven’t?”
“Me? No. But I can’t say the same of my brothers.”
I waited.
“Yes,” he said on a breath. “But I didn’t wind up there right away. I was put into the care of my aunt for years before that. She never missed an opportunity to remind me that I ruined her sister. That she died so a little shit like me could live. She didn’t bat an eye when her boyfriend took out his very particular brand of violence on me. I think part of her wanted him to do it. To punish me for taking my mother from this world.”
“He’s the one who gave you these?” I gingerly brushed a finger over the scars on his arm, the ones hidden by all the ink covering his skin.
His upper lip curled and my inner fire burned hot, wanting retribution on his behalf. To scar the fucker in all the exact same places and in all the exact same ways as he’d scarred Rook before killing him slow.
“I thought I deserved it.”
“It wasn’t your fault she died.”
“I know. I didn’t back then, but I do now. I found this journal she wrote in just before my aunt finally had enough of my shit and sent me away to the group home. Everyone was telling her that having me would destroy her career. That she should abort me and never tell the father. She didn’t ever tell him, because apparently he was a fucking monster, but wrote that she did want me. She wanted me more than she ever wanted anything else in her life.”
“She sounds like an incredible woman.”
He smiled a sad smile. “I like to imagine she was. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t found that journal, but soon after I went to Barrettes home for Boys, I met Grey. And not long after that, I went back to my aunt’s house on Sycamore Street and burned it down. With my uncle inside.”
“Good.”
His eyes met mine and something unspoken passed between us before he shifted, turning slightly to face me. Rook lifted the necklace between us, his face growing hard. “Will you wear it?”
My stomach flipped and my lips popped open in surprise, but he said nothing else, only waited for my response as the first rays of morning sun broke over the horizon, painting him in brilliant gold.
Everyone thought he was the devil, but I could see it now. In just the right light, he wasn’t a devil at all but an angel of justice. My dark prince.
Wordlessly, I turned, using my good arm to push all my hair out of the way, holding it up off my neck.
His hands brushed my collar, making me tremble as he draped the dainty chain around my throat, the black diamond weighing heavily in the dip of my clavicle.
Once he finished with the clasp, he brushed his thumb over the chain against the back of my neck, guiding me back to facing him.
His cheekbones flared as he took me in, in the dawn light, eyes passing between the necklace and my face. He smiled.
“It suits you.”
I touched the stone with my fingertips, a sense of belonging taking me so strongly that it hurt. Mixing with a heavy guilt so crushing that it took all the breath from my body.
In less than twenty-four hours I was going to meet with Officer Vick. And thanks to Diesel’s admissions in the Deadwood, I actually had something I could give him. If Diesel killed Foley with his bare hands and buried him at the edge of that cliff, his DNA would be all over the body. I could take him down. I could take them all down.
But when I looked into Rook’s eyes…
