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He grins, and I know I’ve pushed too far. “You know what? I’d have thrown you in the grave with your father if it were up to me.”
I swallow hard, not doubting for a moment he’d still do just that.
“But I’m beginning to think Amadeo was right to keep you. You’re going to be fun, aren’t you?” he asks, that grin disappearing behind a curtain of darkness. “That or stupid. I’m going to put my money on the latter.”
“You’re as big an asshole as your brother, you know that?”
“No doubt. Let me make things abundantly clear for you,” he says low and menacing, and in the next instant, he takes my arm in a grip like a fucking vise and tugs me into his chest. He’s just as big and as strong as Amadeo, and I know I made a mistake pushing him. He’s going to make me pay.
I press my hands flat to his chest, but I won’t budge him. He towers over me, like his brother, and hauls me up on tiptoe so we’re nose-to-nose. He’s so close I can see the stubble of a five-o’clock shadow along his steel-cut jaw.
His eyes hold mine, but I concentrate on the scar across his cheek. The one that matches his brother’s.
“When I say get up, you get up. When I say sit, you sit. When I say kneel, you kneel. Are you following me?”
I shove and try to get free. “Let me go, you bastard.”
He gives me a shake. “Are you fucking following me?” he asks, his voice low and hard.
“Yes!”
“Let’s test it,” he says, releasing me so abruptly I drop to my butt on the bed. He looks me over. “Get on your knees, dandelion girl.”
I swallow hard. I’m not sure it’s the command, the humiliation it will bring, or the dandelion girl reference. A memory flashes so vividly, it makes my brain rattle. Two boys in that room. One just a few years older than me.
I know it’s him. He’s that boy. The younger of the two. When my gaze falls to his scar, my blood runs cold.
“I said kneel.”
I slip to my knees, the carpet rough against my bare skin. I look up at him. He was there in that small house. We were all there in that house.
“Already better.” He takes a step away to clear a path for me to the desk, and I know what’s coming. “Crawl.”
I don’t move. I can’t. All I can see is the book on the desk. And the room in that small house. Their faces when my father carried me out as a dandelion fell from my hand onto the linoleum floor.
He crouches down and takes a handful of hair to tip my head back.
I grunt with the force of it, my eyes watering as I meet his searing amber gaze.
“If you prefer, I can strip you naked and use my belt to whip your ass all the way across the room if you don’t start crawling, dandelion girl. I’m being kind. Don’t take advantage of that kindness.”
He releases me, straightens, and puts a hand on the buckle of his belt.
“Crawl,” he commands, drawing the belt out of the first loop.
I don’t wait because I have no doubt he will do exactly what he threatened, so I crawl across the room, feeling him at my back.
“Sit,” he says as if commanding a dog. I look up to see how his jaw is set, his hand on the back of the chair.
I sit in the chair, gripping the edges of the uncomfortable wooden seat.
When he leans over me, I catch the faint scent of aftershave. Different than his brother’s. I watch as he opens the book to an obituary.
Hannah Del Campo. Age 14. Beside her name is a photo of a smiling dark-haired girl.
Survived by father, Roland Del Campo, mother Nora Del Campo, and brothers Amadeo, aged 15, and Bastian, aged 10.
I glance up at him. This is Bastian. But his eyes are intent on that photo and what I see on his face, it’s pain. So much so that it’s almost hard to look at him. I shift my gaze back at the book and catch just a few words that I don’t understand. Nameless child to be buried separately. He turns the page, and I find myself hugging my arms as I see a photo of a very different scene. My father and brother from about fifteen years ago. My brother looks to be eighteen there. My father’s hair hasn’t gone gray yet and beside him is my beautiful mother, young and alive although not quite smiling like the photo I keep of her beside my bed.
