AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re right,” I say lightly, swinging the bag back and forward. “But right now, I own this bag. What are you doing to do about it?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Because you’re going to give it to me.”
I get momentum before letting it go. It sails through the air, past Baron, and tumbles along the corridor, clattering to a stop against the glass doors at the end.
“There it is,” I say. “Go get it.”
“Worthless cunt,” he snarls, dismissing me in a single glance before limping toward the door. Even hobbling on one injured leg and with a busted up face, having apparently just had his ass handed to him by Harper, he’s arrogant enough to turn his back on a girl with a loaded gun.
“Oh, and Baron?” I call.
He leans down to pick up the bag, then pushes open the door with his shoulder. But he pauses and turns back, silhouetted in the light from the parking lot, as if he’s just daring me to take a shot, proving to me that I won’t.
I level the rifle on him. The thought of never seeing him again makes me feel high and dangerous, like I might just shoot to prove him wrong. “Be gone before Royal gets home if you don’t want to face the consequences ofyouractions,” I say, careening sensation rising inside me that feels way too fucking much like victory when I repeat the words back to him that he’s said to me so many times. I caress the trigger, a hysterical laugh threatening to erupt. “And just so you know, if you ever come back to Faulkner… It’s hunting season.”
thirteen
Colt Darling
Everything feels far away as we make our way through the mall. No one notices that I’m on autopilot, that I don’t talk or participate. I’m locked in a battle inside the steel fortress of my own head, fighting for my life, fighting for someone else’s life. Fighting the fire that won’t just consume me. I’ll be a mere casualty.
The extra pill begins to take over, making everything soft at the edges. I can’t seem to convince myself any of this is real. We finally find Royal and their dad, and as I look around, I see I’m in a sea of faces who would probably be happy to watch me burn with Tony Dolce.
He’s making drugs, as we all suspected. We just didn’t know where it was, but when we walk in on it, it’s beyond obvious this is the center of operations. I stare at the sea of blue pearls on big metal tables. I wonder if they’re better than the pills I take. I’ve heard about them, this party drug called Alice in Wonderland that Baron Dolce cooked up.
Maverick sells. I could get one from him for the right price.
When we set the operation ablaze, I watch Duke gaze into the fire with the crazy eyes of an addict. I wonder if that’s how I look when I take a pill. He has a brother to pull him away from the flames before we leave the building. I glance at my brother, now holding hands with Crystal Dolce and walking with them like he’s not afraid of what they’ll do to him for stealing their sister, for making them think she died for three fucking years.
But none of them seem to care. Apparently I’m the only one having trouble coping with their reappearance. Maybe it’s my fucked up brain.
I pull out a cigarette as we walk back to our cars, cold rain spitting at us in the freezing night.
“You smoke now?” Devlin asks, watching me tuck the filter between my lips as I reach for my lighter.
“Why not?” I ask. “It’s not like I have to keep in shape for football.”
“You know what that shit does to your lungs?” Duke asks from my other side.
“I don’t plan on living long enough to see the effects.”
“Good point,” he says. “Let me have one.”
I glare at him over the flame of my Bic as I flick it open and guard the fire with my free hand. “What’s going to killyou?” I ask.
“The same thing that kills you,” he says, walking backwards and holding his hands around mine to help me light, since the windy night keeps snuffing the flame. Our eyes meet, and the funny feeling of falling into my own Wonderland where I can actually see things from the Dolces point of view washes into me. He’s psychotic, but sometimes, I understand.
I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes of the others, but I can’t quite get there. But him… Sometimes I get him. Maybe that means I’m psychotic too. I must be, to sympathize with a demon like Duke Dolce.
Sometimes, though, I remember his words on the roof, and I know he’s right, that we’re not so different. In our families, we’re both the afterthought, the fuck up, the one who isn’t taken seriously. So we both clown to hide the parts of ourselves we don’t show the outside world. We don’t act out of anger like others in our families, but we’re no better. We’re both capable of the same level of destruction as any of them.
Yeah, he unleashes his on the world, while I hold onto my anger so tightly maybe one day I’ll strangle and kill it for good. I don’t let myself turn into the same kind of monster that he is, but if I’m not careful, I could. I have the potential inside me, like an aneurism waiting to burst. I know that, and maybe that’s the lesson in all the destruction. To know that I’m no better, but to choose tobebetter anyway.
Harper says goodbye to us and climbs into her car with Royal. The Delacroixs leave. Magnolia leaves. Cotton Montgomery and DeShaun leave. I don’t even know where they came from, but they’re here. Everyone who’s made my life hell for the past three years is here. For a moment, I wish the lab would explode and kill them all. I don’t care if I’d go down with them. It would be worth it if they got what they deserved.
“I have to get home,” Devlin says, giving me an apologetic look. “We’ll catch up in the next couple days.”
“Sure,” I say, letting him pull me into an embrace.
