AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The Dolces wouldn’t have made us pay for their sister’s death when she wasn’t dead. My uncle would be alive. Mom would be okay. Mabel would be home. Devlin’s parents would still be in Faulkner. Magnolia would be happily in school. Iwouldn’t be in Duke’s debt. And there’s no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be with Dixie.
“Well, you have fun getting shit on by all your babies,” I say, standing. “I’m going to go get shitfaced and see if I can still pull a second girl for a threesome with me and Dixie. Then I’ll know if our name is really restored to its former glory.”
Devlin just shakes his head and goes back to his kid. I tuck a pill under my tongue on the way out the back door. He doesn’t get it.
I miss Preston. He gets it.
He understands, even if he doesn’t still have the urge to get drunk and fuck around like I do. At least he’d understand why I have it. He hasn’t been on the frontlines with the Dolces the way I have the past few years, but he’s been watching from the shadows. At first, he put himself front and center, but he was too violent, too much like them. They drove him into hiding, but he never gave up. He never stopped fighting back in whatever ways he could, wrecking their cars, targeting their houses, fucking with their candy business. He tracks their cars, which saved my ass on more than one occasion.
I respect the way he’s dealt with them, even if it’s not the same way I do. It couldn’t be. He left school, finished online, and then threatened Gloria so they’d let him walk at graduation. I had to go to school with them for two years. My only choice was to get along or get dead.
I step out the back door into the gravel drive outside the garage, tensing when Duke’s Hummer pulls up. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop having that reaction when I see one of them.
“It’s weird having Darlings around our house,” he says, hopping down and slamming the door. “You don’t fit.”
“I grew up here,” I point out. “This was my house. I probably fit better than you.”
“Really?” he asks, coming around the vehicle. “I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you?” I ask.
“Just seems like something I should know.”
“I’m sure Baron knows,” I say. “He probably knows more about my family history than I do.”
“True,” Duke says, parking his ass on the front bumper and looking me over. “But he’s not here anymore. And he never mentioned that.”
“That’s surprising,” I say. “I thought y’all shared everything.”
“I mean… Not everything.” His hands clench on the bumper, and his triceps flex, and then he looks away.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of coming around here,” I say, starting for my truck.
“I wasn’t saying it’s a bad thing.”
I turn back.
Before I can answer, he shrugs and kicks his heel against the gravel. “I could get used to it.”
“Yeah, well, don’t,” I say flatly. “I was here to see Devlin. He can come to me next time. Y’all fucked up all my memories of this place anyway.”
“I get it,” he says. “I just thought… Now that our families are cool, maybe we could hang out sometime. Or whatever.”
It’s so ridiculous I can’t even summon a laugh. “You’re fucking with me.”
Duke glances up at me with a pair of puppy dog eyes and a shy grin that does fucked up things to my fucked up head. I guess now that he can’t target my family for killing his sister, he’s broken open a whole new arsenal to fuck with me and fuck me up. He’s used a lot of weapons against me, but never that one. He might know exactly what he’s doing, but I’m utterly unprepared for this kind of attack.
“I mean, we’re basically family now, right?” he presses. “That’s what Royal says. Your brother already lives here, and he married my sister. That makes us sort of like cousins.”
“You’re my half-brother’s brother-in-law,” I say stiffly. “That’s nothing to me.”
He drops his gaze to his feet. “I could use someone, you know?” he says quietly, tilting his head to look up at me again, his eyes squinting against the late afternoon sun, his thick lashes fringing his dark eyes, his hair a tousled mess like he just rolled out of bed. Fuck if he isn’t the most beautiful sight. “And I figure, with your mom and my dad… Both of them were drug related, so you kinda get it.”
“I don’tget it,” I say, glaring at him and his cute little smile and his stunning level of audacity. “My mother swallowed a bottle of pills because your family ruined ours so badly she wanted to die. Your father was cooking drugs. We are not the same, Duke.”
“Yeah, but see, you want to hear something funny?” he asks, his smile dropping and his eyes going dark. “I’m not my dad.”
“And I’m not my sister.”
