Shiloh shook his head frantically. “I don’t. I don’t. You’re my brother. I love you. You know—You know I’m not good at that stuff,” Shiloh finished.
As soon as the words left his mouth, he wanted to take them back. He heard the others snicker, heard the sharp inhalation of his brother’s breath.
“Oh,” Micah said, nodding. “I understand. You’re saying this is my fault?”
“No.” Shiloh gasped, still shaking his head, even though he knew his brother was just toying with him. “Of course, n?—”
Micah picked up an unoccupied wooden chair with a roar, then brought it down hard on the table over and over again until it shattered. By the time he was finished, the chair was in pieces, only the leg in his hand. He was breathing hard, his eyes glittering with a malice that made Shiloh want to disappear.
Despite everything, Shiloh didn’t see the blow coming. One minute, he was standing, the next, he was on his knees, fighting to pull air into his lungs. Micah had driven the chair leg into his solar plexus.
Shiloh felt like he was drowning. Micah had knocked the wind out of him, but it felt like both his lungs were paralyzed, unwilling or unable to bring in much-needed oxygen.
Micah’s face became serene once more, his plush lips rearranging themselves into a sneer. Shiloh watched as hisbrother caught his hair and pulled it back in a half pony-tail, securing it with an elastic around his wrist.
Shiloh’s stomach dropped.
Oh, God.
“Please…” he said once he could breathe again. He couldn’t stop the shaking now, even though he knew it would only make Micah angrier. His teeth started to clack together like he was cold. It wasn’t the first time. Malachi said it was an adrenaline response.
Micah’s face fell into a mock pout. “Oh, don’t look so glum. It’s not like I’m going to kill you.”
Shiloh fucking wished he would. More than anything. But if he did, Malachi would be stuck in prison for life for a crime he didn’t commit. Because of Shiloh. Mal was the only thing that kept him going.
He blinked back tears, willing whatever part of his brain controlled such things to just…not. Tears only made things worse. Micah raised his hand. Shiloh flinched, acid pooling in his stomach.
Micah chuckled, yanking him to his feet, then gripped his chin roughly, shaking his head around. Levi had gripped his chin like that, too, but only to kiss him better. He tried to focus on that, tried to go somewhere in his head far away from his psychotic brother.
“Where did I get such a weakling? Hmm?” Micah simpered, like he was talking to a baby. “Malachi was a fucking loon, but he was at least useful occasionally.”
Shiloh wanted to shout, “Then why did you have him thrown in prison?” but he knew no good would come of it. Shiloh knew why. Everybody did. Bringing it up again would only make things worse. This punishment was going to be bad enough already, and everyone knewthat, too. Micah was just drawingit out, psychologically torturing Shiloh before he physically tortured him.
Micah sighed as if he was so put upon. “But you…I’ve never seen you do a single thing right. I don’t understand how we share the same gene pool. Hell, if I hadn’t watched you crawl out from between our whore mother’s legs, I would have thought she’d found you behind a dumpster. Maybe I should have just smothered you back then. I could have. Iwantedto. But I didn’t.”
Was he waiting for a thank you? Shiloh couldn’t have said it, even if he wanted to. He was afraid that, if he opened his mouth, he might scream. At this rate, he might have a heart attack from the anticipation before his brother even decided on a punishment.
Micah calling Mal crazy was rich. Mal was weird. Really fucking weird. And not in the way all middle children were sort of off but weird in a way that Shiloh could never explain to an outsider with any cohesiveness. Malachi was just someone a person had to experience to truly get the scope of his eccentricities.
Like Micah, Mal had a cruel streak. He enjoyed people’s suffering, but only if they wanted it. Consent was weirdly important to Mal. He liked toying with people, liked making them beg. But he also loved animals and babies. He loved music and art. He loved Shiloh. He’d tried his best to protect Shiloh.
Mal was all extremes, all the time, and nobody ever knew which Mal they were going to get.
As the silence stretched, Shiloh grew desperate to fill it. “I’m sorry, Micah. I fucked up. Just…just do what you have to. I deserve it,” he finally blurted, doing his best to sound sincere. “I won’t even fight back. I’ll even try not to cry this time. Okay?”
“Oh, don’t placate me, little brother. I know you’d kill me right now if you could. If you had the balls,” Micah taunted. “Butyou don’t. If I handed you a gun and put it right to my forehead, you still wouldn’t pull the trigger.” He chucked Shiloh under the chin. “Because you love me. And love makes you weak. It’s why Mal is in prison. It’s why you’ll spend the rest of your life doing just what I tell you.”
Micah was right. Shiloh wasn’t like his brothers. He didn’t have any interest in hurting people. He just wanted to draw and paint and play video games. He wanted to get a job and a boyfriend.
He didn’t know why the genetic code that made Mal and Micah so good at being bad had skipped him, but it definitely had. In another life, with different parents, different circumstances, Shiloh probably would have had friends. People would have thought he was funny and sweet. He wouldn’t have been the weird kid.
But, somehow, he’d ended up in this fucked-up family and it didn’t make any sense.
If someone lined up Shiloh and his siblings, they’d be hard-pressed to find a single physical trait all three shared, except maybe their curls. They all had different fathers, but Micah and Malachi favored their mother’s Swedish looks—both blond and blue-eyed—whereas Shiloh resembled his Argentinian father—dark hair, dark eyes, golden skin.
Unlike Micah, Malachi’s skin darkened under the sun just like Shiloh’s, and when Mal’s hair was dark, people could see the resemblance between them, which had always comforted Shiloh. He didn’t want to look like Micah, though some part of him wondered if he’d have gone easier on him if he had.
But near as Shiloh could tell, the only trait all three brothers shared was something nobody else could see. They were all fucking crazy in their own way, a gift from their mother. The only thing she’d given them before she dove off the roof and left them behind.
