I saw him flinch too.
Yeah. He’s scared of some things, ain’t he?
And if he has family living in this house on Riddle Lane, I’ll get them, too.
Slowly, he faces me again, his cap soaked, my hair plastered to my skull and my skin slippery with rain.
“You just made a big goddamn mistake, boy,” he says, and I watch his face turn red.
“Stay away from her or I’ll make another one. And I won’t call it a mistake.” I turn my head and spit on the ground. “I’ll call it revenge.”
He narrows his eyes. Then he says, “I’ll be seeing you.” He turns and gets in his Range Rover and I don’t lower the gun. I consider firing again as he puts his vehicle in reverse, just to make him piss his pants. But my luck, it’d go straight through and blow his brains out and there I am again, behind bars.
He backs up with one last glance to me before he turns to look out his pristine back window and after a moment, he disappears behind one of the bends in Riddle Lane.
I glance at my Jeep, the blue headlights aimed in his direction.
If he can reverse all the way back to where he came from, fuck it, so can I.
CHAPTER
NINE
LYDIA
“Don’t leave me like she left you.”
An ache fills my chest. Not at the request, theplea, but the way Lele phrased it:Like she leftyou. Notus.Because he doesn’t remember her. He’s told me as much. In his mind, he never had a mother. No one but me, and I wasn’t really that. Too busy with every escape I could wrap my hands around because in our house, I was raised to be who I am: the empress, maneuvering all the intricate pieces meant to keep the money coming in, the drugs distributed out, and the police pacified.
The anxiety pushed away into the smallest vault in my mind, one with a bank-worthy lock. I don’t have time to feel it, and when I think of how I got this way, how I found myself indifferent to anything but Lele and his moods, his feelings, his pleas, I know I deserve the emptiness I’ve earned.
The dreamers think it’s bad, feeling nothing.
The dreamers don’t have nightmares to remind them just how blissful a void can be.
Lele stares at me, his shoulder brushing against mine as we sit side by side on the couch in our entertainment room. There are rules to this, me with Lele, in here.
No true crime. No horror.
This is the rigid framework that helps my mind keep going. And so we watch anything else and right now, we’re in the middle ofWuthering Heights.But he is looking at me, and his fingers are circled around a tumbler of rum on the rocks.
I have nothing. Drinking after I’ve communed with the devil is on mynolist, particularly when I have a meeting in the morning with the transporter who runs my shipments northward. He’s getting prickly about the weight of the product and I need to assure him we have state police bought and paid for nearly to the Canadian border.
Lele’s green eyes hold mine.
“Lydia,” he says. He reaches for me with his free hand, his fingers on my bare thigh, beneath my sleep shorts.
The touch sends nervousness bolting through me. Lele would never hurt me. But the only people who touch me…
No.
I refuse to think of it.
My brother is not them.
We may be barely a year apart, but he’s aggressive and he drinks too much and he fucks too much but even still, he isn’t vile. Not to me.
With me, he’s emotional. Like now. These requests come out of nowhere. Or after he breaks the heart of some girl he fucked out of his system. His messy white-blond hair and puffy lips tells me that’s probably where he was tonight before he stormed into my bedroom and asked if I’d sit with him in here.
