I paused. “Who’s Nat?”
Silence. No one said a word, and I found myself looking at Beck. His jaw was doing that rigid thing, his eyes were doing the stormy thing, and my heart was galloping a million miles an hour, because I had this feeling this was Beck’s great loss.
“Nat was my sister,” Dylan told me, and I blinked, because I had not expected that. “Remember how I said my father had an affair with the nanny?”
I nodded.
He let out a derisive chuckle. “Well, we needed a nanny because I was not his first child. Nat was nine months older than me, and she was the legitimate heir. Even though they would never quite acknowledge that … the old ‘needs a penis to sit on the Delta board’ tradition was even stronger back then.”
I gasped, not quite sure how to take this new information. I could feel his pain though—Beck’s too—and I waited patiently for more of the story.
“She was a perfect child,” Dylan continued. “White skin, like he preferred, blonde curls, and huge blue eyes that could get her anything she wanted.”
A single tear traced along Dylan’s cheek, and my heart ached like someone was actually squeezing it. “She was run over in our driveway,” he finished suddenly. “When she was ten, and I was nine. One minute there and the next gone.”
“She was not cut out for this world,” Beck said softly. “We should have done a better job protecting her.”
I tried to clear my throat. “That’s why you were such an asshole to me when I first arrived?”
Beck nodded. “Yeah, I loved Nat like a little sister, and when she was killed…”
I swallowed my tears. “I’m so sorry,” I said, stepping forward to wrap one arm around Beck and the other around Dylan. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Dylan dropped his head, burying it in my neck, and I could have sworn more tears fell. “It was my fault,” he whispered. “Her mother was trying to run me down and Nat jumped in the way. She got hit instead.”
I gasped, jerking my head back so I could see his face.
“Are you serious?”
He nodded. “Yes. I’m the reason my sister is dead. She was the only one to give a fuck about me, and it got her killed.”
I was just staring at him, my eyes wide, my breath ragged. “What in the fuck…?”
How could this be their lives? How could there be so much loss and pain and destruction in the twenty plus years they’d been alive.
“That was not your fault, Dylan,” I said seriously, reaching up to hold his face so he couldn’t turn away. “I never want to hear you say that again.”
His expression shuttered, but he didn’t argue with me.
Looking between the four of them, I’d never felt so happy that I’d moved out of the compound and forced the four of them to follow me. Their families were all toxic and deadly. Each of them more insane than the last.
“We should get inside,” Evan said quietly, and we all moved to follow him.
The guys stopped at Nat’s grave first, which was part of her family plot. The guys explained that all five Delta families had their own huge plots, with mausoleum looking structures and multiple large tombstones. Even in death they wanted to stand out and splash their money around.
Beck and Dylan crouched down on either side of her white marble grave topper, and placed their hands on top of it. They didn’t bring flowers, or anything else, and I knew that wasn’t their style. They were just here to remember her.
“Hey, big sis,” Dylan said, voice somber. “Sorry I haven’t been back for a while.”
He cleared his throat before falling silent. His head lowered, and I ached to hug him. I’d stayed back with Evan and Jasper, who clearly had not been as close as Dylan and Beck were to her, and it was so hard not to step forward and offer them comfort.
Beck didn’t say anything out loud, but he lowered his head as well, and I noted the white knuckles on his right hand that was gripping the side of the stone.
“Rest easy, little one,” he murmured, right before he stood.
Part of me hated that they’d had a female as part of their group before me. Eddy had told me there was never a female in Delta, and I realized she hadn’t quite lied, because she’d meant that the adult heirs of Delta, the five of them with Oscar, had never allowed a woman into their inner sanctum. But there had been a female they cared about. Another sister. One who was clearly closer to them than Eddy and Evan’s sister must have been.
Nat.
