But she’s cold.
Too fucking cold.
It can’t be drugs because she couldn’t have gotten anything after they took her, and the haloperidol or benzodiazepine wouldn’t have done this to her unless she’s allergic—which, after almost three months in this place, I’m sure they would know which antipsychotic she’s allergic to. “What happened to you?”
I swear her bottom lip quivers. “You did.”
They’re only two words, but they hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. “You’re the one who was stupid enough to hit me in front of everyone.”
She even cried today. Blaze has done many things, but in all my years of knowing her, she’snevercried. Not when she broke her arm falling off the swing in second grade or when no one showed up to pick her up from her first day of middle school. And here she was today, in a room full of people, shedding a tear.
“No,youcaused all of this,” she hisses. Another whimper passes her lips as she pulls herself onto her elbows, raises her chin, and ignores her shaking arms. “The whole reason I was sent to this place was because of whatyoudid.”
Anger slices through me. I try to be nice to her, and this is what she does? “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be dead.”
She jolts, rolling onto her side to end up on her hands and knees, swaying as she does it. “Ding dong, your opinion is fucking wrong.” Her words are slightly slurred.
I frown as I take in the hospital gown and gripped socks they’ve dressed her in. Seriously, what the fuck happened? It doesn’t look right seeing her like this—and why is it so cold in here?
I cradle the back of her head, instinctively wrapping my arm around her waist, offering support as I silently hope that she might absorb even the slightest bit of warmth from me. As expected, shehits me weakly to get away. When will I do anything right in her eyes?
“I’m over listening to you talk about things you don’t understand. You want to take away everything that’s important to me, then fine. So be it. You have. The only two things I give a shit about are you and that ring you’ve been wearing on your finger.”
She’s irresistibly close, almost intoxicatingly so; a slight lean would be enough to taste those cherry lips again.
Blaze’s eyes search mine like she’s waiting for the punchline. I’ve seen her hungover more times than I can count, but I’ve never seen her as vulnerable as she is now, with her eyes glistening against the pale moonlight and the shadows circling her sockets. She looks like she’s been hit by the fucking plague.
Everything she said earlier was wrong. I’d kill myself before I’d kill her. Ever since we were kids, she always thought I hated her when I was just trying to get her to like me. After a while, I hated her for hating me and being so fucking dense, not understanding my intentions. By the time I was old enough to realize the fault in my logic, the damage was done.
It’s one of the many reasons why I hate Kiervan. Even as a kid, he understood how people work, but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Blaze didn’t like me. The harder I tried, the more she hated me.
Kiervan knew that girls don’t like when you burn their hair because you want to show them how pretty they are. He understood that they don’t like when you steal their things just because you want to bring a part of them home. Or break into their house to show her that you want to hang out and understand her better. Or give her a dead bird because you know how much she likes birds. Orchase herthrough the fucking woods with a bat.
So I got better,careful. Doing things that wouldn’t hurt her, and I almost killed her because of it. Blaze could have burnt my house into a cinder and leveled it to the ground, and she still wouldn’t have destroyed the one thing I actually care about.
Even now, I’m still pissed at her for not understanding. She’s so caught up in her own mess that she still has no idea what I’ve gone through for her. And she doesn’t even give a shit about me. In fact, she prefers everyonebutme, when I was the one doingeverythingto keep her out of prison.
Does she think it was her grandfather’s decision to send her to reform school?
No.
Igot her here.
I’ve taken on more of Kiervan’s coursework, and let our parents believe that I’m the reason some of their watches and jewelry were unaccounted for after Blaze’s rampage—not that Kiervan’s pawned it off. I agreed toeverythinghe asked for, and in exchange, he’d convince our father not to press charges and exploit the Whitlock’s investment bank instead. I’m still doing Kiervan’s bidding because my father can think of a hundred ways to get her out of this school and into a federal prison.
Yet here Blaze is, actively trying to get herself kicked out.
Her lips thin into a straight line. “I stole the ring from you.”
I lower my head to hers, forcing the irritation out of my voice to make the words flow as smoothly as possible. “Do you think I spent over ten years keeping it safe from your sticky fingers just to leave it on my desk when you and a school full of wannabe criminals were all around me?”
This is it.
This is the moment she realizes that her place has always been by my side and that everything that came before this moment was always for her. She’ll finally open up to me and tear down the walls she’s put up around herself.
She pales in the darkness, then scrambles out of my hold as if I’ve burned her. “Then you can take it back. I don’t want anything from you when you’ve already done enough damage.”
The disappointment that clutches my chest is gut-wrenching. My fingers curl into a fist as I look down my nose at her. “You have no idea what I’ve done because you’re too blind to understand a fucking thing.”
