It was even more exciting that it was him who had given the permission. “I’d fucking tear out all the plants in that stupid garden of his, for one.”
“Odd place to start, but I’ll join you for it.”
“And I’d take a sledgehammer to that lock he keeps on my door. And I’d take scissors to all his ties. And those short uniform skirts he makes us wear. And I’d break all his favorite albums in half. And his record player. I’d break everything I could get my hands on that he cared about. Everything. Every. Single. Thing.”
The anger was too real, and giving voice to the things I fantasized made it too easy to get caught up in the destruction that I so very badly wanted to wield, and so when the impulse to throw the plate I was holding to the floor popped up, I didn’t have time to calm myself down before I was hurling the dish across the room.
It hit the ground with a satisfying shatter.
Yes. That was exactly who I wanted to be.
We stared at the pieces of china for several seconds, my heart thudding like I’d just run the PE loop around the garden in record time.
“Oh, yeah,” Cade said, and when his eyes hit mine, they locked onto some deep part of me, and suddenly, it felt like we were connected. Like the most basic parts of me were controlled by him. Like I didn’t even breathe on my own anymore, and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to keep being breathed by him.
Then reality hit. “Oh, shit.”
I reached for a towel to dry off then went for the broom and dustpan. Cade was already stooped over the mess when I got back, several large pieces in his hands. “Probably too broken to just glue together.”
He was joking. It was definitely too broken.
“He’s going to kill me,” I said, feeling that all-too-familiar panic. It was bad enough knowing I’d angered my father when I didn’t deserve it. There was nothing I could do to prevent that wrath. When I brought it on myself, I only had one person to blame. “This was my grandma’s china. I’m not going to be able to walk for days.”
Cade’s expression was hard to read, but his eyes looked...concerned? “Maybe he won’t notice. We’ll clean it up; I’ll take the pieces to the trash. He won’t notice until Christmas when there’s a plate missing.” He knew that meant we’d just be delaying an inevitable punishment, so he added, “We’ll deal with it then.”
I’d deal with it. Not we.
Because he hadn’t been the one to throw the plate. It hadn’t even been his chore to deal with the dishes in the first place.
But before I could correct him, the door opened, and there was my father. “What was that crashing sound?” His eyes landed on us, giving him his answer. “What the hell did you do, Cade?”
The wrong answer, it turned out. Since Cade was the one holding the pieces, it was easy to see where he’d gotten the impression.
“No, no. It was me,” I said quickly. “My hands were wet, and it just slipped out of my grip.” That didn’t explain how the dish had gotten all the way over here by the wall, and my father wasn’t stupid.
He’d add it to my previous transgressions. He’d be sure I suffered for it.
“Don’t do that for me,” Cade said, standing up in a rush. I gave him a puzzled look, but he’d turned his attention to my father. “She’s trying to cover for me, sir. I was horsing around and dropped it.”
My father adopted his Very Mad face, which looked a lot like a Very Happy face in some respects. “This was my mother’s china,” he said. “It’s an heirloom. They don’t make replacements.”
“I understand, sir, and I’m sorry.”
“To my office. Now.” He didn’t have to say he expected me to finish cleaning the mess up. “And you can forget about that drama trip of yours. Expect to spend this weekend with me.”
I could have spoken up, and I should have. But Cade shook his head sharply when I tried, and I knew enough about my father to guess that, if I tried to take the blame now, he’d rather punish us both than exert the effort to get to the real truth.
But I thought about it. The words were still at the tip of my tongue when Cade headed off to where he’d been sent. Were on the brink of falling out when my father paused to kiss my forehead.
By the time he’d left, following after Cade, they’d dissolved into nothing.
I brought the back of my hand to my mouth, holding back a sob. Guilt shook my body, but that wasn’t the most overwhelming emotion.
Finally, for the first time that day, I was grateful.
Grateful that he hadn’t let me tell the truth. Grateful that he’d helped me with the dishes in the first place. Grateful that he wasn’t going on that trip with Amelia. Grateful that he’d found a way into my otherwise terrible life. Grateful that he’d let my father abuse him this time instead of me.
So grateful that it didn’t occur to me until later to wonder why.
Eleven
Cade
Grabbing both my sweater and my undershirt together as I pushed through the door, I had them half off when I noticed my room wasn’t empty.
“Jesus, Julianna.” It only took a second to recover from surprise and move on to panic. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t be in here.”
Nothing had ever been said about being in each other’s bedrooms, but I didn’t need to be given a rule to know her father wouldn’t like it. He confined her to her own room most of the time and had a deadbolt on the outside of her door. It was pretty obvious he wouldn’t want her down the hall in mine.
I might not have been so concerned about pushing my limits if I wasn’t already coming directly from a punishment—a punishment that hadn’t even been mine.
I still didn’t know why I’d taken the fall for her.
Or if I did know, I wasn’t interested in admitting it.
“I needed to talk to you,” she said in a whispered tone, as if her father could hear what we said from the floor below us. I was pretty positive he couldn’t really hear us, but I completely understood the desire to be cautious.
It was the same desire that had me desperate to get her off my bed and out the door. “This is really not a good time. You need to leave.”
She stood up, which was a relief, but also a distraction, especially when she didn’t make any other move to go. While I’d been in her father’s office, taking the blame for the broken dish, she’d gotten ready for bed. Two months I’d been in her house, and this was the first time I’d seen her in anything besides her school uniform and father-approved casual clothing. Tonight, she was in a nightie.
And it was short.
And pretty damn see-through.
Fuck. I was going to hell for staring at her tits like I was. For wanting to touch them. For wanting to rub my thumbs over the taut peaks.
Of course, I was already in hell, so it probably didn’t matter what shitty thing I did, except that it would be pretty goddamn embarrassing to get a boner in front of my stepsister.
I ran my free hand over my face. I’d skipped my shave since it was a holiday, and the feel of stubble on my palm gave me something to concentrate on so that the blood wouldn’t run south. My other hand was at my neck, still clutching the clothing that I’d only managed to get half off, and after a few seconds, I realized that maybe that was a good thing because she was too busy looking at my bare chest to notice how I’d been staring at hers.
I knew it was stupid to make anything of that.
I had a normal, average teenage male body, nothing impressive. Whether she’d seen many men shirtless or not, I had no idea. Her reputation didn’t shed any light on the matter. Shirts didn’t have to come off to do the kinds of things she was known to do. So she was probably looking because bare skin was new to her. Or she was curious. Definitely not because she found me attractive.
Still, her eyes on me made me stand a little taller. And when she lifted her gaze and saw that I’d seen where she’d been looking, her cheeks flushed. “I’ll be quick, I just need to know—oh, God. What did he do to you?”
I’d heard something—movement downstairs, and not a threat at all—but I’d made the mistake of turning back toward the door when I heard it, and that gave her a view of my back.
Somehow letting her see that was more embarrassing than an erection. “It’s nothing; will you go?”
I started to put my shirt back on, but she was already at my side, already turning me so she could look at my lower back. “Just...let me see.”
Her hand on my bare skin burned, almost the way the marks on my back had burned, and also not like it at all. Her burn hurt because it was dangerous. Because it was forbidden. Because I didn’t want only her hand touching me but her whole body.
It pulled my focus long enough for her to get a look at the thing I didn’t want her to see, especially when I’d yet to see it for myself, and when her breath hitched, I knew it was as bad as I’d feared.
“What?” I craned my head over my shoulder, impossibly trying to see the small of my back. “What is it?”
She brought her hand to her mouth, her eyes watering as she shook her head.
A flash of frustrated energy surged through me. I threw open the door and stormed down the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t have a mirror in my room, and since I wasn’t lucky enough to have an en suite like she did, I had to use the one down the hall.
Though, maybe I was the lucky one, because otherwise, I might have had a lock on my door too.
I shut the door behind me and took my sweater off the rest of the way, dropping it to the floor before turning my head to look in the mirror to examine what Stark had left on my skin. They were low on my back—he’d made me hold my shirt up while he’d done it. Not so deep that they’d scar, but deep enough that they were bleeding. Three words. Scratched into my skin with a piece of the broken china because he seemed to enjoy making the punishment fit the crime whenever possible.
I AM NOTHING
As sadistic as it was, it hadn’t hurt as much as some of his other methods of discipline. It had been a constant pain, which was somehow easier to bear and prepare for than the surprise sting of a whip. I’d bit down on the back of my hand, which now had a pretty severe hickey, and had tried to guess the design of his strokes but had gotten lost with all the ups and downs of the M and the N and had no longer been sure he’d been writing words at all.
But of course he had.
Words that would hurt long after the physical pain subsided.
“It’s not true, okay? It’s not true.”
I turned my head from the awful image to see Julianna had followed me into the bathroom. I should have locked the fucking door.
But it was already too late.
She’d already seen the words in my bedroom. She already knew.
My eye twitched, and I couldn’t look at her. “Go away, Julianna.”
“I liked it when you called me Jolie,” she said, her back pressed to the closed door, as far as she could be from me and still be in the same room.
Yeah, right, it wasn’t true.
“Go away, Jolie,” I said, louder than I should have. I didn’t care for the moment what happened to me if we were caught alone together, even though I really should care. Even though I would care about what would happen to her if I gave myself a second to think about it.
She took a timid step toward me, and despite feeling humiliated and raw, I caught myself stealing another glance at her breasts, and lower, the outline of her white cotton panties, and felt the blood rush to my cock.
“You can’t let him get inside your head,” she said.
Fuck.
He was already in there. And she was too. Two people who couldn’t be more different. One pulling me into darkness. The other one…
The other one didn’t belong.
“Go. The Fuck. Away.” My jaw was clenched so tightly, the words came out focused and sharp and mean, and if there had been something satisfying to throw in that bathroom, I would have been hurling it at the door behind her, damn the consequences. I needed to be able to sit with this; alone. Needed to sneak out on the roof and smoke my cigarettes in the freezing cold.
She hesitated, the act of deciding written on her face. “I, uh—”
“Go!”
“But I need to know something first!” she said rapidly. Without giving me a chance to reply, she went on. “I need to know why.”
My brows drew inward, and for a confused second I thought she was asking why her father had chosen to carve those particular words on me, then realized she was asking why I’d taken the blame.
Ironically, they were both sort of the same answer, but I really didn’t want to get into that with her. “You’ve helped me too,” I said, hoping a reply would get her out of there. “The cigarettes. The mints.”
“It’s not the same.”
“How is it not the same?”
“That was camaraderie. This was... This was a sacrifice. I didn’t risk myself for you. I didn’t put myself on the line.” She sounded angry.
Which struck me as ironic. Here I was with every reason to be angry at her—for breaking the plate, for making me want to act noble. For being soft and kind and out of place in a house that was only hard and cruel and punishing.
I let out a laugh as I reached for the towel to wipe off the blood on my back. I’d get in trouble for staining the tan fabric, but I was experienced enough now to know that toilet paper and tissue made the wound hurt worse when it stuck to the skin. “I didn’t have an ulterior motive, if that’s what you’re asking. Don’t worry about it, okay? Go.”
“But why!”
Her tone was drenched in desperation, the kind of desperation that had a weight, and when it got its claws in you, and you pushed it away, it invariably took something from you at the same time.
From me, her desperation pulled the truth. “Because it is true. These words on my back? Your father carved them because he sees what I am. I am nothing, and I’ll always be nothing, and it doesn’t matter what happens to nothing the way it matters what happens to—”
I stopped myself. Partly because whatever came next would have been too much. Mostly because I hadn’t quite formulated in my mind what it was that she was. But it wasn’t nothing. It was very, very much not nothing.
She’d moved closer during my rant. Too close. And when she opened her mouth, I was sure she was about to deliver some consoling platitude or insist that I was wrong when it was so very obvious that I wasn’t.
But instead, she stood on her tiptoes and leaned forward, and I was so stunned that her mouth was already brushing against mine when I had the sense to step back. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Her heels came back to the ground, but she didn’t move. She kept staring at me, barely blinking, and I noticed for the first time that there were green flecks in her blue eyes, and that she had a sweet scent I couldn’t place, and that I wished that I was dumb enough to lean in instead of away.
No.
This was trouble. She was trouble. Being anywhere near her would get us both in too much trouble.
“You can’t fucking do this,” I said, feeling like something more needed to be said. For me as much as her.
Then I dropped the towel and picked up my sweater. Trying my best not to let any part of my body touch her, I moved past her, out of the bathroom, to my room, and told myself I wasn’t disappointed when she didn’t follow.
Twelve
Cade
I managed to avoid Julianna for a total of nine days.
Even when the trip was canceled, Stark made my mother still go—her punishment for signing me up in the first place—which meant the entire weekend was spent at his whim. Thankfully, he was on a kick about tidying up the school grounds, so I endured hours in the cold, cutting back dead hedges and picking up litter.
It was better than enduring time in his office.
I told myself it was better than being anywhere near Julianna, too.
Her punishment for speaking back at dinner was dealt with indoors, and
as much as I wanted to know what it was, I knew it was best to pretend I didn’t care.
When Monday came around, we were back to the school routine, and that was easier. Our class schedule dictated our separation. At night, we were in our rooms doing homework, like always. At dinner, I learned how to keep my eyes on my plate. I didn’t offer to help her with dishes. I didn’t even come in the kitchen to unload the dishwasher until well after I knew she’d be gone.
It was dumb. I knew that. Dumb to worry about being in the same room with her or what might happen if our eyes met. Both had happened plenty of times in the past, and her father had never cared. She’d never tried to kiss me. It wasn’t like I expected she’d try again.
The problem was that I hoped she’d try again.
And if she didn’t, there was a good chance I’d try to kiss her, and just thinking about kissing her got me all tangled up because then I wanted to think about what would happen next. And then next after that. But instead of staying focused on the next that would invariably lead to being murdered by my stepfather, I would get stuck on the next that had her in my arms. In my bed.
Under my body.
So I didn’t only avoid her. I avoided thinking about her.
Easy enough until the following Saturday, Stark decided it was time to get the house decorated for the holidays. All for show, of course. Not for the enjoyment of the people who lived inside, but for what a Christmas tree in the window said to people outside.
“You can put up the lights on the house after you bring in the boxes of ornaments from storage,” he said to me. “Julianna will take care of the tree.”
He’d had that delivered, though he had threatened to drop me off in the woods and make me bring one back myself. He found my horror satisfying enough to not have to actually follow through, but I hadn’t been entirely sure he wasn’t sincere until the delivery man had shown up early that morning with a fresh-cut pine.
Wild War Page 9
