Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“He made me forget you!” Aries screams, blood and spittle flying from his lips. “Do you understand? Anytime I asked a question or tried to find out any little bit of information, he would beat me. At some point, he started beating me just to beat me, until I couldn’t remember what happened. Until I started believing what he told me about you, that you were dangerous, that you were the one who killed our mother, that you were the problem, and eventually, that you were dead!”
The rubber band securing all my rage, all my revenge snaps, and they drain out of me like water escaping an overflowing dam. “I didn’t die,” I rasp, driving my elbow into his sternum. “I was living in hell while you played football and fucked cheerleaders!”
He laughs, the sound manic and broken. “Of course that’s what you think I was doing. Living a life of luxury, and I guess from the outside looking in, it appears that way. But my life was anything but a luxury. Richard controlled every second of every day. One toe out of line and it was belts, fists, or whatever he had handy to hit me with. I spent years walking on eggshells, of never being good enough, of jumping at shadows!”
We separate momentarily, circling each other like wolves. Blood drips from a dozen wounds between us—split lips, broken noses, gashes where knuckles have met cheekbones. In the moonlight, we must look like ghosts, identical specters haunting each other’s lives.
“I swear to you, I tried.” His voice breaks on the words, and he lurches forward, his hand fisted in my shirt. “The first week after they took you. I told them the truth. I told them it was my fault.” Something in his tone makes me hesitate, checking the fist pulled back for another strike. “Richard beat me until I couldn’t stand.” The dam in him has broken, the words flowing out of his mouth like a rapid river. “Again and again. For weeks. I had no choice but to believe his version of things. He conditioned me.”
“I don’t fucking believe you,” I whisper, but my voice cracks, giving away my emotions.
“Then don’t, but I was there, Arson. I was fucking there when he said you died.” Aries’s grip on my shirt tightens. “There when they said they’d tried to help you, but you were too far gone. That you’d killed yourself at the facility. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I believed him. I’m sorry that for years I thought you were dead when you were really alive, living in that place, suffering. If I had known, if I’d had any idea, I would’ve done more.”
I roll off him, sprawling on my back in the grass. The night sky spins above me, stars blurring as something hot and unfamiliar burns behind my eyes.
Is it possible? That none of this was really his fault?
If so, that makes everything I’ve done for nothing. It opens the door for an emotion I’ve refused to allow myself to feel for anyone but Lilian. There’s no room for guilt when it comes to my brother, but now I wonder if I spent so much time blaming him when I should’ve been blaming someone else all along.
Richard.
“They told me you knew exactly where I was,” I say to the darkness. “That you visited the facility and laughed about how pathetic I was.”
“If I had been given the chance to visit, I would’ve done whatever I could to get you out of there.” His voice is a broken thing beside me. “I didn’t even know the place existed until you locked me in that facsimile of it. I never said it out loud or thought about it too much for fear that Richard would find out some way, but I always…hoped maybe you were out there somewhere.”
We lie side by side, blood cooling on our skin, breath coming in harsh gasps. Identical bodies, identical faces, lives split by a single moment of cowardice and calculation.
“Fuck,” he whispers, the single syllable weighted with horror. “All this time, all these years, we were pitted against each other. Fed lies, conditioned and manipulated for others’ control.”
“Yeah.” I laugh, the sound hollow.
His voice cracks. “And it worked. They made us hate each other, made us enemies.”
“There was never going to be enough room for both of us in the Hayes world.”
“That’s not true,” Aries whispers. “We can’t change the past. That’s water under the bridge, but on my fucking life, I want you to know that I thought you were dead.”
“Some days, I wished I was.” The confession slips out before I can stop it, torn from some dark place I’ve kept buried. “Early on. Before I learned how to survive. How to hate.”
He turns his head to look at me, his face—my face—a bloody ruin in the moonlight. “I wasn’t lying when I said I would have come for you if I’d known. I would have burned that fucking place to the ground.”