Page 87 of Gilded Fake

But what about the elites, other founding sons, the guys I grew up with?

Even they had an excuse, flimsy as it was. They were never really my friends. When I came back, I never trusted them, and they knew it.

The ones that really get me are the ones I did trust.

Harper.

Dixie.

Gloria.

The world tilts with the whiskey bottle this time, and I steady myself on the tailgate.

How could she not have told me? She told me what she did, that she lied to me, that she fucked me. But she didn’t tell me I was sleeping in the same bed as a snake all that time.

Why the hell not?

It doesn’t make sense. If she liked me all that time, which she says she has, why didn’t she tell me? If she’d told me then, I would have ditched Dixie a long time ago. Gloria would have gotten what she wanted, if that’s really me. We would have been together months ago. I could have taken her back up with me instead of letting her pay her dues in the gutter.

I spot a lone cigarette butt that I flicked further, right at the edge of the drop into the pit. I set down the whiskey bottle and approach slowly. The ground sways and tilts with every step. I know I shouldn’t go up to an edge like that when I’m this fucked up, but some urge draws me, the same urge to self-destruct that rose in me every time I clawed back an inch of the ground the Dolces took from me. Like talking to Harper when they said I couldn’t. Like flipping them off and telling them to go fuck themselves. Those times, I only lost a little. A month of memories. A finger.

I pick up the butt and flick it into the abyss below. Dusk has fallen, and it swallows the white filter as it goes end over end. And then I’m staring down into the drop, which isn’t quite a vertical plummet like you’d see from a natural cliff. It’s a slight incline, gravel and scree, with the edges of the rocks they mined jutting out, a few twisted saplings here and there growing where they could find purchase. A fall like that might be worse than a straight shot to death. You’d still tumble a hundred feet, but you’d look like you got beaten with a cheese grater by the time you reached the floor below, beaten to death by all the rocks you hit on the way down.

My gaze sinks to the bottom, and my stomach lurches sickeningly, the whiskey threatening to come back on me. I force myself not to stumble away from the edge. Instead, I spread my arms wide and close my eyes, picturing the fall. The way everything in my body would clench like a fist. There would be nothing but blind fear for a few seconds, and then nothing.

No pretty liars and gilded fakes, no one with ulterior motives to question, no betrayal.

No mother who doesn’t know me, sister who doesn’t call, brother who doesn’t get that even though we’re back in power, nothing is like it used to be.

No craving scrabbling inside my skin like rats clawing to get out, maddened with need.

Just blissful oblivion. Sweet nothing.

I hear footsteps running on the gravel, and I open my eyes and turn. When I do, my foot slides on the gravel, and my stomach plummets in advance. I have one second to remember that crack that rippled from Destiny’s skull, up her arm, down mine, and into the center of my brain where fear and pain and memory nestle like a seed.

Once, before that, I jumped out of a helicopter. I was probably too young, but my family has a way of getting what we want, and I wanted to go skydiving for my birthday. I liked jumping off things back then—swings and high-dives when I was little, then bluffs and balconies and buildings. It wasn’t the weightlessness of being in the air that I liked, the freedom of flying, or the complete absence of control. It was the rush that came after the careening terror, the rush that made me feel alive and invincible when I walked away. And then I learned that walking away was a privilege, not a guarantee, and I stopped jumping.

Now I have that one moment to feel the ground give way, the gravel rush under my boots, the sickening wave of terror rising like bile up my throat, to see the chasm beckoning, as inviting as blue sparkling water, and then I’m airborne.

The next second, my back hits the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.

“What the fuck?” a voice thunders, a man standing over me on the gravel lot, breathing hard.

I blink up at him, struggling to draw a breath, to comprehend the face swimming over me. My vision doubles, acid burns in my sinuses, and my guts churn and twist. I can still feel the gravel sliding, the ground giving way, the pitch of my stomach as my vision swam over the beckoning, fatal drop.

“Your fucking family,” he says, spitting the words like a curse. “Next time, I’ll let you jump.” Then he turns and stomps off across the gravel lot towards a bright yellow Hummer, as conspicuous as a school bus parked up here.

Damn it.

I sit up slowly. “Duke.”

He hesitates mid-stride, but he doesn’t turn back.

“I wasn’t jumping,” I say. “I almost fell. Because you startled me.”

He snorts and pivots back to face me. “Nice try, asshole.”

I pull my knees up, needing to feel my feet on solid ground, and drape my arms over them. I sit there picking gravel out of my elbows, where it gouged into my skin from the force with which he threw me down. The sky overhead is the muddy purple of a bruise as sunset fades, but it gives me enough light to find each piece. The sound of the insects increasing as evening settles in swells around us, and then the crunch of his shoes on the gravel as he returns. He settles his oversized frame beside me, my whiskey bottle dangling from one hand.

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