Page 183 of Brutal Prince

Addresses.

I tilt my head, and advance a step before I can stop myself. “You made him do it, didn’t you?”

Brandon doesn’t seem to hear me. Instead, his hazy expression of drunken anger slowly contorts into surprise.

“Ya look nothing like ‘er,” he says.

What? Who?

But that’s not important. “I asked you a question.”

Brandon arrives in the present with a condescending snort. “Pissed tha’ m’boy isn’t actually your fucking bestie, you queer prick?”

I scowl at him. “The hell you on about?”

Fuck knows I can’t take him down, but I’d love to try. Even if it meant being bludgeoned into a coma, I’d love nothing more right now than to crack my knuckles into this ogre’s jaw.

“Marcus does.”

My mind feels like scrambled eggs. I shake my head, frowning hard. “What are you—?”

“His mum,” Brandon says. “Spitting fucking image.” He lifts a finger, tut tutting me for all the world like he’d just caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. “But not you. Ya look like your father.”

And why wouldn’t I?

Wait…what?

“Natalie,” I say quietly.

Brandon’s face hikes up in a grimace, then he turns and spits into the corner of Marcus’s room. “Whoring cunt,” he says, spittle dotting his lips as he moves around the bed. “Tramp wouldn’t keep her legs closed if you paid her.” He laughs, rough and loud, and makes to grab me.

I sidle away, and reach behind me. My fingers touch the windowsill, and the relief that escape is so near almost drives me to manic laughter.

All those pieces I was trying to shove together? No wonder they didn’t fit. I was working a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. What I thought was a bit of sky turns out to be a lake. Clouds? A white dress floating on the surface of the water.

Natalie was Marcus’s mother? Our mother?

“That…that’s not possible,” I say.

Dad would have told me. He knew she was sleeping around — how could he not have known who with?

I don’t see it though — the resemblance between Natalie and Marcus. Yes, they both have black hair and dark eyes, but so does every other goddamn person in the world.

Brandon’s obviously close to a psychotic break or something. Perhaps he’s schizo. Would explain the alcohol abuse, the domestic violence, the paranoid delusions.

Marcus isn’t my brother. He can’t be. Because that means I share DNA with the sick fuck, and the thought alone makes me want to throw myself off the bridge at Angel Falls.

“You’re crazy,” I say, moving back until my thighs brush the window sill. “No fucking wonder Marcus turned out the way he did.”

In an instant, Brandon is in my face. His fist is a blur as it heads for my jaw. I half-fall, half-push myself out the window. I barely manage to grab the oak tree’s branch as I hurtle past, and I tear off the edge of a nail as I fight to cling to the rough bark.

Brandon sticks his head out Marcus’s window, laughing so hard that his spittle dots my face like drizzle. “Might as well let go, boy. No more use left in you, is there? We got what we wanted.” He laughs again, and disappears inside the house.

I consider letting go, but it’s two stories down with a stony-looking patch of ground to land on. Instead, I monkey climb down the branch and hop onto the grass, too flustered to bother making myself less visible.

Soon as I’m back in my car, I slam closed the door and lock it. I doubt Brandon will come after me, but I’m not taking any chances. He might claim that Marcus takes after his mother — my mother? — but that apple certainly didn’t fall far from the fruit tree, did it?

I slam my hands into the steering wheel, a well of red-hot fury burning its way through me. I have all of the answers, except the most important one.

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