Page 62 of Twice as Twisted

When I see a pretty girl, I don’t think about her beauty. I think about how I can make her mine, possess her, fuck her before anyone else. Once I have, she’s of no use to me. Women are not artwork. They’re holes.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a girl naked. She was probably impaling herself on my dick, and I only cared how she felt from the inside, not how she looked. Usually, I don’t even bother taking off her clothes. Lifting her skirt and pulling aside her panties is quicker.

Are they all so pale and insignificant, almost without substance, feathers that could blow over the cliffside and out to sea?

It makes me want to wrap Mabel in sheets of silk and hold her in my arms so she doesn’t float away, chain her up in the basement so she couldn’t if she tried. With her full, bare body stretched before me, I’m too transfixed to think about anyone else anymore. I want to touch every inch of her, explore her with my fingers, tease her with my tongue until she’s screaming my name. But I know that’s not how it would go, especially tonight, when she’s already touched out.

So I turn off the water and hand her one of the towels from the place, scrawny and cheap compared to the big, fluffy ones we use at home.

Home.

It’s weird to think I don’t have one of those anymore. Like Olive, I’m set adrift, borrowing time and a room somewhere I don’t belong. But unlike her, I’m done with waiting. The girl I was waiting for came back to me.

Now she’s standing in front of me, and I don’t have to pray to imaginary gods and indifferent saints that I’ll see her again. She’s here. She’s mine. She’s been delivered, and it’s up to me now—to keep her, to make her happy, to not screw it up. To make her love me, and to not lose her again. To make her my home.

“Come on,” I say, scooping her into my arms. “Let’s get you to bed.”

We lie on our sides in the queen bed, knees almost touching. She tucked the blanket under her so there’s not enough on my side, and cool air blows against my back, but I don’t complain. Tonight isn’t about me.

“Where’s Seeley Boots?” I ask in the dark.

“He went under the bed,” she says. “He doesn’t like new places, and he’s had a lot of traveling already this year.”

“You could have left him with your dad and Colt when you ran away,” I point out. “I heard cats don’t like moving.”

She scoffs. “So you and Baron could catnap him and probably torture him and light him on fire?”

“Hey,” I protest. “We’d never hurt your cat. We’re not psychopaths.”

“You burned my brother.”

“Just his arm, and he’s an asshole,” I say. “Animals are like kids. They’re innocent, so they’re off limits.”

She’s quiet a long moment. “I believe you,” she says slowly. “I said that out of resentment. I don’t really believe you’d light him on fire.”

“But?” I ask, sensing there’s more she’s not saying.

“But I know you, Duke. I know you do whatever your brothers tell you. And I know what your brothers are like.”

“Come on, my family’s not that bad,” I argue. “You know Baron wouldn’t tell me to hurt your cat.”

“I do?”

I’m unsettled by the fact that I can’t answer with certainty anymore. Baron’s mind has always been clinical in its curiosity, and his indifference can be seen as cruelty, but he’s never acted with unfounded malice. He has a code. When someone wrongs him, the punishment is carefully calculated. When he sets out to accomplish something, the pain he causes in pursuit of that goal is inconsequential, but he’s never gone out of his way to harm an innocent bystander just for the pleasure it might bring him. If anything, he’d consider it beneath his dignity. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake has never been his weakness—it’s mine.

Thinking about the timid, broken thing chained in the room below where we sleep now, though, I can no longer be so sure. I can’t rationalize away his treatment of her. Even tonight, seeing him kill a man was less shocking than seeing Jane the first time. The man tonight deserved it. He touched what is ours. Baron’s justice is swift and unapologetic. But Jane never wronged him, and yet, he’s eviscerated her until I could barely get the ghost of a smile out of her when I joked around with her, as if she couldn’t summon the energy for a laugh.

I shiver and scoot forward a little, so the blanket covers another inch of my back. My knees press against Mabel’s, and she stares at me like she’s waiting for something. I reach for her hand, lace our fingers, palm to palm. Her lids flutter, but that slight flinching is the only reaction I get. I remember when we couldn’t hardly touch her without eliciting a panic attack. At least we’ve been good for her in some ways.

I squeeze her hand and ask slowly, the question that’s been on my mind. “Do you think, if you could, you’d fall in love with me?”

“I can’t, so there’s no point in asking,” she says.

“Why not?” I challenge. “You love hypotheticals.”

She’s quiet a minute, pondering that. “I can’t know what I would have been like if I’d never met you,” she says. “But if I’d never met you, I wouldn’t know you, so I couldn’t love you.”

“Meeting us didn’t make you incapable of love,” I point out.

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