Page 26 of Twice as Twisted

“Then you understand.”

“She’ll die if you leave her here without food for very much longer,” I say. “You can only live so long on soda. Plus, we don’t know how long we’ll be gone. What if it smells bad, and the neighbors call the cops, and they come find a dead body?”

“No windows,” Baron points out. “It won’t smell bad outside.”

“You think Mabel wants to come home to a crime scene?” I ask. “What if it spooks her into running again?”

“I can’t let Jane go,” Baron says. “She’ll go to the cops. Even if they don’t believe half of what she says, they’ll see how cut up she is, and they’ll check out her story.”

“I’m not saying you should let her go,” I say. “Though she’s so scared of you, she probably won’t go to the cops if you threaten her.”

“Then what are you saying I should do with her?” Baron asks, frowning at me.

I crack open another beer, hoping if I drink enough, it will drown the rustling sounds from the basement, whether real or imagined. “I’m saying we take her with us.”

eight

Mabel Darling

Three Years Ago

A hush falls over the café, and whispers rise around me. I don’t look up from my book. I never pay attention to whatever drama the other kids are feeding on this week. When my family ran things, I kept my head down. Now one cousin is dead and one is recovering from an attack over New Year’s, and more often than not my brother Colt is either suspended for fighting or in the hospital after getting jumped, but I haven’t changed. I’m here to eat lunch, not participate in the social scene. I have no need for status, for titles, for anything this school can give me except an education, a diploma, and a letter of recommendation that will get me into a good school.

So I don’t pay any more mind than usual—until someone different slides in across from me. Willow Heights likes to pretend they only accept the academic type, but the students all know the truth. Half the kids here don’t give a shit about learning. They’re here because they’re legacies, because their families have the name or the money that gets them through the doors. The highly competitive, cut-throat ones care about class rank and GPA more than the actual knowledge or skill they’ve acquired.

No one likes to admit it, but the kids who care most about their education are the scholarship kids who have to keep an impeccable conduct record as well as perfect grades to stay. Naturally, I sit with them at lunch.

Even they are not immune to the drama, though. Apparently I’m the only one who’s not going to fall out of my chair when a Dolce boy joins us like this is his table instead of the one he took over from my cousins.

“I thought you were leaving me alone,” I say, glancing up and then turning back to my book.

“Why’d you think that?” he asks, cocking his head.

I shrug and set down my sandwich to turn the page. “I haven’t seen you since I said I wouldn’t go out with you.”

For a few months after that first encounter, when Baron did his obligatory introduction, the Dolces did not speak to me. Then suddenly, they started showing up at my locker each morning, all four brothers moving in a pack, each more dangerous and foreboding than the last. Baron brought me a single flower picked from outside each morning, and one day, a request.

Obviously, I refused.

“Aww, did you miss me?” he asks, reaching across the table. He tugs playfully at the top of my book, pulling it down flat on the table.

“No.”

“What you readin’?”

“Emily Bronte.”

“Too bad. I was hoping it was one of those porny romances. I could have read you a passage and made you squirm,” he says, walking his fingers up the back of my hand, sending a warm buzzing through my body that unsettles me. I want to tell him to stop touching me, that I don’t like it, but for some reason I don’t. Maybe I don’t want him to know something about me that might invite questions.

Or maybe I don’t want him to stop.

The thought is startling, dizzying. Terrifying.

“It is a romance,” I say, finally looking up as I draw my hand away and close the book.

He grins at me, a lopsided, boyish smile that does something funny to me every time. Except this time, I realize my mistake.

“You’re not wearing your glasses,” I say carefully, my heart lurching in my chest.

---