Page 28 of Worse Than Wicked
“Because I have them all the time,” she says. “Mine are gruesome. Usually someone dies in a terrible way. Sometimes they’re things I’d want to happen. Sometimes they’re the worst things that could happen. But I don’t get to choose which one comes.”
“I love you so much,” I blurt, diving into her. I press my face into her chest, my eyes burning, and squeeze her tight. I didn’t know how scared I was that she’d say something different.
She wraps her arms around my head, holding me to her heart like that’s where I belong. “You’re allowed to have friends, Duke,” she says. “And anyone who’s never stopped and asked themselves if they’re a bad person when someone told them they were, only proves that they’re incapable of self-reflection and therefore, by most humans’ definition, a bad person. Anyone who would question why you did is not only a bad person but a stupid one.”
“You love me?” I ask, running my hands up her sides, pressing my ear to her chest to hear her heartbeat, as if I can hear a lie if she tells one.
“Yes,” she says simply, threading her fingers through my hair.
“I won’t let him hurt you,” I tell her, my voice ragged but fierce. “I promise.”
It’s a promise we both know I can’t keep, but I wish more than anything that I could find a way to protect this girl who understands me and lets me be my most vulnerable self without judgment. I wish I could find a way to make her trust me enoughto do that with me. But I don’t know how, and I don’t know how to protect her from my twin the next time he comes for her. One of these times, I’m afraid it will be the last.
eight
Duke Dolce
Time passes like a fever dream back in Wonderland. Nothing changes from hour to hour, day to day, month to month. Ingredients go in, pearls come out, sliding down the chutes in warm, loud rushes. I still hear them falling when I lay down in the silence at night, in the charming little place I decorated with Mabel. I smell them in my clothes, my nose. I taste them in the back of my mouth when I go to sleep, in the thirst in my throat in the morning. I see them cascading in shimmering waves when I close my eyes. All I see is blue.
Blue.
She doesn’t come back, but she haunts me anyway. If she was okay, if she was alive, she would go back for Olive. I check in with Crystal, ask her about the kid more than I should. She probably thinks I’m a pedo, like everyone else.
But Mabel doesn’t think so, and she knows about predators, so I tell myself it’s okay if I ask, if I check to see if Blue came back for her. Maybe Baron damaged her brain and she forgot about Olive. Maybe he cracked her skull and she got amnesia like Colt did when Royal beat his head in. But how could anyone forget Olive?
She haunts me as much as her sister. Sometimes, when I’m sitting on the cinderblocks in the dead grass, smoking a cigarette and debating whether I can take one more trip with Alice before they come to get me, I see her instead of Dad. She’s standing in the corner of the yard, in the corner of my eye, a little girl ghost who melts with the smoke tendrils curling from mymouth when I turn her way. Sometimes I think I’m imagining it, but sometimes I’m sure someone was there.
I know it’s not Olive. I’m not stupid. But is it Blue?
Or the Black Widow Killer, finally come to collect?
Even if I don’t like kids, I hurt people.
Mabel and Harper and Lo.
Dawson.
Dad.
I see him almost every day now, standing with hands on hips, disappointment on face.
I hear him say, “How long has this been going on?” and “The priest will take care of this.”
I feel the impossibility of refusal, the helplessness, the shame—for what I do and can’t stop doing, for allowing him to bring me back again and again, for not standing up to him or the priest. I let it happen, so why does it fuck with my head so much?
It’s not Dad outside the barred windows of Wonderland or in the overgrown back lot, of course. It might be Mabel’s stalker, though. Or the FBI. Maybe they know what we’re doing here, what I do here all day every day. Maybe they’re watching, like Baron watched Mabel. They want me to see them, to go to Baron and tell him. Then they can prove he’s the mastermind, that I’m just a grunt. He always tries to give me credit, but all I did was test his first iterations. I was his subject before Jane.
He got rid of her once she served her purpose. He called her garbage. One day, he’ll see that I’ve served mine.
The FBI doesn’t think I’ve served my purpose yet though. That must be why they wait, why they duck away every time I blink, so I’m not sure if I’m seeing things or if they were really there. Maybe they don’t care about Lady Alice at all, because they think they’re onto the Black Widow Killer, and even busting a drug operation isn’t worth blowing their cover.
Or maybe they were collecting information, and today is the day they’ll make their move. I might even be their target. After all, I make the stuff, all day, every day. Maybe that’s why Baron put me on this job. I make all the money, make it all possible, and I take all the risk. He knows I won’t rat him out. And if we’re caught, I’m the one who will take the fall. Maybe he’s even tipped them off—him or Mabel. They needed the money, but now that Baron crossed the nine-figure mark, they might be ready to get rid of me and disappear off the map. They could start over anywhere with that kind of money, and Mabel already knows how to disappear.
I try to imagine prison, but I can’t. It’s too similar to my life now, plodding through endless, monotonous days in a dark building, an hour in the yard here and there. If that was my future, I would find a way to cut it short. If I couldn’t get a belt, I’d make the other inmates do it. It wouldn’t be hard. Talk shit to the wrong guy, and if that didn’t work, tell them what everyone thinks about me is true, turn a life sentence into a death sentence.
“Hey.”
I look up. Someone is standing in the yard, grass seed stocks around her ankles. I squint into the bright, afternoon sun. My skin is damp with sweat, but a chill passes over me before she steps out of the sun, and she’s more than a silhouette, more than a ghost of a girl who didn’t stay in her grave.
