Page 119 of Wicked Games (Fallen Royals 2)

“I wish I remembered what happened.”

He turns around and lifts my chin with his finger. “Do you?”

“You could tell me,” I whisper.

He shakes his head and pushes my hair off my shoulder. “You’d never believe me.”

My mind goes back to ten years old. One minute we’re happy ten-year-olds chasing each other through his house, and the next, I’m at the park with Dad. He’s being taken away.

There’s a gaping hole, and it’s driving me mad.

I open my mouth to ask another question.

“Leave it for tonight,” he says. “I wasn’t lying about my head hurting.”

Well, then. I climb into his bed, folding myself into a little ball with my back against the wall. I pat the space beside me. “You said you’d tell me what you remember.”

He joins me, picking me up and putting me on his lap. I wrap my arm around his shoulders. The room is a bit chilly, and goosebumps break out along my arms and legs. He draws a pattern on my thigh.

“What do I remember?” he muses. “Yelling at my uncle. Telling him enough was enough.”

“Yelling at him about what?”

“My right to live.”

It’s a bit cryptic, honestly, but I don’t question him further. We just sit in the quiet for a few minutes. My eyes track the pattern he’s drawing on my thigh. A circle, a cross, a loop. A word.

B. R. A. V. E.

“Who are you calling brave?”

He pauses. “I heard a woman screaming. It’s weird, right? Aunt Iris is used to her husband’s… outbursts.”

“Does he hit her?”

He flinches. “I doubt it. Uncle David has other ways of keeping her and my mother under control.”

The last time I asked about his dad, I got shut down. I keep my questions to myself this time. There will be other days to ask where his dad went. Did I drive him away? I know something had to have happened with my mother. I didn’t just make the Ashers hate me—I made her leave me.

What kind of child does that?

“You’re in your head again.”

I meet his eyes. “Misery loves company.”

That gets a smile out of him. He kisses me softly, but it doesn’t last. We weren’t meant to be soft. So I let him push me onto my back and take away the aching in my bones.

29

Margo

Riley picks me up from Caleb’s house the next morning. She wiggles her eyebrows at me, laughing. “How was your night?”

I glare at her. “I should be asking you the same thing.”

Her smile widens. “Yeah, you definitely should. Damn, Eli is good in bed.”

“Stop.”

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