Page 2 of Dukes of Peril

It’s loud on the shore. The water is frothing a lot more angrily than it looked from above, slamming against the rocks and pelting us with its mist. I think at first the earth is trembling beneath my feet. But no. That’s just me. My body is wracked with shivers, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I finally get a good look at Remy.

He looks pale and grim, eyes glazed as he stares out over the river’s water, watching.

It occurs to me this isn’t his first time standing here like this.

“Remy?” I croak, climbing unsteadily to my feet. “Are you–”

His eyes snap to mine, losing some of that dazed sheen. “We made it.” He reaches for my hand, levering me up with a pinched, pained expression. “We made it. Right? Didn’t we make it?” Green eyes scan my body, as if he’s searching for proof that I’m really here. Only then, he pauses. “Oh. You’re hurt.” Ducking his head to look at my knee, he lets go of my hand only to wipe the blood away.

“It’s just the rocks,” I say, still struggling to catch my breath. In the dim moonlight, I check him out, too, looking past the tattoos and defined muscles. His shoulder sags. I touch the rounded juncture, alarmed. “You’re hurt, too.”

“I think it’s dislocated,” he says, still touching me, mapping out my body. His fingers land on my hip, tracing the star, and I’m surprised to realize the action grounds us both. “It’s not the first time. Happened in the third grade, seeing how far I could swing off the monkey bars.”

“Remy,” I say, drawing his gaze to mine. “I didn’t believe you before. About your dad. I’m sorry, I thought–”

“Don’t,” he says, his tone harsh. I think the anger is meant for his father, or maybe even me, but he continues, “Don’t apologize. I’m the one who didn’t believe you. I’m the one who fucked up, Vinny.” His face falls, and he looks away, swatting wet hair from his eyes. “I fucked us up so bad.”

Haley. The memory of her on her knees before him burns sour at the back of my throat, but I bite it back. Everything we talked about on the edge of the cliff comes with caveats.

“I love you, Vinny.”

He said those words. I heard them, felt them, let them soothe something wounded and sore inside of me. But now that we’ve survived the fall, I can’t help but wonder if it was the truth or just a last-minute, panic-driven confession. Pretty words to send a dying girl off the edge of the world with.

I won’t hold Remy to it, even if the thought of him loving me warms me like a blanket.

Maybe that’s the hypothermia setting in.

There’s no time to ponder the hurt that brought us here or the truth about the man who sent us over the edge. “Hey,” I say, pulling myself away from this train of thought. “We can talk about that later, when we’re safe and warm. But right now, I need you to think. Do you know how to get to a road?” I ask, wrapping my arms around my upper body, trying to control the shivering. “How did you get out of here before? Do you remember?”

He winds his arm around me, the good one, engulfing me with his skin as I’m clutched to his chest. It’s just like it was before, when we were falling, and it’s odd, I think. That something so fast can be burned so precisely into my memory. “We need to wait.”

“It’s freezing,” I say through chattering teeth, but that’s the least of my worries. The Baron King won’t give up on his son that easily. “We can’t just sit out here until sunrise.”

“They’ll come for us,” he says, looking up at the sky.

I stare at the patch of skin below his chin and shiver. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Your dad isn’t going to let us get away twice.”

Remy looks down at me, blinking away a drop of water. “You’re right, he won’t. But my father isn’t going to chase us. He’ll wait for our bodies to surface down-river. Just like...” He doesn’t say her name, but I know he’s thinking it.Just like Leticia. His fingers curl against my bicep. “But my dad won’t find us. Not before they do.”

They.

The Dukes.

Nick and Sy.

I glance out at the river, dark and empty. “How do you know?” I have no doubt they’re looking for us, but we’re at the base of a cliff, carried down by the current. How the fuck are they going to find us?

“They’ll come for us, Vinny.” His fingers, trembling from cold, graze the side of my face, lingering behind my ear. The tracker. “They’ll come foryou.”

Eventually, we collapse against the rocks, legs bent at the knees, my cheek crushed into his good shoulder. I’m not sure how Remy can stand it. With his arm hanging unnaturally like that, he must be in more pain than he can bear, but aside from a grimace every now and then, I wouldn’t know it to look at him.

There’s a stretch of silence where the trees on the opposite bank rustle in the wind, leaves chattering just as hard as my teeth. My eyelids are feeling heavy when Remy’s gruff voice suddenly shatters the quiet. “I hit my head against the rocks,” he says, voice thrumming beneath my ear. “There was blood everywhere, but it wasn’t red. It looked black, like ink.” My gaze snaps up to him in alarm, but I don’t see any blood–red, black, or otherwise. His eyes are full of exhaustion, fixed sightlessly to the sky. “It wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t cold that night. I kept bleeding and bleeding, and it wouldn’t fucking stop. The river had a smell to it. Goldenrod and dead things. It made me want to puke my fucking guts up. I remember falling now, Vinny.” His gaze dips down to mine, something flat and angry swimming within it. “I remember landing.”

And then he looks away.

He doesn’t talk after that. I almost wish he would go on one of his epic babbling sessions, with the colors and vague explanations, but he doesn’t say a word. He clutches me close, but remains eerily still, as if he’s shutting down, or perhaps lost in the memory of the first time this happened to him.Goldenrod and dead things. I know it’d be the right thing to do, to talk to him, to keep him stimulated, to keep him alert, to ask him everything he remembers.

The problem is, I sack out first.

---