Page 65 of Kings & Chaos

I knew it because it had been mine.

My hands froze on his chest. “Is this… is thisme?” I croaked.

There was a split second when I assumed everything would be okay. He would answer, would confess that he’d had me tattooed on his chest when he’d been seventeen.

Then he reared back like he’d been burned, grabbing my arm and shoving me out of the shower. “Get the fuck out of here, Jezebel.”

I slipped and fell on the wet floor, then scrambled to my feet.

I looked back at him, confusion clouding my mind. “Neo…”

“Get the fuck out!” he roared.

I didn’t wait for him to say it again. His voice was thick with rage and something else I couldn’t name, his face contorted with the same anguished expression he wore when he watched me sleep.

I flew out of the room, slamming the door behind me, wondering why tears were stinging my eyes.

Chapter23

Neo

Fuck me.

And I meant literally fuck me.

What a fucking asshole.

I banged my head against the tile in the shower after Willa slammed the door behind her, cursing myself for my reaction when she’d realized the angel on my chest was her.

My talisman. My secret.

The first time I’d taken off my shirt at a family event — some little asshole’s poolside birthday party — after getting the tattoo, I’d been nervous. It had been years since I’d seen Willa wear the choker, and the tattoo artist had done a good job of making it a small, barely noticeable detail on the elaborate angel.

But that didn’t mean no one would remember.

Would someone notice? Would they know? Would they think I was some kind of freak?

Drago had given me shit. “For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you just leave off the choker? The tattoo could be anybody without it.”

He hadn’t been wrong, but the choker was important. It was part of how I remembered Willa the day she’d endured my dad’s wrath for the chance to free me from the closet.

When I thought of her back then, so much smaller than me, Drago, and Rock, a little bird compared to my father, some details stood out more than others.

Her golden hair messy, a tangle of waves around her small face.

Her eyes, staring at me like a pool of water in some forgotten jungle.

The pink dress that had fluttered around her knees when she’d walked.

The choker, a unicorn of all fucking things.

I’d said fuck it and told the tattoo artist to add it, then spent the next two years worrying Willa would see it.

But she’d hardly looked at me. Every time I’d seen her, she was reading or talking to her sister or Mara Peretti. To Willa, I’d been invisible, and I’d gradually stopped worrying she would see herself in the tattoo.

Then she’d enrolled at Aventine, and I’d worried all over again, half-dreading and half-hoping she’d realize the ink was her. It had been dumb considering how hard I’d worked to make her hate me. She’d hardly looked twice at me when she’d first moved into the house, and it was my own fucking fault.

The water in the shower had run cold, and I forced myself to stay under the spray as penance, forced myself not to jack off to the memory of her face and her body, her eyes staring through my fucking soul.

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