Page 120 of Pretty Wicked Secrets

Her trust, her total submission, does something to me. I’ve had many people under my control under other circumstances, but all of that was taken. This is different. This isgiven.

I open the bathroom door, releasing a cloud of steam into the hallway, but I don’t hear my brothers. They trust me to take care of Riley, and I will. When Riley makes no move to leave the bathroom under her own power, I lift her into my arms and carry her to her room.

It’s late, but even if it wasn’t, I know firsthand how drained she must feel. For a moment, I consider finding her something to wear, but then I dismiss the thought. I’ll make sure she’s warm enough under the blankets on her bed, and even though I’ll leave her to sleep, I prefer knowing she’s naked, with the marks I’ve left on her exposed.

I help her into the bed, and another tear spills down her cheek as I straighten the pillows and then arrange the bedding around her. I’m tempted to capture it and save it, maybe taste it, but when she lets her eyes drift closed I leave it alone. Sleep won’t heal her, but it will restore her, and I want that.

I smooth the damp waves of her hair back from her face, then adjust the blanket again, tucking it around her shoulders before letting my fingers drift beneath it to trace my mark between her breasts. Another tear leaks out, and without opening her eyes, she wraps her hand around my wrist, holding it there.

I wait, and eventually her heart rate slows. Her breath evens out. Her grip goes slack.

I start to pull away, and her eyes snap back open, full of a silent plea. Still full of pain, and loss, and all the blood I tried to wash away too.

I hesitate, but she doesn’t let go of my wrist, so I slip into the bed next to her, both of us on our sides facing each other as I continue to lightly rub the mark I left on her. This time, she doesn’t close her eyes, and the silence wraps around us like another blanket, cocooning us together with the pain.

I’ve never laid in bed with another person. Never been close enough to a woman that I could feel each exhale flutter against my throat. Never touched someone’s bare skin, touched their most vulnerable places, without the intent to cause harm. So it makes no sense that being here with Riley feels like coming home.

Or maybe it does. Pain has always been my home.

I blink. For the longest time,homewas the place where terror lived. Then it became the horror I escaped from. Here, in this house, it’s become a fortress of safety and order, but the feeling seeping into me as we lie in silence, breathing together, is something entirely new.

“I hated him.” Riley’s lips barely move, the whisper hoarse and raw. Under my fingers, her heart beats faster, pulsing, pounding against the tips of my fingers.

I press them into the scar. “He deserved it.”

Her breath stutters, then she nods, finding my other hand and bringing it to her cheek. She tucks it under her head like a pillow, squeezing her eyes closed and letting tears flow onto my palm.

“After my father was killed… after she killed him…”And Emma. “I ran.”

Riley nods without opening her eyes, the hollow emptiness inside her like a vacuum, sucking the story I’ve never told anyone—not fully, not even my brothers—out of the darkest depths of my heart.

“I didn’t know she’d been caught until years later. I didn’t realize…”

She hadn’t even tried to cover it up, or hide. When the police showed up, I found out later, my mother was sitting next to the bodies eating the lunch she’d prepared for all of us. A true monster.

Riley’s eyes open, and the words come again.

“I didn’t realize she’d been captured until Jonas, Maddoc’s father, mentioned it in passing. He had his finger in a lucrative contraband ring up at Whitehorn, the women’s prison upstate, and he didn’t realize she was my… that we were related. He mentioned her crimes though, and I knew. I looked it up. I found out she was…”

Riley blinks, and I take a breath. Then let it out. Then another.

“She was on death row, but that takes years. I went to see her.”

It was a mistake. I thought seeing her behind bars would fix something, heal something, but all it did was awaken the monster withinme, like calling to like. I didn’t want to see her behind bars. I wanted to gut her the same way she’d—

I slam the door down on the memory of Emma. I can’t.

“She wrote to me afterward. Every week. She told me how bad it was there. How much she suffered.”

A familiar flare of satisfaction blazes in my chest, and without thinking, I flex my hand, caressing Riley’s cheek. Her eyes are latched onto mine like she’s untethered and I’m the lifeline she can’t let go of, can’t even blink, without drowning. But I’m a monster too. She needs to see that. She needs toknowthat. I want her to know me in a way no one else ever has.

“I looked forward to each letter. To the proof that she was miserable. It still wasn’t enough, but then she got cancer. She begged for my help. The medical care in prison is almost non-existent, and the type she had was brutal, and slow, and excruciatingly painful without treatment.”

I close my eyes for a moment, savoring my memory of all the pain-drenched words she wrote like a fine wine.

If I didn’t know firsthand that death deletes the living, erases them and replaces what once was with nothing but a yawning void, I could almost convince myself that Emma and our father still exist in some way. That they were able to reach through the veil that separates them from the living and fill Mother’s body with each and every nodule of that pain in retribution for what she’d done to us… or as a final gift to me.

But they’re gone, so the cancer was some other form of cosmic justice.

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