Page 40 of Enter if you Dare: Part Two

“You always owe someone money,” I scoff.

“I didn’t ask for a lecture,” he snaps.

“No, you usually ask for money.”

He narrows his eyes at me, but he can’t deny it. The only times I have seen him in the last few years were when he needed money or a place to stay.

“You would have plenty now.”

Yeah, well, he isn’t wrong. Both Leni and I are doing amazing, and it’s funny the only thing that has changed is Rowan no longer sucking us dry, physically and mentally. I now have a balance in my bank that isn’t in the negatives.

My foot eases off the accelerator, and the car slows before I even realize what I’m doing.

“What are you implying?” I ask him.

“Come on, Valli, that place must make a fortune. The ticket sales and the freaks running around. Your boyfriends must be loaded.”

Cold dread washes over me. My brother has been free for less than an hour, and he is already counting money that doesn’t belong to him.

“They’re not giving you anything,” I say through clenched teeth.

“I didn’t say they had to.”

“You were going to. I know you, Rowan.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to help me get back on my feet.”

A car passes us and honks its horn. I shouldn’t have stopped where I did, but the audacity of this man has stunned me. “I have been helping you for years. You’re a grown man and it’s time to stand on your own two feet.”

“You’re my sister, and you don’t understand what I’m going through,” he complains, but that is my breaking point.

“I don’t understand?!” I practically screech.

“No, you don’t.”

Blinding red-hot anger boils over. “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be held against my will for weeks.”

He turns toward me, but I keep speaking.

“But I know what it’s like to have a man kick in my door because my brother owed him money. I know what it’s like to check every parked car outside because I don’t know who you have pissed off. And I know what it’s like to count my money and wonder which bill I can pay late because I have to help you again. I know what it’s like to be beaten because you didn’t end up paying that bill. And don’t forget I was kidnapped, too, but I managed to get away.”

I press down on the accelerator again, trying to keep myself busy so I don’t cry in front of him.

“I promise it will be different,” Rowan says. “We are family.”

As if I haven’t heard those words so many times before, all lies and broken promises.

A gas station comes up and I pull in. Rowan braces one hand against the dashboard when I stop too quickly and the tires crunch over the loose gravel, the car locking up beneath us.

“What the fuck?” he snaps.

The gas station looks deserted, but I don’t care. I put the car in park and turn to Rowan and really look at him. He has our dad’s mouth and his mother’s nose. He looks like the brother I once had, but time has changed him. His hair is now too long and greasy, and there are shadows beneath his eyes. Some things are reminders of the good times, like the scar above his eyebrow, which he got from falling out of a tree in our backyard. I remember sitting beside him while Mom cleaned the blood from his face. He squeezed my fingers and told me not to look because it was gross. I remember him holding my hand at our parents’ funeral, and the promises he made after we lost them, that we only had each other. I believed him, and he lied.

“You don’t get to keep using that.”

His brows furrow. “Using what?”

“That we are family.”