Page 114 of Vile Bastards
The icy breeze swirls the gauzy curtains, causing them to dance like undead ballerinas, crooked and strange.
“I wanted her, and you took her from me.” I step back and smile. The look must truly be grotesque because Jonas releases the safety on his gun, hefting it in two hands. “And Ash? He wanted her, too. He was in love with Lucy, and he tried to take her from me.” I grit my teeth, still thinking about Scarlett, focusing everything on Scarlett. “So I killed him.”
There it is. A lie. But not entirely untrue. By pursuing my one, true thing, the one and only person in the world that cared about Ash, I led Aspen to Scarlett. I walked him right into the arms of a gloriously sensual death of full curves and ripe lips, of big eyes with long lashes, of warm hands, of a sympathetic smile, of a beating heart.
Doki-doki. Doki-doki. Doki-doki.
Mine. Scarlett is mine.
“You killed your brother?” Jonas asks, but he doesn’t sound upset. Annoyed, more than anything else. “Over some washed-up Prescott whore?” I ignore the derisive cutting of those words, even if my fingers are still twitching with violence.
Aspen—the frog—croaks, and Jonas glances over, crinkling up his face in confusion.
Does he know that Ash liked frogs? Did he ever care?
“Why would you do that?” he asks finally, glancing back at me. “I’ve warned you against that bullshit before. He was useful, Aspen. Now he’s a liability that we’re still cleaning up.”
My throat tightens with anger.
“Lucy died, and for what? I know all about your political scheming, your plots, your machinations, but for what? For WHAT?!” I pace back and forth, yanking at my hair, allowing all of my crazy to bleed through. I scratch at my forearms until they ache. The pain keeps me alive, like lightning to the brain.
“You know what,” Jonas sneers, practically spitting at me. He engages the safety on the weapon and turns away, offering up a brief nod to his man near the open window. We’re done here. That’s what his look says. “Chet will be pleased you found the body at least. See? I do know what I’m doing sometimes. Sending you to that mudhole of a track was a smart decision.”
He goes to walk away, and I follow him, because the more I keep digging, the more secrets I uncover. I suppose one could call this a selfless act, a way to drag suspicion away from Scarlett—and it is—because it draws attention to me instead. It puts all the blame on Lucy.
But it’s more than that.
It’s an act of rebellion, a smirk in the dark. Jonas won’t soon forget waking up to a rotten corpse, now will he?
“Because she was Chet’s daughter, she had to die?” I question, and Jonas just laughs, like I’m stupid. In the past, it was common for him to act that way toward Ash, not Aspen, but it happened on occasion. He glances back at me, like I truly am a moron.
“Because a man doesn’t make a presidential bid with incest on his record.” Jonas continues down the stairs, and I collapse to the floor, back to the wall, panting hard.
If I can figure out that Chet Archer’s son—the inglorious Chet Jr. Cody Archer—got his own sister pregnant (albeit without knowing who she was), how long until somebody else does? How do I make sure that they do without putting Scarlett in even more danger?
Because a wild animal is dangerous. A wild animal backed into a corner is doubly so.
I put my head in my hands, close my eyes, and pray for a meteor to hit the earth.
At least if Scarlett and I are dead, we can be together. As it seems now, the chasm that’s growing between us grows wider by the day, no matter how hard I try to stop it, no matter how much I wish I could take her and run away.
No matter how much I love her, I’m the poison in her veins.
Alexei
Revulsion is the word of the day.
Pure, unadulterated repugnance, abomination of the highest order. I twitch a little, standing there on that filthy sidewalk with its myriad gum stains and shoe scuffs and graffiti. Someone has painted over the school sign—Home of the Loggers—and modified it so that it reads Home of the FLoggers with a spurting penis crudely etched beside it.
The walls of this abominable school have cave-like chalk drawings, yet more spray paint, and stickers. There are stickers everywhere. Stickers on the handrails, on the doors, on the windows.
“If you’d rather sit in Emma Jean’s apartment like a frightened, little mouse,” Bohnes breathes, glancing over at me. “That can be arranged.”
I ignore him.
It makes sense for me to enroll in this high school; it’s the perfect cover. Nobody in the mayor’s camp would ever think to look for me in a garbage dump like this. The family, on the other hand, certainly will.
