“Your cousin?” I spluttered.
“Yeah, my cousin.” His voice was heavy, caustic.
I held his dark emerald gaze, my heart shrinking. “Oh.”
His tongue swiped at his lip.
“Tell me,” I breathed.
“After I killed her dad, Inès and I took off, but we had nowhere to turn but the drug dealers I’d been working for. I had no choice. We would’ve gone into foster care or a home, detention center, something. Us getting separated—there was no way that was going to happen. The dealers helped us lay low, even planted evidence to get the heat off of us in the murder investigation.
“We camped out in people’s basements, in warehouses, and trailers for weeks on end. We finally got our own place, this tiny shit-box. We were working, bringing money in.” He stared into the distance, his jaw set. “I thought we were so lucky.”
It slammed into me like a brutal January wind on the plains. “You were in love with her,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You—”
His eyes flared. “She was my first cousin and my best friend, but being together was the only thing that made sense to us and the only thing that kept us whole—at least for a while. There was no wrong or right. We never discussed it. It was the way it was. It was a given.” He let out a deep exhale. “It was fucked up, and we both knew it in the back of our minds, but there was no stopping it.”
“You loved her.”
“I loved her.” He pressed his lips together.
A simple statement of powerful fact, undeniable.
“But she was sick,” he said, his voice dropping.
“Sick?”
“Bipolar. She used to have these dramatic, unpredictable mood swings. Ridiculously happy and excited about life one day and then sad and anxious the next. She’d be making grand plans for us at all hours—not eating, not sleeping. Then, the next day or the day after, it would crush her. She suddenly couldn’t make a decision about anything, not even something simple like if she should close her closet door or leave it slightly open. One day, smiling, and later on, a crying jag, distant, irritated with the world, irritated with me. She wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t take her meds most days. I got her what I could, tried to keep her on some sort of schedule, but that never worked, and that wasn’t good. Then, she started using.”
His shoulders scrunched up, and in that fleeting movement, the strain of the burden he’d been carrying pressed in on me.
“What happened to her?”
“Men were always noticing her, thinking she was older than she actually was. She was pretty and real tall. She used to do some modeling.”
My stomach rolled at the controlled tone of his voice.
“Depending on her mood,” he continued, “she’d either hate their attention or want more of it. Same went for me. She’d either push me away or couldn’t get enough of me. It made me insane. My not being around too much because of work only made things worse.
“She started doing crazy shit. Once, I caught her fucking a guy from our neighborhood at our apartment. We got into a fight, and she left with him. Then, she came crawling back a couple of days later, begging for my forgiveness. I was furious but more relieved that she was okay. It got to the point where I just didn’t care about much else, other than if she was okay.
“A few months later, it happened again, but this time, she was fucking the dealers I worked for. They ran a gang, and I owed them for everything, for covering my killing my uncle, for making me the man I’d become. She packed up her stuff and took off with them. She was done with me. I got into a fight with them over her in the street.” He rubbed over his middle, my eyes following the sudden movement. “She knifed me, and they took off. I ended up getting arrested on a trumped up assault charge, and I got thrown into juvie.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen?” My stomach churned. “Did you ever see her again?”
“Yeah. Dig and I met in juvie. We broke out together and found her. But she didn’t want to be found by me.” He raked a hand through his hair, bunching it in his grip. “We had it out, but she wouldn’t leave with me. She wanted to stay.
“Me and Dig got out of Denver that night. That was when we got these tats.” His fingers grazed over his twisted fanged snake. “I didn’t care where we went, as long as we went somewhere. Eventually, we ended up here.
“Are you still in love with her?” I whispered. “That’s why you—”
“I hate her.” His voice jolted through me like an electrical current, his eyes stony. “I hate her for giving up, for giving in. I kept fighting for both of us in any way I could. I killed for us, stole, destroyed people, but none of it mattered in the end. She gave it all away.”
“She was sick. Maybe she couldn’t—”