He cocks his head, and though he doesn’t smile, his eyes light up like it’s Christmas. He’s a Jurassic Park raptor, and I’m tied to a goddamn chair. “Now, now. I’m not sure we’re close enough for that kind of talk.”
“But you want us to be closer.” There’s a half-dry slick of blood on his arm. I have to ignore it before my brain shuts down.
My Leo is in there.
“That’s why I’m here,” I go on, “so you can make up for all the years you’ve been gone. Am I right?”
He presses his lips together, stepping over Harvey on his way back the table. There, he swipes a bottle of what looks like beer and cracks off the lid. “Now that I think about it, I’m not entirely sure.”
“You killed those women because of me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Trust me, I’m not flattered.” I manage a snort. “I’m a lot of things right now, but…definitely not that.”
He takes a long, loud swallow of beer. “You always were a lot of things, Aeron.”
“Do you have a name?” If I can just keep the bastard talking, it stops him from doing anything worse. “Aside from Dad, that is.”
“I do.”
“But you won’t tell me.”
“You’ve spent thirty-two years not knowing.” He shrugs. “What difference does it make now?”
I pause. Even now, in all of this, I can’t resist a little manipulation for dramatic effect. “I want to know where I come from.”
“Oh, I see.” He hops up on to the table, sending empty bottles flying across the floor in clinking clusters. The wooden legs creak and groan. “You want to know if you’re like this because of me.”
“Maybe.”
“Because it must be genetic, right? Being some deviant little prick is obviously in your DNA.”
“I don’t care about that part. I can’t change it.” No matter what Ghost Tuija wants, or begs of me. “I just want to understand what’s happened. Why I’m here.”
A slow laugh gurgles up from his throat. He shakes with it, clutching at himself until the guffaws reach new octaves.
I grit my teeth. “Spit it out.”
“It’s just so funny, when you think about it.” He fixes his odd, wild gaze on me. “There’s not an inch of Lore in you, Aeron. You’re all Hart.”
“Hilarious,” I mutter.
“Well, now you sound like your mother.”
“Great.”
“Indeed.” He takes another swig of beer. “Women, eh? You can kill for them and they still don’t fucking appreciate you. Of course…you got around that.”
The old wounds in my belly smart at that one. The fine, knitted fibers of my scars shiver, writhing against each other like a pit of tiny snakes.
He leans forward on his elbows to regard me. “I always wondered why you did it. I’d sit there with all the time in the world on my hands—that’s why they call it Doing Time, I guess—and I’d wonder, is it because he thinks she killed his daddy?”
“She killed both fathers,” I say coldly. “She admitted it.”
“Did she really?”
“She…yes.” In a fashion. It was the only conclusion, grasshoppers. She tied the lies together so well—they weren’t pretty, but they fitted, like all the world’s most dangerous things, and if I’d brooded over them any longer then I wouldn’t be where I am today.
I…yeah. Shut up already.
He titters to himself. “Oh, the irony.”
I say nothing. Just stare at him, my upper lip curled so hard that my nose pulses with pain.
“I think she always hoped you’d grow up to be some kind of superhero who’d save her from me.” He shakes his head with a pitying sigh. “In a way, she got her wish, right?”
“God, I bet you’ve been salivating over this shit.”
I didn’t kill her for nothing. Even if she didn’t end my father—my real father, the one who taught me piano skits and made me laugh and smelled like cheap cigars—she buried him. And she pinned Ash’s parentage on some stranger I’ll probably never know the name of, flinging his life away just to throw me off the scent.
“Ooh,” Blood Honey grunts, “the cogs are turning! You’d have throttled that bitch anyway, right? She was hardly mother of the year.”