Page 112

Stiffening, I whisper, “Don’t let her see me like this.”

“Cover him,” Wick says before sauntering off. It gnaws at the pit of my churning stomach to watch him morph into a different person. It flips like a switch, this easy change from best friend and brother to conniving seducer. Pace shifts, blocking me from view. We stare at one another as we listen to Wicker call out, “Change your mind, Red?” There’s a rustle of fabric, if I had to guess, he’s cupping his junk. “I knew you’d come looking for me. I’m ready when you are.”

The slam of the door is her only response.

Pace’s eyebrows raise when Wick strides back to us, looping his arm under my armpit. “Guess the threat of having your cock near her one more time was enough to scare her off.”

If Wicker’s ego were a physical being, then Verity calling his prowess into question would probably make it look worse than me. Wicker’s jaw twitches. “Please, by the end of her exile, she’ll be begging me for it.”

Panting, I clutch onto him. “She’ll be beggingmefor it,” I say, fully aware of the irony. I take a deep breath and grab Pace by the shoulder, leveraging myself back up. “I’m the only one giving her what she needs.”

The pain is blinding by the time we make the final stretch to our room. Danner beat us up here, a tray of medical supplies sitting on the table next to the bed along with a clean sheet over the mattress.

I stop at the edge of the bed, a tremor running through my fingers as I try to unbutton my shirt.

“Here,” Wicker says, pushing my hands aside and taking over. His longer fingers quickly run down the buttons. His movements are gentle, a complete contrast to the hulking menace that terrorizes other players on the ice. He pushes the shirt off my shoulders and carefully peels the fabric from the drying wounds. This is the side of Wicker no one else sees but us; gentle and patient.

“Okay?” he asks, looking at me from under his blonde swoop of hair.

I grunt and drop to my knees, mattress sinking under my weight. Pace helps ease me forward, helping me lay flat on my stomach. I exhale fully for the first time since stepping into Father’s office.

“How bad does it look?” I ask. I could look in the mirror across from the bed, but I don’t need to. I can judge the severity of wounds from my brother’s expressions. Wicker’s turning green, like he’s fighting the urge to vomit. Pace has gone stone still. He’s left us for that place inside, the one of quiet rage.

“Not as bad as… last time,” he finally says, flicking a glance at Pace. The words hang between us like a ghost.

Spring break.

Nothing has ever been as bad as the night Pace got arrested. Father handed out thirty lashings. I passed out in the middle, and when I woke up, an ashen Wicker was standing over me, waving smelling salts under my nose. Beneath the scent of it was the sourness of vomit wafting from the vase in the corner where he had lost his lunch. Father told him to clean it up and put me back on my knees so he could finish the job.

Pace lowers his gaze to the tray, his dark eyes shrouded. “Is it stinging yet?” The words lack inflection.

He might as well be screaming.

Clenching my teeth, I admit, “Yes.”

Before the back garden became overgrown with dead, wilted things, it used to play host to all sorts of curious plants. One of them was a type of stinging nettle–urtica. I did a paper on it in high school. Buried beneath paragraphs outlining its medical uses was a passage on urtication, sometimes used as a form of punishment, and how the fibers could be extracted, weaved with something like leather.

I got top marks.

Other than the quiet sounds of the guys opening the medical supplies, the room is silent. I don’t need to look to see what’s going on. We all have our roles, and we fall back into them despite the time we’ve been apart.

Except when Wicker moves for the antiseptic, Pace jolts forward, saying, “No.” A stretch of stillness lingers, and then his determined, “I’ve got him.”

I don’t see whatever look is passed between them, but I can practically feel Wicker’s frown transforming to comprehension as Pace takes the bottle. He didn’t get to do this for me last time. Probably spent all those months in jail feeling responsible, imagining Wicker taking on the burden of it himself.

Gently, Pace dabs the wet cotton to my open wounds, freezing every time I flinch. Wicker sits near my head, whispering, “It won’t take long. It’s not that bad.” And then again, as if he’s trying really hard to convince both of us, “It’s not–it’s not so bad.” He assists Pace by handing him the antihistamine first, then the antibiotic ointment, and finally the bandages.

I come in and out of it, wanting nothing more than to sleep, but the antiseptic burns worse than the urtica, sending my body into tremors. Pace leans forward, touching my forehead with the back of his fingers. “Pain check?”

I give a heavy blink, thinking. “Maybe a five.”

It’s an eight, but I won’t show it. They’re already carrying enough guilt. There’s no need to pile on. The urge to protect them runs deeper than the scars on my body. Someone had to stand between them and Father’s ire.

Although I’m older, Wicker was Father’s first adopted son. It’s hard to look at him and think that in another life, he’d be a Baron. His grandfather was Clive Kayes, King of the Barons, and his father was… well, certifiably toast. Guy never even got a chance at the crown, but was still important enough to be axed so someone else could.

My own father was a past failed Prince. As far as I know, his Princess was unsuccessful, and he was dismissed after three months. Later, he married my mother and had me. I don’t remember much about being adopted myself, just that the night of my parents’ deaths, in the midst of red and blue flashing lights and puddles of thickening blood, Father came and took me away in his big, fancy car. I was only two. Wicker was still just a baby himself when I arrived, not even six months old.

Looking at him now, I can’t remember exactly when I started feeling so protective of him. Maybe all the way back to those early days when it was just the two of us, always seeking the other out at night, scared and needy as we hid beneath my bed, Wicker falling asleep curled around me like a vine. Or maybe it was later, the first time he was taken out of boarding school, returning the next day with a boastful story about the tall woman with razor-sharp nails who Father had ordered him to spend the evening with. More likely, it was all the time in-between, slowly figuring out that home wasn’t this place made of sticks and stones, but insteadhim. The blue-eyed boy with a smile like a knife’s edge.