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Tillie slowly removes the gun from Nate’s chin. “Sorry. It’s the pregnancy hormones.”
“Yeah, because that’s it…” Brantley chuckles. She brings out a side of Brantley I haven’t seen. The energy between them is strange. Seeing Brantley with anyone else is weird, though.
“We’re here because the school is reopening in one week for the remainder of the year and indefinitely. That means that everyone from the school in the Hamptons will be coming back here. To old soil.” Bishop pauses. No more jokes. “The Hamptons site will be handed back to Hector and the older Kings. The students and staff are aware and are prepared for the shift. The ones who aren’t, are us.” Bishop runs his finger over the top of his lip. His eyes connect to Tillie. “You wanna show Saint around so we can talk?”
Tillie stands, strolling toward me while flipping her long pink hair over her shoulder. “Come on. Maybe one of the old fucks who used to teach here has an alcohol stash. God knows they would have needed it…”
I go to push off Brantley and his fingers slowly—so, so slowly—disconnect from around my hips. I turn to face him while I’m standing, his hand covering the bottom half of his face, his eyes on mine.
“What?” he asks, but doesn’t skip a beat when his eyes trail up and down my body. He pauses on my legs, comes back up and stalls on my chest, before finally meeting my eyes again.
“Nothing…” I murmur, grabbing Tillie’s hand and sidestepping out of his outstretched legs. The shift between us is roguish, but it has my palms sweating and my heart rate speeding up anytime he’s near. Deep in the back of my mind, I know he has been more obvious with his wants lately. The eye contact, the touches, the fallen words that stain my mind longer than it took for him to say them. Instead of this all being scary, I find it provocative and tempting. I want to push him, but what a stupid thing that would be for me to do. Flirting with Brantley would be like performing a séance. You don’t know what you’re going to conjure, but you’re screwed once you unleash it.
Once we’re far enough away from the boys that they can’t hear, and almost back at the front office, Tillie laughs. “Has it always been like that between you two? Because I’m telling you right now, that is not something we have ever seen from Brantley.”
“You mean the hands-on?” I ask, my interest in her question genuine.
She grasps the rail of the stairs, her dark red nails almost matching the cherry gloss antique wood. “I mean he doesn’t—isn’t like that.”
I shrug my shoulders and follow her up the stairs. “He’s always just been Brantley with me, so I don’t know any better, but no. He hasn’t always been so—touchy.”
Tillie snorts, rubbing her belly. “Trust me. It’s much better the way he is with you.”
I already know Brantley holds dark secrets. Some I know, most I don’t. I thought over time, he would eventually share them with me, but here’s the thing with Brantley. He will never share the details of his hell, not because he doesn’t want to relive it, because he’s more than capable of doing so, but because he simply doesn’t want to invite anyone in…
Past
There were footsteps down the hall. The light was out in my bedroom, but there was enough of it from the hallway that slid beneath the crack of my door. Back and forth the footsteps passed. Over and over again.
I was sixteen now. Brantley never showed up at home anymore since Lucan died, and on that note, he never explained why he died or how. Or why when they put his body in the Vitiosis tomb, Brantley didn’t have a funeral for him. An anything for him. The tension between the two men had always existed like ardent flames, but that, to me, was still weird.
When the footsteps stopped, I assumed he was back in his bedroom, so I threw the covers off myself as my feet hit the plush carpet. I had on warm fuzzy sleepwear, a pink cashmere crop hoodie and undersized shorts. Slipping my feet into my slippers, I made my way to my bedroom door, squeezing the handle and cranking it open.
I paused when I saw Brantley sitting directly opposite my room with his knees drawn up to his chest and one arm slinking on it. I should’ve shut the door as soon as I saw him. He was okay. Alive. That’s all I really needed to know.
But then I started to notice things. Like how he was wearing no shirt and his jeans were unbuttoned. How his belt was unfastened, and his boots barely tied to his feet. That wasn’t the obvious thing I noticed, though. It was the smeared blood all over his body. A body that he worked on seven days a week. Where his six-pack abs dipped, curved, and popped, there were droplets of blood and dark stains, all the way up to his neck. My eyes collided with his, and before I could stop myself, I was on my knees in front of him, my hand on his cheek where blood streaked down to his collarbone.