Page 37 of A Moth to the Flame (Utopia #1)

Chapter

Twenty-Six

DUKE

It is damn strange to stick my hand out and introduce myself to a woman I’ve known my whole life. I could just kick my own ass for not insisting that we go to a random coffee shop outside of the Quiet Zone. At least then, we wouldn’t have to pretend to be each other.

My aunt rolls her eyes. “I know who you are, Cordelia McCoy.”

“You do?” I ask as the real Cordie shuffles on my feet nearby. “How?”

Aunt Bitty hasn’t ever lived in Utopia. She might’ve cared for us after Mama died, but she was too busy with her own grief to bother with the townsfolk.

“You—” She lifts her chin toward where Cordie stands in my body. “—talked about her all the time. Couldn’t mistake all this red hair for anyone else.”

Fuck. What did I say about her?

An awkward silence hangs in the air, heavier than the summer humidity.

I glance in Cordie’s direction, expecting embarrassment or anger. Instead, she’s studying my aunt in a way that makes me even more nervous.

Aunt Bitty pops her eyebrows. “Well? Come in, come in. Stop darkening my doorstep like a couple of ne’er-do-wells.”

I feel like a dangerous stranger all of a sudden as I follow my aunt inside. If she says one more thing that puts Cordie on alert, I’m afraid of what I might do to my own flesh and blood.

Aunt Bitty leads us into the sitting room that’s bursting at the seams with lace curtains, fake flowers, and knickknacks of every kind. It looks like an Appalachian old lady’s paradise.

“So,” Aunt Bitty says, taking a seat in one of the flowery, upholstered armchairs. “You want to use the computer for the day?”

Cordie holds up her laptop. “Just the internet, thanks. We don’t get a stable connection in the NRQZ.”

Aunt Bitty’s nose crinkles. “Since when do you have a laptop, Duke? That shop of yours suddenly turning a profit? I never imagined you’d spend extra income on computer stuff.

Figured you’d finally take that trip to Charleston that you were always going on about.

Never could understand why you were so hellbent on visiting such an unremarkable town.

If you wanted to take a vacation to a big city, at least pick an actual city. ”

I wince.

Knowing what I know now, if that’s where Cordie was, then that’s where I needed to be, too. Fuck if I can remember talking about it to anyone, though.

Cordie looks like she’s biting my tongue. Not sure if my cheeks are bright red from anger or embarrassment.

“Well?” Aunt Bitty prompts, when Cordie and I are quiet for too long.

Cordie clears my throat. “I’m pretty good at computers now.”

That’s all she says. We decided that it was smarter to keep our lies simple. No explanations, no excuses.

Aunt Bitty doesn’t look like she buys it, but she turns her attention to me because I’m more interesting anyway. Fresh meat.

“I haven’t had much female company since my sister passed.” She sniffs, then waves her own nephew—the real Cordie—away. “You’ll do.”

Since I already coached Cordie on everything she needs to know, she doesn’t stick around.

I take a seat on the sofa, anxious as hell. The sooner Cordie does what she needs to, the better, so that we can get out of here.

Aunt Bitty smiles like she’s getting ready to eat me alive. “Those Castellaw boys are nothing but trouble, for themselves and for you, young lady. You’d do best to steer clear.”

I blink at her bluntness, though it doesn’t surprise me. Aunt Bitty’s always been a no-nonsense kind of woman. Spare the rod, spoil the child, and all that.

She leans forward and glances down the hallway where Cordie went minutes ago.

After she’s sure my body isn’t lurking in the hallway to eavesdrop, she leans forward over the coffee table where a tea set waits.

“That Castellaw man ruined my sister. If not for his handsome lies, she might still be alive.”

I have to count to ten in my head to keep my temper in check. How dare she speak of Daddy that way? As much as I’m itching to defend him, anything I say needs to sound like Cordie, not me.

I wasn’t kidding when I told Cordie that Daddy and Aunt Bitty have never been the same since Mama passed.

There was a heaping helping of grief with a side of resentment in my house for as long as she stayed with us.

Still, I’ve never heard her state so plainly that she blamed Daddy for Mama’s death.

I swipe a cookie from the plate on the table and chew slowly, to buy myself time to think of something to say that won’t involve screaming.

Aunt Bitty doesn’t want to wait for that. “Mark my words, girl. Those boys are unnatural. Demons in men’s skin.”

She’s really going for the jugular today, without knowing that this isn’t just idle gossip to me. “Why did you take care of them after their mama died if you don’t like them?” I fight to keep Cordie’s voice even.

Aunt Bitty straightens then pours us both a cup of tea. “Tempest loved her sons something fierce. It was the only fitting way to honor her memory.”

My heart cracks from hearing Mama’s name. Almost no one says it anymore. Utopia moved on without her, and Daddy… Well. I don’t think Daddy can bear to say her name any more now than he could back then. He never got over her loss. He’s still a shell of the man I remember from when I was a boy.

“Let me ask you something, Cordelia.”

I brace for questions that are none of her business.

Aunt Bitty fixes me with a look that’s either disgust or pity. “Why are you with Duke?”

“I’m not with Duke. We’re…friendly,” I choke out.

She frowns. “You shouldn’t be. Friends with him, I mean.”

I rub my chest. “Why not? He’s okay.”

I’ve never been okay, no matter how much I pretend otherwise.

Beyond my obsession with Cordie, I’ve scraped by on a steady diet of other shortcomings.

I don’t have much to show for thirty years of life.

A tiny, two-bedroom house. A struggling business that barely makes me enough income to get by. A ghost of a father, and a group of brothers who can’t mind their own damn business most days. Luke’s kids are all right, but they’re little hellions ever since their mama walked out.

Even if Cordie wanted to be my mate, nothing has changed. I have less to offer her than anyone.

Hell, I can’t even read.

“Cordelia,” my aunt snaps. “Are you listening to me?”

I straighten my spine. I was not listening. I was wallowing. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep much last night on account of the storms.”

Aunt Bitty stares at me like I’m off my rocker. “What storms?”

Huh. Must have missed here. Either that or the old bat slept right through them. “Never mind. It was a rough night, and I’m not feeling like myself.”

I’m not feeling like myself because my body is in the other room, hopefully working like lightning to get us set up on renting out my damn house.

Aunt Bitty thins her lips. “Well, you listen and listen good now. Duke is not okay. None of those boys are okay.”

Damn, lady. Cool it. You hate us. I get it .

For me, her disrespect is justified. For my brothers? Absolutely fucking not.

“Losing their mama when they were young was hard on them. They’ve turned out to be decent enough men.”

“They’re not decent,” Aunt Bitty insists. “They shouldn’t even exist!”

I squint an eye at her. She’s always been a believer in things like alien abductions and Mothman, but what the hell?

Cash is the town sheriff. Luke’s the fire chief and a hell of a single dad to two boys.

Jude got an honorable discharge from the military after an injury.

Finn is an EMT because he couldn’t afford medical school.

My brothers are all successful, independent men. They’re existing just fine.

Aunt Bitty glances toward the empty hallway again then whispers, “When Tempest and Ian got married, they found out they couldn’t have kids.”

What the hell?

Aunt Bitty shakes her head and makes a wild gesture with her hands. “They spent money they didn’t have and traveled to hospitals in different cities for all kinds of tests. The doctors said that Ian was sterile.”

Sterile.

I blink at her until it sinks in.

Daddy can’t have kids.

“I thought maybe she used a sperm donor clinic,” Aunt Bitty says with a sour expression. “She promised me that she didn’t.”

“How did she have five babies if…”

I can’t bring myself to say it. My aunt has slid all the way off her rocker in her old age. There’s no way Daddy isn’t our father.

“I think she made a deal with the Devil,” Aunt Bitty says.

She’s serious.

Every damn thought empties out of my head like she’s punched it full of holes.

Except one.

The cat called me an odd creature .

“Those boys might have the Castellaw name, but I have no idea where they came from,” she goes on, stirring her tea like the world isn’t caving in.

“Tempest swore up and down to me that they’re not adopted.

It’s criminally expensive, adoption is. She and Ian couldn’t afford to make even one test-tube baby, let alone five.

My poor sister cried and cried to me when she found out how much that science-y shenanigans costs. ”

Cordie’s heart stutters. Her lungs stop working.

My aunt goes on, not realizing who in the hell she’s talking to, “I drove up to help around the house when she was pregnant with the youngest one, Finn. Tried to ask Ian if he’d taken some newfangled medicine to increase his sperm counts, but Tempest shut me up right quick.

She dragged me out of her house and told me I wasn’t welcome there anymore.

I loved my sister. Still do. I can even understand her desperation to give her husband the kind of family he always wanted.

But if her behavior that day wasn’t a dead giveaway that she was up to no good, then I don’t know what is.

If it wasn’t modern medicine, or adoption, or hell, an experiment run by that government spy base up there, then how do those boys exist, hmm? You tell me.”

I can’t tell her shit. I can barely breathe.

“So.” She slurps her tea. “Do yourself a favor, Cordelia McCoy. Run far, far away. Something isn’t right in that town, and something isn’t right about that family.

God have mercy on her soul, but my sister took her secrets to the grave.

There’s no telling how those five boys came to be, but they reek of the Devil. ”

My heart— my heart—cracks in Cordie’s chest.

What does Daddy know? He can’t be completely in the dark, not if the doctors told him that he couldn’t have kids. One baby might be a miracle, but five?

We look like regular men. Not even Miss Nell, the blind seer, has ever accused us of being anything out of the ordinary. If there are real witches in Utopia, corrupt or not, wouldn’t one of them have noticed something off about us in the past few decades?

I swipe a shaky hand over Cordie’s mouth, well beyond the point of maintaining any sort of composure.

This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.

Being stuck in my mate’s beautiful body just became the least of my problems.