Page 10 of Bene

“Sometimes, I wonder,” she whispered.

“Don’t.”

He loved this woman. Certainly not in the same way his brother did, but he loved her nonetheless. He loved August simply because Beni fell in love with her, and she was the perfect fit for him, no question about it. His guilt was a killer, if only because he had said and done things early on in August and Beni’s relationship that he thought left his brother with bad feelings, and despite it seeming good between them now … Bene couldn’t say that it was. Not that his brother ever gave him any indication otherwise, and he made every effort he could to fix what he’d done wrong.

Still, the guilt raged on.

Killing him slowly.

It was the icing on his fucked up cake.

No, August hadn’t taken his brother away. Things would just be different now. Bene had to figure it out, and he had to do that by himself.

Soon, the song changed and someone else interrupted Bene’s dance with August to take over. A friend of her father, apparently. He stepped back, and let the man take over, but only after he gave August a kiss to her cheek, and one more congratulations. She deserved it, after all, the same way his brother did.

Plus, Bene was back in that space again.

The dark one.

His chest hurt.

It wouldn’t stop.

Bad things always seemed to happen whenever he got in this place—bad in his heart, and bleak in his mind. He acted out, not that it made any sense, or like he intended to do it at all. He didn’t want to do that here, not at his brother’s wedding reception.

That wasn’t fair.

Opposite to him in the room, he watched Beni rub his chest again.

Bene rubbed his, too.

Fuck that pain.

It told the truth when he didn’t.

Not tonight, though.

No one would notice him gone.

Surely.

The party was almost over. Beni said it himself. With over three-hundred guests, no one would even notice he wasn’t there to send his brother off on his week-long honeymoon in Italy.

Bene headed out of the hall before someone might notice he intended to leave, the background noise and pain in his chest fading with every step he took. It wasn’t long before he was in his car, driving down the highway, and heading for the heart of the city.

His phone didn’t ring.

No one called him back to the party.

A distraction, his mind repeated.

That’s what he needed right now.

A fucking distraction.

Bene planned on finding it.

The dates on the headstone mocked Vanna the longer she stared at the engraved numbers. Something about the reminder that her sixteenth birthday had been spent standing right here in this very spot, dry-eyed because she cried so much at that point, her body just stopped producing tears.