Page 13 of Wicked Brutal

“No. Terrible plan.” A laugh escaped her through the tears, and I touched her face. “You don’t get to decide I hate you.”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“We figure it out.”

“You can’t fix this.”

“I didn’t say I could.” That surprised her, and I wiped beneath her eye with my thumb. “I don’t know what your father’s doing. I don’t know what the fuck their arrangement actually buys either of them, and I don’t know how to get Tobias away from Roman.” Her breathing shook. “But I know you don’t do this alone anymore.”

“Ryan.”

“I love you too.” She started crying harder. “Jesus. That was supposed to help.”

She laughed, and then she grabbed my blazer and kissed me.

We stayed secret. At school she was O’Toole and I was Harrington. Sometimes I ignored her. Sometimes I was worse. We made it believable because Edgewood already expected me to be an asshole. Privately, I got her back.

And we held out. That was the part nobody watching would ever have believed about the two of us — that behind the locked doors and the stolen hours, we didn’t cross the one line that mattered. Because now I knew what the line meant. Now I knew that her father had sold that line to a man twice her age, and that the day it stopped being true could be the day it got her hurt. So we were careful in a way that had nothing to do with wanting each other less. We wanted each other so much it was its own kind of danger. We just also knew exactly what it would cost, and for a long time that knowledge held us in check.

We tried to hold out completely, at first. That lasted until Halloween. Then New Year’s changed everything.

Kaiden’s parents threw their annual party, and everybody came — enough people to disappear inside. Ally went upstairs before me. I waited, then followed, and she was sitting on the edge of the guest bed when I walked in.

“You took forever,” she said.

“It was four minutes.”

“Six.”

“You counted?”

“Obviously.”

I locked the door, and she smiled. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I crossed the room, and she wrapped her arms around my neck when I kissed her, and downstairs somebody started screaming about champagne, and neither of us cared.

We stayed upstairs longer than we should have. Then we went back down separately.

Neither of us understood yet that we’d just lit the fuse. That the promise she’d broken to take her own life back wasn’t the kind of promise you could break quietly. That somewhere in the weeks after, the whole thing had already started ticking.

By Valentine’s Day, Ally had been acting strange for almost two weeks.

She was tired. Quieter. Sometimes pale. Twice I’d watched her push food around a plate without eating. I asked. She said she was fine. I didn’t believe her, and I also didn’t go digging — that was the part people misunderstood about knowing how to find anything. You had to decide when you weren’t entitled to the answer. So I waited.

Valentine’s Day fell on a Friday. I got her to the guest house after nine. My parents were gone, and Roman thought Ally was with Bella, and for once we had hours instead of stolen minutes.

I’d been planning it for two weeks. I didn’t do flowers — flowers were what you bought a girl when you didn’t know what else she liked, and I knew Ally. I’d found a first-edition copy of the memoir she’d read aloud to me at the lake over the summer, the one about the woman who’d left everything she’d known and built something for herself somewhere else, and I’d wrapped it in brown paper, no bow, because she hated bows. I’d hung café lights across the guest house because she’d pointed at a picture of them once in July and said they made everything look warm. It took me an hour and I nearly fell off the ladder twice.

She walked through the door and stopped. Her eyes moved over the lights, the blankets, the food, the wrapped book. Then me. “Ryan.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets. “What?”

“What did you do?”

“It’s Valentine’s Day.”

“I know what day it is.”