Page 260 of Wicked Brutal

His eyes come to mine. “And that baby.”

My throat tightens. “Yeah.”

Dad gets up. “You’ve got about an hour before you need to get ready.” He starts toward the kitchen, then stops. “Ryan.” I look at him — tired, furious, scared. Exactly how I feel. “You see her at school, you make sure she’s okay.”

“I will.”

“And you don’t do anything stupid.”

I stare at him. “You tried to leave twenty minutes ago to murder her father.”

“That’s exactly why I’m qualified to recognize the warning signs.”

I almost smile. Almost. He disappears into the kitchen.

I pick up my phone. No new messages from Ally. Good. She needs to sleep. In a few hours she’s going to put on her Edgewood uniform and cover Roman’s fingerprints as well as she can. Tobias is going to wake up in the same house as the man who hit him. Jane is going to wake up bruised beside a husband she’s spent years learning how to survive. And I’m going to school. The thought makes me fucking sick.

But last night Roman did something he hasn’t done before. He gave us proof. Jane gave us a direction. Victor showed us Roman isn’t standing beside him — he’s standing underneath him. And whatever agreement sits between them runs back into a web we’ve been cutting pieces out of for months.

We still don’t know what Victor gets. We don’t know what Jane knows and hasn’t been brave enough to say. We don’t know what Roman keeps. We don’t know why Bella knew to look at the wives. And we still don’t know who keeps whispering warnings before we get where we’re going.

But for the first time, Roman is losing control faster than he can hide it. Victor already lost his in front of half of Edgewood. Good. Let them unravel. Let them get scared. Let them start making mistakes.

Because I’m done waiting for these men to decide what happens to Ally. They’ve had eighteen years. Now it’s our fucking turn.

Iskipped school yesterday. Technically, I was sick — just not in any way the school nurse could diagnose.

Mom called Edgewood before first period and told them I wasn’t coming. After Victor’s very public visit Thursday, the ring he’d put on my finger, and the spectacle that followed in the atrium, nobody questioned it. She kept Tobias home too. Dad wasn’t happy about either of those things. Mom didn’t care. For once, she didn’t make an excuse sound like a request. Tobias hadn’t slept well. I looked terrible. Neither of us was going to school. That was the end of it.

So the three of us stayed home. Tobias built a blanket fort across most of the family room and declared it the official recovery zone. Mom made grilled cheese for lunch. We watched movies from beneath a mountain of pillows, ate too many snacks, and let Tobias choose everything because neither of us had the heart to tell him no.

Our bruises darkened as the day went on — the marks around Tobias’s arm, the ones on mine, Mom’s shoulder and back and temple. The cut on my lip stung every time I smiled too wide. We didn’t talk about them much. We didn’t need to. For one whole day, Dad stayed away, and the three of us stayed together.

Ryan checked on me so often I finally threatened to start sending hourly proof-of-life photos. He immediately requested one. I sent him a picture of myself holding a spoon. He requested another with the toaster. I informed him he was abusing the service. He told me he’d stop when I stopped scaring ten years off his life. I sent the toaster.

This morning, Mom helped me with my makeup before I left. The bruise on my face isn’t as bad as it looks bare — concealer and foundation soften the worst of it until you’d have to be looking closely to notice. My lip is harder. The little split has already started healing, but makeup isn’t going to make a cut disappear.

Mom dabs something over the bruising beside it anyway. “There.”

I look at myself in the mirror. Not perfect, but better. My arms are another story, long sleeves take care of those.

Prom dress shopping is the perfect excuse to leave. Half the senior girls at Edgewood are doing the same thing this weekend. Prom is still weeks away, but Edgewood treats school dances like diplomatic events — dresses have to be ordered, altered, customized, accessorized, and probably entered into some secret database so nobody accidentally arrives in the same shade of blue. Nobody will think twice about me spending the day with the girls.

Mom adjusts my hair over my shoulder, then meets my eyes in the mirror. “Have fun.”

“I will.”

“Ally.” I look at her. Her smile is tired. Bruised. But real. “Actually have fun.”

Something squeezes inside my chest. “I’ll try.”

Penny and Xander live next door, so I walk.

Penny opens the door before I can knock. “You’re late.”

I check my phone. “By one minute.”

“Still late.”