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“MG.” His tone is soft.
“Go away, Jac.”
He swallows again and he says, “I came to talk, not about that, but I fucking came to talk.”
“I’ll say it again. What about?”
“The past. I want to tell you a story, and…if you want to shoot me after, then go ahead.”
She considers him, then she finally nods and sits, still pointing the gun. “Talk.”
It takes him a while. He has more of my whiskey.
Finally, he sighs. “I need you to stop sleeping with Hendrick.”
“This isn’t talking, this sounds like you dictating my life—”
“You’ll keep doing it, probably, but I fucking hate him. Everyone knows that. No one other than Hendrick and I know why.”
“Jac,” she says. It’s a warning.
“I loved one thing in this world. My little sister, Lili.”
Lili. My stomach heaves like I’m going to throw up.
“She was beautiful, sweet, and I swore I’d protect her.”
He falls silent, and I close my eyes. I don’t want to hear this. Not any of it, but I don’t think even me going out there would shut him up.
“They said my mom died in childbirth, but it isn’t true. He killed her—my father, not Hendrick—so there was this perfect little baby, my sister, and she only had me.” He stares at the bottle. “Think what you want of me, but I loved her, and I protected Lili.”
Magdalena doesn’t speak.
“I’ve got this memory, fuck, I must have been four at the time,” he says softly, “Lili almost one, and it’s so vague but so real I could touch it. I took her, and we hid from my father until they found us. Lili and me against the world.”
Him and Lili.
This undoes me, kills the anger in a way I can’t explain. I can’t move because I remember this.
There was the time, when I was six until around eleven or twelve, that Jac followed me around and Lili followed him. Our fathers weren’t enemies, but they weren’t friends. Business worked better if they threw in. And as members of the Quinate, they grew more powerful. Untouchable.
And Jac had his shadow, one he protected. Right until he didn’t.
“When she was fifteen, I think Agnossio raped her.”
I can’t fucking breathe.
He takes another swallow of my booze. “She’d just had her birthday, and she was friends with the chick Hendrick’s fuck of a father, banged…well, friends with the woman’s daughter. The woman was staff, so you know, easy pickings. Lili claimed she fell but when I asked the maid about those clothes, they were gone. And Lili never wore them again.
“Then she was twenty-one, a few months or so after her birthday, she called me in hysterics. I couldn’t make it out, just something about her friend.AndHendrick. So I hightailed it to castle fucking Agnossio, pulled a gun to get in, and when I found the right bedroom, Agnossio Senior was holding Lili down. Slamming into her. Hitting her. She was struggling, trying to get him off her. And he had his hands around her throat. It happened fast.”
I know the story. Not this part. Just the aftermath. And my eyes are burning. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I bite hard on my lip to stop sound escaping and wait.
Jac isn’t finished.
I close my eyes.
“When he finished, I realized she had stopped struggling. He killed her. Crushed her windpipe, broke her neck. He killed my Lili.”
