"I'm sorry for him, too." I kiss her palms, one, then the other. "But he's a black hole right now. He sucks everything in and destroys it. He's dangerous. To himself. To the people around him."
"To you?" Her voice is just-above-a-whisper hushed.
I stare at the pooka. "I got this tattoo because Remington went on a bender. He did a shit-ton of stupid crap in a few hours, and the tattoo kept getting brought up in descriptions."
I look up at her face, but she hasn't recognized the ugly constellation for of all the dull stars I've thrown into her sky.
"You got a matching tattoo?" Her fingers drum on her thigh. "Why?"
"The last cops who caught up with my brother after his night of fucking mayhem? One wasn't in my father's pocket. Remington went too far. An officer my dad has some pull with promised the other guy, the one with a hard-on for Remy, that someone would take the heat. He basically talked his partner out of dragging Remy to jail that night. He let me come get him and take him home. But the partner put a statement in, and the tattoo was in it. So I needed one that was the same when I showed up in court."
The missile of my insane confession just hissed from the sky to the ground and is about to detonate.
"You were with him that night? You did some stupid stuff, too?"
The desperate sadness in her eyes tells me she knows my answer before I have to say it.
The boom of this crash-and-burn scenario muffles my hearing.
"No."
I can see the moment it explodes in full force for Evan.
Her head tilts to the side and she squints at me, like she’s seeing a different version of me, one she isn’t sure she likes.
Her words come out slow and low. "You look enough like him. Jace thought you were him, close up. You took the blame."
A half dozen emotions ricochet over her face, one after another, none of them good.
"You take the blame!” she accuses, her eyes flashing, her head shaking back and forth. “'House of the Rising Sun' is Remington's ringtone. You know you have to leave when you hear it because you have to get your brother out of trouble."
She unfolds her legs and paces the room. I watch her walk back and forth, back and forth on those amazing legs, those legs that I wish were wrapped around me right now.
She turns to me and asks, "Is this just a recent thing? Just since he broke up with his girlfriend?"
I give serious consideration to a couple handfuls of lies before I settle on a soft variation of the truth.
"It's gotten more extreme in the last few months."
She turns on her heel and stomps back toward me. If she wasn't so damn beautiful, I'd say she looked like a bull I just waved a bigass red cape at. She catches my wrist and twists my arm around so my tattoo is level with my eye.
"You marked your body. Permanently," she accuses, her voice ice cold. "You have a criminal record. Permanently."
Her manicured fingers pack a bite I'm not expecting.
"You're being melodramatic, Evan. His blood runs through me. What's a little ink? And I had a record before."
"You had a record for your crimes? Or you carried your brother's record?" Her chest rises and falls like a bellows with the maniac pace of this intense, mounting fury.
"He's my family. You don't understand. His crimes are my crimes. His record is mine. The Youngblood name isn't a one member thing. It's all of us, together, against everyone else."
I lose my trademark calm and my voice picks up.
"Against everyone else?" The question punctures the quiet left by my declaration of loyalty. "Or against each other? Because what he's doing seems to be hurting you pretty exclusively unless I'm missing something serious."
Her blue eyes hold wide and fierce, like some kind of battle leader.
It's obvious.
What she's saying, it's not like I haven't been thinking this for years.
I've been thinking the same exact thing since the first whipping I took for Remy, and then after every detention and suspension, four stints in juvy, six in community service, and three years on probation. My luck has held all these years, but the rope is getting shorter and my time is running out fast.
Soon people like Judge Schwenzer will work their asses off to rip this whole thing open, and I might go to jail, to prison, or get shipped to the family compound in no-name backwoods Hungary. That's the inevitable end to this road unless Remy makes some huge changes soon.
And I'm not enough of an idiot to hold my breath waiting for my dipshit brother to change his stripes.
But there's something about hearing someone gorgeous and funny and brilliant saying this truth to me, versus my own stupid brain coming up with it.
There's also the fact that, as obvious and partially true as this might be, it's also way more complicated and still only, at best, no more than partially true.
I can't tell her that, though. Mainly because I'd be using one of her least favorite words: complicated. There's a sick, sinking feeling right in the center of my gut, because this isn't jail or probation, but it's the beginning of the end of the first thing I've really wanted in longer than I can remember.
"I hear you. Really I do." I stand up and check my pocket for my keys.
They're lost in the bright mass of blankets and sheets on her bed, and I pick through all the bedding I was just rolling around with her in to grab them. She's looking right at the floor. "And I know, it's fucked up, especially if you're outside looking in. But it's the way we do things, all of us, every lowdown stupid Youngblood. It's my way. And not everyone is okay with it. I can’t blame you for not being able to accept that."
I'm so close I can smell
