Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(78)

“It’s just so funny, when you think about it.” He fixes his odd, wild gaze on me. “There’s not an inch of Lore in you, Aeron. You’re all Hart.”

“Hilarious,” I mutter.

“Well, now you sound like your mother.”

“Great.”

“Indeed.” He takes another swig of beer. “Women, eh? You can kill for them and they still don’t f*cking appreciate you. Of course…you got around that.”

The old wounds in my belly smart at that one. The fine, knitted fibers of my scars shiver, writhing against each other like a pit of tiny snakes.

He leans forward on his elbows to regard me. “I always wondered why you did it. I’d sit there with all the time in the world on my hands—that’s why they call it Doing Time, I guess—and I’d wonder, is it because he thinks she killed his daddy?”

“She killed both fathers,” I say coldly. “She admitted it.”

“Did she really?”

“She…yes.” In a fashion. It was the only conclusion, grasshoppers. She tied the lies together so well—they weren’t pretty, but they fitted, like all the world’s most dangerous things, and if I’d brooded over them any longer then I wouldn’t be where I am today.

I…yeah. Shut up already.

He titters to himself. “Oh, the irony.”

I say nothing. Just stare at him, my upper lip curled so hard that my nose pulses with pain.

“I think she always hoped you’d grow up to be some kind of superhero who’d save her from me.” He shakes his head with a pitying sigh. “In a way, she got her wish, right?”

“God, I bet you’ve been salivating over this shit.”

I didn’t kill her for nothing. Even if she didn’t end my father—my real father, the one who taught me piano skits and made me laugh and smelled like cheap cigars—she buried him. And she pinned Ash’s parentage on some stranger I’ll probably never know the name of, flinging his life away just to throw me off the scent.

“Ooh,” Blood Honey grunts, “the cogs are turning! You’d have throttled that bitch anyway, right? She was hardly mother of the year.”

“She was there,” I say with as much venom as I ever shot toward her.

“She was. Can’t fault her for that. And you know, I have to hold up my hands and admit it—she was kinda jaded, after me. But she did try to protect you. She had a good crack at giving you a normal life.” He makes a fist and turns it slowly, observing his bloodied knuckles. “Disrespectful bitch.”

“We’ve never really been a respectful family.”

He hoots. “You think?”

“I wasn’t including you.”

“I wasn’t sure about tying you up, you know. I figured I’d be spoiling all our fun. But now I’m getting all the juicy emotional stuff, and it’s like Oprah or something—ooh, mama.” Another hoot, like a drunk owl. “Seriously. You keep going with your little boy resentment and I’ll pretend to pop the corn. I’d pop real corn but we’re in the middle of f*cking nowhere, so them’s the breaks, eh?”

Keep talking, f*cker. Keep talking.

“Here was me planning for us to make up for lost time, have a couple beers out on the deck there…but if we were doing that, I wouldn’t have been able to f*ck your cock sleeve. Quite something, isn’t she?” His delight fades into quiet malice. “Noisy, though.”

My entire torso pulls tight. My temples pulse. My temper flares, though it’s bound to the chair like the rest of me and there’s nowhere for the stampede of blood to go.

“Maybe I can think of a new way to play Pringles with her. You could join in.”

I have to distract him.

My Leo is in there.

“You’re never going to be anything like me,” I tell him in the calmest voice I can muster. “You’ll never have the money, or the brains, or the smart, hot girls, and no amount of throwing your weight around is going to get it.”

“I already am like you. I made you, you little shit.”

“Then surely all this should be the other way around. I should be copying you, right? Let’s see—what is it you do, again?”

“Nice try.” He finishes the beer and tosses the bottle toward Harvey; it lands on his shoulder with a blunt thump and rolls off into the corner.

“No, really. I’m curious. I want to know what my old man’s achievements are. You’ve been to jail, so that’s one thing…very impressive…and you’ve killed how many people, now?” I can’t count on my hands, so I improvise by nodding. “Three women, three men…who else? I bet there’s more.”

“Maybe.”

“We should sort you out with a reward chart, like we do for Ash. Put it on the refrigerator. You can have a sticker every time you rape or pillage, and when you get to ten, you earn a Viking hat and a Twinkie.”

Blood Honey slithers off the table and slopes toward me with heavy feet. The shadows pull at him with long, oiled fingers. “What in hell makes you think you’re better than me?”

“I’m not.” I stare up, looking him right in the eye. “My body count isn’t anywhere near yours, but the truth is, I’m worse. And you can’t stand it.”