The strength in his arms was wasted on him.
Cole’s lips trembled, and his throat burned as if he’d just drank acid. “Goddamn you! Tell me! Tell me why you’ve done it!”
The trees, the snow, the dusky sky above, and the walls of Ned’s home spun around him ever faster, causing his stomach to clench. A dark laugh rumbled nearby, deep under the disturbed soil, as if Lars were mocking him even in death. Or was it just the dog barking in the house?
Glinting spots filled Cole’s vision as he shook Ned, roaring at the top of his lungs.
He couldn’t stand this anymore.
“I trusted you! I loved you. But I will kill you if that’s what you want rather than talking!”
With a sharp cry, he rolled Ned to his back and, seeing him curl both arms around his head, went for the unprotected neck. Ned’s hands fell to the sides, and he stared back at Cole with bloodshot eyes.
“I’m sorry—”
“That’s not good enough!”
Cole squeezed Ned’s throat and rose to apply more pressure as Ned grabbed at his forearms, trying to break the hold rather than shove Cole off. Well-rested and strong, he could have done it. But Ned didn’t try to fight Cole even as he started wheezing, and shut his eyes, trembling in fear and agony.
As if he didn’t want to hurt Cole and was ready to give his life for the sake of misguided secrecy. How dare he? Didn’t Cole deserve to know Ned’s reasons? The reasons why he’d chosen murder over love?
Cole choked up, shivering when Ned’s finger slid under the sleeve of his coat and touched skin, starting a fire to consume everything Cole stood for. Ned’s thumb stroked his wrist even now, as if to say it was all right to kill him.
Cole looked down with his teeth pressed together, ready to spit into Ned’s face, but when he met Ned’s gaze, as green as he remembered it being in the Arizona sun, his heart ached as if it had been stabbed.
Ned was a liar, and even the confession at the gallows could have been horseshit, but the emotions buzzing in Cole were true. Every bit of him longed for Ned, and despite the bitterness gnawing at him from the inside, he’d missed his first true lover. The time they’d spent together might have been a fleeting fancy for Ned, but it had meant the world to Cole. Still did, no matter how violently his mind rebelled against it. This was the only man who made Cole feel understood, and if Cole pushed on his throat with a bit more force, he’d be lost forever.
There wouldn’t be a soul in the world to understand what Cole had gone through.
“I… I can’t kill you,” he uttered, letting go. His fingers were stiff, and every muscle in his body ached, but he couldn’t bring himself to snuff out Ned O’Leary’s life.
He was a pathetic excuse for a man.
Ned clutched at his neck, as if there was still need to pry off Cole’s fingers, but he was breathing again, and each frantic gasp sounded like an accusation.
Cole rolled off him and faced the shallow grave that had been meant to hold his or Ned’s body by the time the sun rose again. The kerosene had burned out during the fight, leaving them in the dark, inches away from Lars’s body.
He couldn’t stand himself.
Seven years wasted on chasing after a ghost, all for nothing. He wished Ned would grab the knife at Cole’s belt and slit his throat, then kick him into the empty hole.
But Ned refused him, and he always would.
Cole no longer had any purpose and no one to call a friend, so he curled up in the snow, resigned to his fate. He didn’t even shrug Ned’s hand off when it squeezed his shoulder.
Ned coughed and spoke with a low rasp, “I will tell you. I will tell you everything if you think it will give you the peace you crave, but… I know it won’t. It will change everything you think you know about Tom and me.”
Cole stilled at first, but as snow melted against his skin, he chuckled. “Don’t think anything could make my opinion of you any worse.”
Ned cleared his throat, taking so much time to cull the constant urge to cough Cole’s tired eyes shut and he almost drifted off into a slumber. What came next roused him more than even the strongest coffee could.
“We met here seventeen years ago. I was the boy in that cupboard,” Ned said in a dull voice. “The one you never spoke about to anyone but me. I’m pretty sure you saved my life back then.”
At once, Cole found it hard to breathe, as if Ned had been choking him, not the other way around. His gaze settled on the roof of the cabin, which was covered by a dense layer of snow, just like it had been his first time here. Seventeen years ago.
“I—” He swallowed, torn between rolling back to see Ned’s face and keeping his own hidden. “You survived.”
“Some days I wish I didn’t, but here I am. We lived here because my father was strong, but had a gentle soul. He wanted to avoid taking part in the war, but violence came to his doorstep either way. When you arrived with the Gotham Boys that night, my mother hid me in the pantry, but I still heard my father scream and beg for mercy. Tom showed him none.” Ned shifted behind Cole, and his voice now came from above, as if he’d sat up. “When Tom and Zeb were done with my father, they ordered my mother to cook. I considered bursting out of the pantry with a knife or a shotgun, doing something, but I was so scared, and my mother had told me to stay silent and not leave the hideout under any circumstances.”
“I remember,” Cole whispered, stiff as if the cold had frozen the blood in his veins. He remained still despite his guts twisting into a painful knot. He hadn’t seen anything beyond the beating that poor man—Ned’s father—had gotten, but even back then, as a small child, Cole had known what the later silence had meant. “They killed your father.”
“Yes,” Ned rasped. “And when my mother went to the pantry for ingredients for your dinner, shaken by the murder of her beloved husband, Tom sneaked in behind her. He promised her she’d live if she stayed silent about what would happen. And then he raped her. As I sat there in impotent terror.”
“What?” Cole looked over his shoulder this time and found Ned staring into the sky, his face tense in the sparse glow of the stars above. Cole hadn’t seen or heard of Tom ever forcing himself on a woman—he had all the charm and money needed to find female company—but as much as he wanted to protest, he had not been there, and Ned had.
Ned had seen what happened and after such a long silence—had no reason to lie. And while Cole had never known Tom as a rapist, the man used to have a bad temper and had sometimes intimidated people just because it gave him pleasure. Perhaps it had been the only time he did something of that sort, but it didn’t make his actions any less condemnable.
He remembered Ned’s confession from years ago, how Ned had thought it was witnessing his mother’s rape that made him numb to affection. Tom had been the perpetrator, and Ned had seen the ordeal. He’d said she hung herself when Ned had been just a boy. Was that how Tom had taken not one parent from Ned but both?
“I’m sorry,” he uttered, staring at the frozen dirt with a dull sensation in his heart. He’d loved Tom like a father, but he’d never been blind to the fact that he was a bad man to anyone but the chosen few he’d considered family. So it seemed even the few rules Tom had claimed to follow had been a sham.