"No. Though she had most people fooled for a while. Apart from Bear and Rene, of course."
"Why?"
"Because they saw her at her worst. She even wrapped Rex around her pinkie finger until her true colors shone through." The notion still boggled my fucking mind. I guessed it was because we’d all grown up together. He’d seen her before she turned into the bitch tyrant.
"I’m sorry she’s dead, but not sorry she can’t ruin things for us anymore."
I twisted my hand over in hers. "She didn’t deserve what she got."
"She’s the reason you got hooked on drugs, Storm. That’s what you just said. You also agreed that she’s a bitch."
"Her death wasn’t necessary," was pretty much all I could say.
Somehow, Scarlet had gotten tangled up with the Famiglia. It was the ex-Don, Benito Fieri, who’d had her killed. She hadn’t been back in West Orange for years, but for whatever reason, had been there long enough to get her ass brutally murdered.
"You know she told me to abort Cyan?"
My hand tightened around hers as my teeth clenched with my anger, but I didn’t say anything. Scarlet’s bitch mouth was one of the reasons why I’d cut her out of our lives.
"That was just the first of many suggestions from her. So forgive me if I don’t start wearing black and saying the world is a worse place without her because you won’t get that from me."
"I didn’t expect to," I countered, and I meant it.
Family was family.
You tolerated them.
Put up with their shit.
I’d done that for so long with Scarlet that I hadn’t even smelled the stench when she came around. Until I’d realized blood wasn’t thicker than water and that my life was better without her in it.
"Good thing, because I’d hate to disappoint." She snatched her hand away, which made me mourn its loss, before she reached for the fork again and dug out some more pie for herself.
"What did she do that made you try meth that first time?"
"She got pregnant at fourteen. She never said who the father was—" I grimaced at the memory. "—but I know he had to be an older guy just because of what he did to her. She never did tell us, not even after he nearly beat her to death."
"She made a habit of nearly getting beaten to death, huh?"
"Keira," I reprimanded gruffly, aware that she didn’t even know how my sister had died but was right anyway.
It had been a habit of Scarlet’s. She’d ruffled feathers and her nose had met many another woman’s fist as a result.
She shrugged. "What? It’s true."
It sadly was.
"Scarlet admitted she tried to blackmail him."
"And there you have it. Knew there’d be something like that going on," she muttered unsympathetically.
"Wherever there was a buck to be made, she was sniffing around it… that’s for sure," I agreed.
"She lost the baby?"
"Yeah."
She blew out a breath. "Poor thing."
I knew she meant the baby, not Scarlet.
I’d always been aware that there was no love lost between my sister and her, but still, her venom came as a surprise because Keira was a sweetheart, in possession of a sweet heart.
I knew Scarlet too well to be offended on her behalf though. Some people came into this world kicking and screaming, and they left that way too. That was my sister—a pain in the ass from the beginning until the end.
If she’d been a regular sister, I’d have wanted to avenge her death. As it stood, mostly I was left wondering what she’d done to deserve it and, all told, I just hoped she finally found some fucking peace.
"Link told me once that she had to have a hysterectomy… was this the same pregnancy? Or did she get pregnant again?" Keira asked, breaking into my thoughts.
"This was the only kid she had."
She grimaced, but questioned, "You seriously never found out who the guy was?"
"She never said," I hedged.
"You didn’t have any suspicions?"
I heaved a sigh, because I didn’t want to think about this, never mind talk about it. She was right, though, earlier. She did deserve for me to be less reticent. "I thought it might have been Kevin. Nyx’s uncle."
"The one who…" She gulped, freezing in place. "You know?"
"Yeah." I knew.
The one who’d abused Nyx’s sister until she’d killed herself to escape his claws.
The one whose head Nyx had blown off by messing with his uncle’s shotgun, and whose murder Bear had helped cover up.
"Did you never ask her?"
"She never told me."
"Did she love him? Or just want to hold it against him?"
"Who the hell knows with Scarlet?" I grumbled, reaching up and rubbing at my tired eyes. "I just know that only that creep would fuck around with a fourteen-year-old girl and get her pregnant then beat her ass."
"God, that’s terrible," she rasped, the story finally penetrating her hatred of my sister. "Fourteen… Cyan…"
Yeah. The ramifications were worse when you had a daughter approaching that age.
The little girl who watched Disney like it was her crack, who needed a nightlight still… how could she be a few years away from having sex and getting pregnant?
"When she was in the hospital, that first night, it was so bad, K. Seriously. I thought she was going to die. She bled out because of the baby, had to have an emergency hysterectomy…" I scraped a hand through my hair. "It was crazy. I didn’t sleep for days, and I was just so fucking tired. Prince, he was the VP by that time, hooked me up."
"You took drugs to stay alert?"
I nodded. "Dumb, huh? Not for fun, not to escape, not to party all night, just to stay awake."
"I wouldn’t say that was dumb. Sad, but not dumb. Why didn’t you just get some sleep? You didn’t have to be awake all the time, surely?"
"Scarlet and I, well, you know we didn’t get along great. I have no idea why, but she’d start sobbing whenever I tried to leave. So I didn’t. I stayed with her. But the beeps, the noises, I couldn’t ever rest.
"Plus she’d wake up at all hours and was manic as hell. Sometimes, she’d start screaming at me, other times she’d break down in tears. That went on for seven days. I took the meth, it made shit a lot easier until she was discharged four days after that."
"And by then, it was too late?"
"I had the taste." I nodded again, and even after all these years, I still savored those first highs.
Nothing beat that initial hit.
Every other time, you just chased a fucking rainbow for the pot of gold at the end of it.
"You’re lucky you still have your teeth."
My lips curved. "I didn’t stick with meth."
"No?"
"Prince died. It got harder to source it."
"You went clean?"
"For a time."
"Meaning?"
"After Prince died, Bear might as well have turned into the DEA. We could push ‘em, but we couldn’t take ‘em. He had a few brothers tossed out for breaking that law."