Chapter 13

You’ve been drinking,” I said when Jackson let me in. The fisherman smelled like a distillery.

“You didn’t want Harry having it.” Jackson shrugged. “It was either this or pour the bottle out.” The fisherman’s tone made it obvious that pouring out whiskey had never been an option.

I decided that it was just as well that Jackson had apparently drained the bottle. If he’d been sober, he probably would have noticed my blotchy skin, my bloodshot eyes.

Between my sister and me, Kaylie had always been the pretty crier.

Soon enough, Jackson was out like a light. Harry was likewise unconscious. I lowered myself to the floor next to his mattress and thought about the information I’d gleaned at Kaylie’s wake. My patient’s billionaire father had sent people to Rockaway Watch to do damage control. In all likelihood, that meant that all I had to do to be rid of the giant liability before me was find a way to contact one of Tobias Hawthorne’s people. Within hours, if not minutes, they’d have the precious heir life-flighted to some fancy medical facility hundreds of miles away, where my family couldn’t touch him.

I thought about the press and imagined what coverage of the resurrection of Toby Hawthorne might look like. Would anyone even question your role in the fire? I asked him silently. Would you pin it all on a “troubled” girl?

I could feel the anger I’d denied myself in my mother’s presence taking hold of my body. My fingers curled into my palms as the muscles in my stomach slowly knotted. I felt my rage at the way the world would remember my sister in the ache of my jaw and the clench of my teeth.

I hate you. The words grounded me, soft and velvety in my mind as I laid a hand on Harry’s chest, outside the burns.

I hate you.

And then I heard the faintest of murmurs. I pulled my hand back and braced my fingers against the mattress. The room was dark, but I could hear his lips moving. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then he started to thrash. To writhe.

I wondered when the last time he’d had pain medication was. I wondered why I even cared.

I grabbed the flashlight I’d left on the floor earlier and turned it on. My patient’s eyes weren’t open. He tossed his head violently back and forth, his whole body wracked with the force of that movement.

His burns. I did not want to hold him down. “Wake up,” I said, working to hold on to my anger.

He didn’t.

“Wake up.”

His lips moved again, the volume of his speech growing to the point that I could actually make out the words. “The tree…”

The villain of my life’s story was more than writhing now. He was going to hurt himself.

I caught his head between my hands, my thumbs braced against his jawbone on either side. “Not on my watch, you asshole.”

It took every ounce of strength I had to keep his head still, but after a moment or two, his body stopped moving, too.

“The tree is poison.” His eyelids flew open, and just like that, we were looking directly at each other. I’d dropped the flashlight on the mattress. Its beam did little to disturb the darkness, but somehow, I could see—or imagine—every single line and curve of Toby Hawthorne’s face. Granite jaw. Slashing cheekbones. Deep-set eyes.

I didn’t see pain there. I saw fury and devastation and more. For a single moment in time, it was like looking in a mirror.

And then he came fully awake. The expression on his face changed, like the surface of a lake touched by wind, and his lips moved again. “Deified,” he whispered.

I thought at first that I’d imagined him saying that word, but then I heard his voice again through the darkness, through what little light came of the flashlight’s beam.

“Civic. Madam. Race car.” His eyes, the color of a forest at night, never left mine. “Rotator. Deed.”

He was reciting palindromes, the smug bastard, and I was going to kill him.