“Why not?”
Skylar sits down. It’s abrupt, as if his legs gave out on him too fast for me to see. “Because it’s not true, and now I’ve told you all this shit, I need you to understand that.”
He draws me in without even trying. Without even looking at me. I’m on my knees in front of him before I have the consciousthought to move. “How are you to blame for the sins of your parents?”
“I’m not, but the way you look at me sometimes—the way you’re looking at me now, it’s a sick reminder that I’m a sinner too.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“You don’t understand.” For the first time since this started, he holds my gaze with a stare that doesn’t flicker in and out. “That war…it started because my dad wasn’t alive to run that route anymore. And Cam’s parents and every soldier they lost, they fucking died because everyone they were fighting believed the Rebel Kings killed my dad.”
“So?”
“So…theydidn’t kill him, Mal. I did.”
30MAL
I stop breathing for a beat. A jagged twist of truth sinks its claws into my heart, and the image of Skylar I’ve guarded all these months crumbles and reshapes as something that flays me to the fucking core.
He killed his father.
It should shock me, but I’m too war-weary and cynical for that. It fucks with my head more that he’s carried it this long, like a half-buried corpse, and every nuance and quirk I’ve seen in him shunts together to make a sickening sense. “How did you do it?”
Skylar doesn’t blink. “Stabbed him in the throat. I took the blade from Cam. I think he let me.”
“You think?”
“We’ve never talked about it. I don’t want to relive how I became a murderer in a split second and he respects that.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one. Cam took the fall. Even his dad died thinking it was him.”
I sit back on my heels, trying to piece it all together and build a picture I can contemplate without losing my shit. It’s a process I used to be good at. However grim and whatever the context,information was a means to an end. A tool to get the job done. But this…it leaves me as fractured and dizzy as Skylar’s starting to look.
Because you love him.
“What was your dad’s name?”
Skylar’s eyes roll a little and I realise he’s struggling to focus, to stay conscious, maybe. Hate that I have to let him. So he can get all this out before it fucking kills him.
“Mitchell,” he says after a beat.
“Buchanan?”
“Yeah.”
I process that. Wonder why it matters when the only thing I truly care about is that Skylar’s father is already in the ground.
Can’t kill him twice.“What happened to you after Cam’s parents died?”
“I moved on.”
“They didn’t want you?”
“I didn’t want them. Being around the club, the bikes, the noise, the fucking boots on the gravel outside their house—” Skylar brings his fists to his head and I read his intention to hurt himself. To drive his knuckles into his skull because pain is the only thing that makes sense.
I catch his wrists, stilling him. “How did you turn that into becoming an A&E nurse?”