forty.
Marsden biked along the highway so fast, her tears dried on her cheeks before they could fall. She tasted the mud of the river in her mouth with each gasp for air. Rocks flew from beneath the wheels of her bike, bouncing back off the shoulder of the road like loosed scattershot.
But she couldn’t move fast enough. She could never outrace the truth of Wynn and who her father was, what he might have done. It shamed her, too, that so much of her wanted her father’s death to be on Brom’s hands instead of hers, whatever that might mean for Wynn. Shamed her to the core. Her mind stewed over the idea of bonds drawn by blood, the supposed sanctity of those links. She and Shine, Jude and his father, Lucy and her family—no wonder she questioned. Even her connection with Wynn now felt strained and odd.
A honk from an approaching vehicle startled her, and she slowed down a fraction. A truck passed her and pulled over to park crookedly on the shoulder of the road. Evergreen emblazoned on the side, forest-green paint on black, all of it sheened over with a fine layer of dirt. Behind it, the river coursed brown and the sky blazed blue.
Her pulse leaped.
Jude.
They’d just been with each other, fingers driven into each other’s hair, the crushed perfume of too many flowers adding to their light-headedness. His skin had been searing, his mouth and tongue the hottest.
Marsden should have been scared to let him get that close. She knew he saw things in her that she’d always been so careful to hide before. She didn’t have to ask to see the truth of that on his face, the way his eyes couldn’t hide a single thing when he looked at her.
Forest fires.
Maybe, even, kismet.
And she wanted him.
Now, as she listened to him cut the motor of the truck, the need to tell him everything came in a flood. Her future at the boardinghouse, being a skimmer, that she’d taken a part of his brother from him—all of it. The relief of finally wanting to admit everything she was eased some of the tension in her gut, told her how wrong she’d been to not do it earlier.
Jude stepped out from the truck and headed toward her. She heard the sound of tiny river rocks crunching beneath his shoes, the dried-out weeds that had blown over from the riverbanks snapping and screaming.
There was an envelope in his hands, white and creased, as though it’d been worked over by disbelieving hands.
Marsden recognized it instantly. It must have fallen from her back pocket. She instantly felt sick. The expression on Jude’s face was pure, miserable fury.
She recognized that look, too.
It was the Jude from before the covert. The one still reeling from damage, made raw from the people he needed, the same ones who kept falling short.
And she’d been the one to do that now.
“Adam Lytton,” he said as soon as he reached her, staying an arm’s length away. His voice was steel, pounded flat and sharp. “I recognized the name from the covert column in the paper. Why would you send a dead man money?”
“Where did you find that envelope?” Her own voice was dull. Delaying the burn.
“I found it on the floor at Evergreen. After you left. Why do you have this?”
“Why did you open it? It wasn’t for you.”
“I couldn’t help it. Seeing his name on an envelope you were just holding made no sense at all, so I needed to—Marsden, why do you have this?”
“I was going to tell you.” There was a ringing in her ears.
“I guess I beat you to it.” Jude’s gaze was unmoving from her face. “So tell me.”
“I got the money from Adam Lytton’s body when I found it in the covert.” Each word was supposed to have come easily. She thought she’d been prepared, hadn’t she? But she’d never been more wrong as each one slowly scraped itself to life, proving her horrible. She paused, her longing for time to stop so acute it nearly hurt. The quiet around them blistered; her next words crawled from her slowly and painfully. “I’m a skimmer. I’ve been one since I was nine.”
He sucked in a breath. “For money?” His cold revulsion hung in the air, as thick as the tan silt that made up the river, the mud that birthed it. “Doing all of that just for money?”
“It was our way out of Glory—Wynn’s and mine. I had to get us out of the boardinghouse. Watching her get older there, seeing what people did—I had to.”
“I’d be the first to tell you that money only goes so far.”
“I was running out of time. I still am.” I’m already out of time.
“Why were you sending away money if you need it so badly?”
“It was my way of saying . . . sorry, I guess. Asking for forgiveness, in a way.”
His face seemed to break. The wind came off the water and tossed the waves of his hair, dashing grit all around them. The warm breeze was cold against her skin.
“You lied right to my face,” he said. “Back at the covert, when I asked you outright if you thought a skimmer could have gotten to Rig before you did. When all along it’d been you.”
She said nothing. What could she say that would change that truth?
“Did you take something from Rig? When you found his body?”
“Money.”
“That’s all?”
Marsden closed her eyes. “A note. It was in his pocket. Four lines, handwritten.” She opened them to see Jude’s completely torn apart. The colors in them were wild, chaotic, dangerous.
“This whole time, you didn’t tell me.” His voice was molten. “You made me trust you and want you, and you kept that from me. You knew how badly I’d needed more from my brother. I would have taken anything.”
“Not this,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t have wanted this.”
“Bullshit. That was never your decision to make. You were just trying to hide how you had it in the first place, because then I would have known about you being a skimmer. You chose that over what you knew I was looking for.”
“I didn’t want you hurt, having to read it, seeing it for yourself. Doesn’t that matter to you? That I cared?”
His expression darkened, became cutting and cruel. “Not nearly enough. You don’t matter nearly enough. You barely matter at all.”
A series of cars slung themselves along the highway, and Marsden heard a catcall from one driver’s-side window. It meant nothing and the sun was useless and something in her chest felt splintered.
“Tell me what he wrote,” he demanded bitingly. “The note.”
She knew he would hate her, would never forget the sound of her voice saying Rigby’s last words. “Jude—”
“Goddamn it, Marsden. Please.”
“Your brother . . . he wrote, ‘I’m sorry, Jude, I never wanted you to know. I told myself it was Dad. I didn’t want to stop. But I didn’t mean to do it.’”
She watched his eyes absorb his brother’s words, try madly to untangle the puzzle that they were and make sense of them. “What was he talking about? Do what?”
She remembered how she’d thought of violence, reading those words, and how she hadn’t been sure what that meant. “Killing himself, what else could—”
“No, because he did mean to do that—he walked into your covert all on his own.” Jude shook his head. “So he told himself who was Dad? He never wanted me to know what? It doesn’t make sense.”
Suddenly, his fury died away, and his expression turned uncertain, and Marsden felt it in her own bones—the other ways Rigby’s words could be read, if you dared to. And the image that bloomed in her mind wasn’t how he’d looked as she’d stood over his dead body in the covert, but how he might have looked standing over someone else’s.
She watched that same image cross Jude’s face like a shadow, linger there like a bruise. One dealt not by his father, but by his beloved brother.
“What else did he write?” His eyes, emptier than she’d ever seen them, utterly desperate. “Those were not my brother’s last words.”
She shook her head slowly, unable to say a thing.
Marsden watched him be devastated, be buried beneath the depths of her and his brother’s betrayals, and was absolutely numb as he got back in the truck and sped away.