ANNND NOW I WAS SPORTING two black eyes. Funny, I thought telling Riley about Paige and me would help put his mind at ease that someone was actually looking out for her. Kidding. No I didn’t. But this whole truth-telling thing was getting kind of painful.

I sucked in a breath as Paige swabbed rubbing alcohol on the cuts all over my face.

“Quit being a baby,” she warned.

We were crowded in the downstairs bathroom, me sitting on the sink, her between my legs. The ends of her hair tickled my chest, her nearness distracting me from the sharp stings she inflicted with her steady hand. I could think of a couple things I’d rather be doing right then, but this wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been.

“So you’re not going to tell me why Riley blew up like that?” she said.

“He got fired today and started swinging at the first person he saw.” I shrugged as if that was both the beginning and the end of the story.

“He got fired? Why?”

“If you turn on the news today, you might see some things that don’t put the best slant on my big brother.”

She threw away the bloodied swab and leaned back to look at me, a question in her eyes.

“He likes to fuck whores,” I said.

Her mouth popped open. “Riley?”

“The one and only.”

“But...” She shook her head. “He was...”

“A boy scout, top of his class, your childhood friend.” I took her hand and pulled her closer. “I know.”

Her mouth pinched together with a wince, and a flash of guilt swept through my gut. Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so blunt with her with the whole fucking whores thing.

“I don’t know who he is anymore. He’s a complete stranger, and I...I hate that,” she said, absently scratching her fingers over my chest. “What happened to him?”

“Power.” I squeezed her hand on my chest and tried to put everything else out of my head for now. “Power happened to him. He got a taste of it through Dad, and even more when Dad decided to run for president.” I scooted off the countertop to share the same small space as her. “Which is why I need to go.”

She looked up at me, her dark eyes concerned. “Where?”

“To put out some fires. I’ll be back before you know it. Go grocery shopping if you want. But please,” I said, trailing a finger down the bridge of her glasses to smooth the worried line underneath. “Don’t forget the bacon.”

She snorted and shook her head. “You need an intervention. Okay fine, I’ll go do the woman’s work while you go do the man stuff only because I’m starving.”

“Women’s work.” I dipped my head for just a taste of my sweet magnet in the soft curve of her neck. “It’s the grocery store. It’s not like you’re barefoot and pregnant.”

Her whole body stiffened. She slid away from me with an empty expression. “I’ll go now.”

Obviously I’d struck a nerve to make her shut off like that. I scrubbed a hand down my chin and stared after her as she left the bathroom. Was it because I’d said the p word?

“I was kidding,” I said, following after her.

She slung her purse over her arm and fluffed her hair around its strap. “I know.”

“I didn’t know we had a safe word.”

She screwed up her face at me over her shoulder. “What?”

“You know, a safe word. A word people use when they want to stop a...uh... sexual partner from going too far. I said pregnant and you immediately shut down.”

“So...I was going too far?”

“I’m only twenty, babe.” I winked. “I can only take so much of all the delicious things you have to offer.”

A smirk tilted those sinful lips. “You’re a rotten liar.”

She didn’t know the half of it.

“I shut down, as you call it, because I’m hungry,” she continued. “I was unaware we had a safe word as well, but I don’t think pregnant should be it.”

“Okay. Fair enough,” I said, striding toward her. “So what should our safe word be in case one of us goes too far?”

She paused by the front door. “Apocalypse?”

I chuckled. “Well, that would definitely put an end to pretty much everything, I suppose. Apocalypse it is.”

“Behave yourself today, Sam,” she said. “No more fighting.”

“What fun is that?”

She gave me one last warning look before slipping outside. Then she immediately changed her mind and came back, squeezing and releasing the strap on her purse in quick succession, with a determined lift to her chin.

“Pregnant,” she blurted. “I was once. I had the baby, and I put it...her up for adoption.” Her mouth wavered as if there was more she wanted to say, but she snapped it shut so tight the tendons in her neck strained.

A million thoughts flooded my head. Before I could stop it, a single word grinded out. “Rick.”

She looked at me for a long time with a haunted look in her eyes I never wanted to see again. Finally, she nodded.

A strange noise came from the back of my throat. “Did he rape you?”

“No. I was...” She swallowed and started again. “I was young and stupid.”

I blinked down at the few tile squares between us that hours ago we’d fucked on, doing my best to wrap my under-caffeinated, bruised head around this. She obviously blamed herself, but it took two to the deed. Rick was a fucking asshole who should have known better.

Paige had a baby. With Rick. Did it change anything?

She stood still and silent, likely waiting for some kind of reaction. Because it mattered to her. I mattered to her, otherwise why would she tell me something so personal when it obviously upset her to talk about it?

“There’s more,” she whispered, then swallowed hard. “He’s been blackmailing me with pictures of...of our time together in exchange for information about you.”

“Me?” What the fuck?

“Your whole family,” she corrected. “Especially Rose, and I...I told him she’s in Pasadena, Maryland at the drug rehabilitation center and I’m so, so sorry about all of this.” Her shoulders sagged, dropping her purse to the floor, but she acted like she didn’t notice anything else except me and the obvious guilt that weighed heavy on top of her. “When he wanted more info, I told him to fuck off.”

Whoa. If the guy wanted dirt on my family, there was certainly a lot more than the location of Rose’s drug rehab. Even if we weren’t being blackmailed by Hill, there was a chance Rick, and everyone else, could have found out about everything. Not by Paige, but still. On top of being a sex predator, Rick had also blackmailed her. Jesus, did the guy have a decent bone in his sick, perverted head?

“He’s the one who cost you the Library of Congress job?” I asked. When she nodded, I had the sudden urge to go all Dexter on his ass, but I kept that need in my tightened fists for another day. The fucker would pay, that was for sure.

Blowing out a breath, I stepped toward her and held her tight. She clung to me while I kissed the top of her head. None of this changed a damn thing. Holding her felt like coming home, like we were meant to happen. I pulled away to cup her face and kiss her, pouring whatever she needed from me into her to chase away her heartache.

Minutes—hours?—later, she leaned her head back, her lips swollen, her eyes hooded. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

I kissed her again, a quick, innocent one, and pushed her cute hipster glasses up her nose. “It’s okay.”

She nodded down at her purse and swiped a hand across her cheek, and I hoped she knew I meant it. It was okay. It really didn’t change a thing about how I felt. Or what needed to happen next.

“I’ll go get the bacon,” she said and slid me a quick smile.

When she closed the door behind her, I leaned my forehead against it while the silence in the house pressed in. She took her natural energy with her every morning. It made the house feel empty. Lifeless.

I usually left soon after she did on the weekdays, but since it was Saturday, I procrastinated. Yeah, I wanted to see my sister again, but our last visit about two months ago had shaken me. Instead of the zombie shell my sister used to be before she’d entered treatment, she’d been angry. Like the kind of angry that possesses your soul and makes you do and say ugly, terrible things. About Mom and Dad. Even about me and Riley. The doctors said she was still detoxing and that her “irritability” was part of the process. Irritability, my ass. My sister had turned into a demon.

But soon enough, I parked in the guest section of the sprawling treatment center in Pasadena, Maryland and got out of the car, my sunglasses once again covering the bruises on my face.

The website for this place described it as upscale and private, two words that had leaped out at my parents immediately since those were the most important things to them, not what was best for my sister. Maybe today I’d find out for sure that money really could buy happiness, at least for Rose. For her, I hoped so.

Tall, spiraled bushes and various flowers lined the parking lot and trailed along a winding sidewalk that led to the front doors. Four white marble columns flanked the sides of the building and held up a third-story balcony where heads bobbed behind a low iron fence. On either side of the columns, separate wings stretched into the distance, the left for females and the right for males.

Air conditioning blasted my face once I entered the glass doors, and I breathed it in deeply. The sharp odor of chemicals burned my nose because some guy was mopping the black and white checked tile in the corner. He swept the mop back and forth over the same spot. I had to wonder if that was some kind of punishment. Probably not since this was the twenty-first century, but how much research did his family do on this place before dropping him off for someone else to solve his problem? Maybe I had it all wrong—I hoped I did—but how much did anyone really know about what happened here behind closed doors? Or right out in the open like the man who kept mopping the corner?

Worry buried deep inside my gut as I stepped toward the receptionist’s desk near the middle of the large room. To say I hated coming here was an understatement, but today I hated the thought of not coming even more. If Rose had been exorcised since our last visit, I might ask her how many other times Riley had been to see her. And Mom and Dad. I wanted her to know she still had family. That we hadn’t forgotten about her. But I had a horrible feeling that maybe some of us had.

“I’m here to see Rose Cleary,” I said before the receptionist looked up.

She was reading a file, or pretending to anyway, and her tight brown curls bounced around her head when she finally met my gaze. Her crinkly dark eyes widened, red flooded her cheeks, and she began pawing random items on her desk in some weird attempt to keep her fifty-year-old self in her chair, I guessed.

A nervous giggle fell out of her mouth. “She your girlfriend?”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Like it was any of her business. “Sister. That’s Cleary with a C.”

“Rose, Rose,” she mumbled, nodding, and waved her hands over her computer keyboard, magician style.

Jesus H., I’d flustered her to level abracadabra. At this rate, Paige would be home before I’d been given my guest pass and a white rabbit would be hopping around my feet. Sometimes being me was such a pain in my ass.

The woman finally settled her fingertips on the home row and pecked one letter at a time while she spelled my sister’s name.

Instead of snatching the keyboard away from her, I grinded my teeth together in silent agony. No one ever said I was a patient man. I just wanted to get away from the mopping guy in the corner and the sting of cleaning chemicals to see my sister. Now that I was here, I couldn’t get to her room fast enough. I shouldn’t have waited this long in the first place. I needed to know if she still hated me like the demon inside of her had shouted last time I’d come. I needed to know if she could forgive me.

If I could forgive myself.

#sorrynotsorry

My little sister, obsessed with birds since day one, had flocked to the Twitter-verse and vague-tweeted her quick, downward spiral into heroin. #sorrynotsorry had been her last tweet before her overdose.

“There we go,” the woman said, curls bouncing. “And what is your name?”

“Sam Cleary.”

“Sam.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest and tilted her head, a dreamy smile on her painted lips. “Such a nice name.”

I gave her a nod since I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth.

“Do you have some identification on you?” After I dug around in my wallet for my license, she pursed her lips at my picture. “Room one sixty-one. And here’s your guest pass.” She batted her eyelashes, actually batted them. “Sam.”

“Thanks,” I croaked and took the pass from her. Then I shot toward the left wing like my life depended on it.

The long hallway was nearly empty except for the occasional patient and/or family shuffling past. TVs blared from inside some of the rooms, and others were silent. The sharp chemical smell faded some, but it was still there, either in the gleaming checked floor underneath me or engrained deep inside my nose.

Taking a steadying breath, I took off my sunglasses and folded them over the collar of my T-shirt. One fifty-nine. One sixty. One sixty-one.

Outside her door, I raised my fist to knock, but the quiet seeping from under her door unnerved me. Last time I was here, she’d screamed her throat raw and tipped most of the furniture over in an angry/jonesing attempt at escape. Now the silence was almost too extreme for a whisper.

Maybe she wouldn’t look empty or crazy this time. Maybe she’d look more like my sister. Maybe she wouldn’t scare the living shit out of me.

I knocked, and it blasted down the quiet hallway like an explosion.

A second later, Rose opened the door. She blinked her blue eyes, as clear of makeup and drugged-out haze as I’d seen in a long time. Her long blonde hair hung shorter at just past her shoulders, and she looked rounder, healthier. Not like death warmed over. She even wore her Donald Duck slippers I used to steal from her just to throw them at her head. Between those and her yoga pants and T-shirt knotted at the side, it was like we were home again. Seeing her seemingly whole and human and sister-like burst a flood of feelings through my chest.

“SamRam?” she whispered because she must’ve felt the oppressive quiet, too.

I cleared my throat. “Rose?”

“What’s wrong with your face?” she asked.

My innate big brotherly skills, only slightly rusty in the two months since I’d seen her, kicked in at full throttle with the lamest comeback ever: “What’s wrong with your face?”

With a laugh, she threw herself into my arms. I caught her in a bear hug that lifted her off her feet.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she squealed.

When I set her down again, she drew away and a shadow passed across her eyes. But the next instant, it vanished.

She shot out a fist and sucker-punched me right in the gut. “Took you long enough.”

The sting of her words hurt much worse than the dig of her knuckles. I deserved it, too, much worse than she was doling out, especially since I could tell my not coming to visit had affected her. And why hadn’t I? Because I was an asshole, that was why. I didn’t think I could handle seeing her like that again. It was...terrifying. But maybe it had been the same for her, too.

“Yeah, well.” I scrubbed a hand over my eyes as if I could rub out the memory. “I guess I was hoping you’d grow some muscles because you still hit like a girl.”

“You want to go?” She thumbed her nose, raised her fists way out, and churned them through the air like we were going to duke it out circa 1933.

I chuckled. “I’ll pass. So, are you going to invite me in or you just going to make me stand here all day?”

She dropped her arms, her smile spreading, and opened the door wider. “Come in, SamRam, and stay for a while.”

If the hallway was a vacuum of nothingness, her room was the exact opposite. It radiated life and color from the collage of paintings and inspirational quotes hanging on the wall to the messy desk by the open window with yarn piled on top of it. Everything, including my sister, was soaked in sunlight and warmth. And it was such a fucking relief.

Minus the yarn, this was how her old bedroom had looked—sloppy, but with a buzzing energy around it whenever she breathed life into it. That was what had been missing last time I was here. Life. It had been slipping away from her with every hit of heroin.

Now, Rose was back. She seemed to be, anyway.

She took my wrist and led me to the chair by the desk. “I have to show you something, but promise not to laugh.”

“Fine,” I said with a sigh, but I couldn’t hide my grin.

Behind the piles of multi-colored yarn, she pulled out a rainbow stocking cap thing and folded it over her head. “Ta-da.”

“A hat?”

“Not just any hat, dork. I made it. I’ve been learning to crochet, and I’m actually kind of good at it.”

“Let me see that.” I swiped it off her head, making sure I messed up her hair in the process, and studied the cap. It looked sturdy and well-made, but I knew jack about hats. “Since when do you crochet?”

“Since I got here.” She sank down on her bed and pulled on knitted, fingerless gloves over her hands. “Oil painting, too. It’s therapeutic. It helps keep my mind off...things.”

My gaze snapped up to meet hers. “And how’s that going for you?”

She shrugged and looked down at her duck slippers. “Some days are easier than others. Some days...”

I clicked the snap on my jacket to count the seconds until she continued. Eight. Nine. I cleared my throat. “Rose?”

“Sam?”

“Don’t ever do heroin again.”

Her chin wobbled as she dug her heel into the blue carpet.

“You hear me?”

She nodded once. “I hear you.”

“I mean everything, Rose. Even what you might think is just an innocent drag on a joint. Don’t do any of it.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice small.

Her blue eyes connected with mine for a second, full of questions I knew I’d have to answer sooner or later.

“I’m done with pot,” I said. “For good. And I haven’t taken a drink for several weeks.” Hell, I hadn’t even thought about it since that time I got wasted after getting shot at during the delivery to Slim. I stood and rubbed my hands through my hair. “If I had known, Rose...”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. You wouldn’t be here in this place knitting hats if it wasn’t for me.”

“Sam, stop. It’s not like you forced it up my nose.”

But I might as well have. Memories of that night flooded back to me on a curl of skunk weed smoke. Riley had invited some guy over to our house before we went to the movies, and I knew right away I didn’t like him. He’d brought pot, though. While our parents attended a political fundraiser, we lit up in the backyard. Rose, who was just barely eighteen, came home early, caught us, and demanded to be let in on the fun.

“Fuck no,” I’d told her. “There’s not enough, and you wouldn’t like it anyway.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, her and the new guy—Ben, I thought his name was—were tearing each other’s clothes off with their eyes. I didn’t like it, thought about ending Ben right there and then, but a car full of girls pulled up in the driveway. Serious doubt raged inside my gut at the thought of leaving her with him. Riley was there, though, lying on the concrete on his stomach and staring into the swimming pool. I didn’t realize at the time how high he was.

I’d left Rose there, and I shouldn’t have. I’d been thinking with my dick instead of using my head to look out for my little sister. By the time I rounded to the back of the house with a train of girls behind me, it was already too late.

Rose was hardly able to keep her head up. Her glassy eyes seemed to quiver inside her head while they tried to focus. Later, I’d found out Ben had given her ‘something to make her feel real good’—her first hit of heroin. When I saw her like that, wasted, my little sister already so far gone because of my stupidity, I lost it.

I couldn’t even explain what I did because I didn’t remember. I broke Ben into little pieces just like he broke Rose’s plans to change the world. She was going to do something that actually mattered with her life, not like Riley or me. The next thing I remembered were a bunch of cops pinning me face-first to the sidewalk. I had no idea who called them—still don’t—but there was blood everywhere. I later found out I’d busted Ben’s nose and two of his ribs.

That was nowhere near the damage done to Rose, though. That first hit addicted her. All she could think about was getting the next and the next until...

She found Hill. Or Hill found her.

Rose’s light touch interrupted the memory. I let her pull me down next to her on the bed, gladly trading this reality for that nightmarish one.

“I’ve been reading a lot of business books from the library we have here, and that’s what I want to do,” she said. “Start my own business.”

“With hats?”

“For starters.” She winced down at a loose thread on her fingerless gloves. “I saw the news. How’s Riley taking it?”

“How do you think?”

She waved at the bruises on my face. “Did he do this?”

“The prep’s a lot tougher than he looks.”

“Does he think I leaked it?”

“You?” I shook my head. “Why would he?”

She stood up quickly, the messy flyaway hair on top of her head streaming out behind her like tail feathers, to pace the room, her mouth pushed together in a weird frown.

I followed her movements with a narrowed gaze. “What are you not telling me?”

Her reflection stared hard at me from inside the mirror across the room. “How about what you didn’t tell me, Sam? About Hill’s blackmailing us?” She absently swatted the hair on top of her head in an attempt to smooth it before turning her quick pacing toward me. “You should’ve told me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You mean while you were detoxing? Because you weren’t exactly in the listening mood.”

That pulled her up short. She glared, and a fury that shouldn’t exist inside someone like Rose tightened her fists. If I were to be punched in the face by another Cleary, she deserved to be the one to do it. But instead of a physical punch, she gave me the kind that hurt much worse.

“You should’ve come to see me sooner, Sam,” she said. “Riley did.”

Special emphasis on Riley. Not the big brother who led her to believe she was a superhero, but the one who screamed bloody murder whenever she got in his way. Why? Because I was a fucking coward who was too afraid to see what she was going through. All that shame at the back of my throat made it hard to breathe, so I pushed to my feet and stepped toward the open window for some air.

“He told me about you working for Hill, and I pretended to know all about it since it was obvious all he cared about was his damn job and Dad winning the presidency. But Sam, no more lies. At one time, yes, I was in debt to Hill, but not anymore. There isn’t anything I owe that man.”

Her words rang clear, but I struggled to grasp their meaning. If there wasn’t any debt, then why did Hill lead me to believe there was for the last two months?

“Hill has nothing on this family, not even proof of Riley and Dad with prostitutes.” She took a long breath. “Riley ripped half of my little black book from my hands before he left, but...I’m the one who leaked a torn page of proof to the press early this morning.”

“What?” I whirled around to face her, my mind reeling to catch up.

She picked up another crocheted hat from her dresser, this one with a rainbow-colored stringy fluff on top. “Hill was working on expanding his turf, trying to take over some guy named Slim’s neighborhood, and he wanted to expand his trade, too. I found more girls, pretty ones, and so many upper-level government people flocked toward them, toward...us.”

Bile climbed up from my stomach, acidic enough to burn the backs of my eyes. I shook my head, refusing to piece together what she was trying to tell me.

“I was desperate for more heroin, but I was already in debt to Hill. So we made an agreement.” Her gaze met mine, pained, haunted, yet somehow relieved. “Drugs for sex.”

“Shut it,” I barked, so completely done with this...this...sick confession.

She flinched and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that flowed down her cheeks anyway.

A prostitute. She let Hill reduce her to a prostitute so he could control her by dangling her next fix in front of her while she fucked some random guy for money. My little sister.

Oh my fucking God. I fell back on her bed and buried my knuckles into my eyelids to dig all that shit out, but I couldn’t un-know it and it made me sick.

“Talk to me, Sam. We need to talk about this,” she begged.

“I... No.” I flew toward the door and into the hallway, blinded by truth when I’d been living inside a dark lie for so long, while Rose’s sobs broke my fucking heart all over again.