“What? What!” I hollered at them. “You can step on my love, but I can’t step on yours? What kind of fucking rule is that?”
“He is your father!” she screamed as Wyatt rushed to his side, putting pressure on the wound.
“She is my wife!”
“Your fucking wife killed a member of our family!” Wyatt screamed back at me.
“Aunt Cora was already dying,” I hollered back.
“What?” Wyatt asked, his stupid eyes all wide and fucking confused.
“What?” I mocked him. Leaning over, I fucking mocked the shit out of him. “What? The family doctor didn’t notice? You went and did all that schooling, and you didn’t fucking notice little brother? You didn’t notice her cancer was back? What?”
He shook his head. “I checked her medical reports, and the autopsy—”
“Are you new to this family, dipshit?” I looked at the woman beside him. “Melody, sweet mama bear of mine, what did your autopsy say? Liam, hang in there, tell Wyatt what your autopsy said since the moron doesn’t know we can fucking fake those! Medical records, we can fucking fake those! Why? Because we own the goddamn motherfucking hospital! Guess who was head of the board here?”
I knelt into the little family huddle they were in around my father. “Come on, guess little brother. Who was on the board here at this hospital?”
He didn’t say anything and instead focused on our father. So, I knocked on the floor in front of him.
“I didn’t gut him; he won’t bleed out. Come on, answer me, little brother, since you are making such big moves with big people now. Tell me, who was on the board?”
“Ethan, enough, we know it was Coraline—”
I held out my hand to her. “Melody, do not let me focus on you, or one of us will really die here today. I promise you, Calliope will wake up and heal despite the bullet you used, so it cannot be me.”
She huffed. “Melody? This is how you talk to your mother after everything I have done for you, everything I sacrificed for you and—”
“Sacrificed for me or your own ego?” I laughed bitterly. “All of you kept saying I was blinded by Calliope when the truth is you all are the blind ones! Calliope hasn’t been trying to destroy the family, you idiots. She’s been trying to destroy her own! In doing so, she has to save this family, but you all refuse to see it! All of you refuse to fucking see because we protect differently than you!”
My mother thought she had sacrificed?
She might have, but not like Calliope.
Not at all like Calliope.
7
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
~Oscar Wilde
ETHAN
Sitting on the floor, I breathed in slowly, trying my best to calm down, but in all honestly, I wanted to take a bat to everyone’s head. I wanted to smash things against their skull
so badly if someone put a bat in my hand, I might actually swing.
My fucking head hurts.
“You expect me to believe she’s trying to save the family,” Melody scoffed. “Are you sure you know everything she has done. All the information she sent to her grandfather. What she’s done to—”
Lord, give me strength.
“Which grandfather?” I asked, shifting my head to look over at her before pointing in front of me. “That grandfather? The one with the hole in the back of his skull.”
“She killed him because we backed her into a corner,” she replied beside my father as Wyatt stitched him up. She sat with her back against the rows of steel drawers, refusing to hear me.