The Collar He Bought Me

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My brother died in my arms, drowning on his own blood.

His hand was clamped over the bullet hole in his chest. He spent the last air in his lungs on six words.

I regret ever being your brother.

Everyone called me crazy. They had a point.

I'm the one who wrecked him. He used to be all clean lines and quiet decency. And he wasn't even mine by blood. His mother adopted me, and we grew up months apart in the same too-big house. I still found a way to ruin him.

I loved him the way a fire loves a house. I wanted him past every line we were never allowed to cross, and I held on, and held on, until there was nothing left of either of us to save.

Then I opened my eyes.

No blood. No riot. No gun in the dark.

He was standing right in front of me. Alive. Furious. Whole.

I got him back.

So this time I'm going to do the one thing I never managed before.

I'm going to let him go.

I'll hand him back the clean, bright, ordinary life I burned to the ground. And I'll walk out of it myself, before I can set fire to anything else.

Even if he spends the whole of it never once looking at me.

Chapter 1

"Stella. Read back what you wrote about your own brother." His voice tore through the room. "Does it not make you sick?"

Dorian stood in front of me with my diary open in his hands, knuckles white around the spine, that careful face of his gone red to the tips of his ears.

I should have wanted to sink through the floor.

Instead I burst into tears. Not from shame.

From relief.

Because I knew that voice. I'd buried that voice. I'd knelt with the sound of it in my ears for longer than I'd been alive this time around.

And here it was. Here he was. Alive. Furious. Whole. Years before the blood. Before the bullet. Before he died regretting me.

I got it back. The first fight. The exact second he found out what I was.

Last time, in this exact moment, he pointed at the box of journals on the floor and told me to burn them.

And last time, I came apart.

I grabbed him by the collar and I kissed him. My brother. The one person who had never once let me hit the ground. I felt him go rigid under my hands. Then he ran.

He spent years running, pulling back an inch at a time, and I chased every inch of it like the disaster I was. Everything that came after grew straight out of that one kiss I had no business taking.

So this time, when he pointed at the floor and told me to burn them, I didn't reach for him.

I scrubbed the tears off my face with the back of my wrist. I bent down and picked up the box. Ten years of us, in my own careful handwriting.

"Okay," I said. "I'll burn them."

He looked at me like I'd started speaking a language he didn't know.

Here's the part people leave out when they call it unnatural: we aren't blood.

My mother and his mother were best friends. Mine loved too easily and chose worse. She married a man who used his hands, and she was gone before I turned five. My father drank himself into a ditch on the way to confess to it. So his mother took me in. Then she died too, the winter we started middle school, and the house emptied out to just the two of us and a few staff drifting through the halls.

He's only months older than me. You'd never have known it. I was the wreck. He was the adult. The night my stomach gave out, he sat by the IV pole till morning. Every storm I couldn't sleep through, he let me drag my blanket into his bed.

Even after a girl named Ivy fell to her death and the whole world decided I'd pushed her. Even after he hated me down to the bone.

When the violence finally came for me, he stepped in front of it without half a second's pause.

That was him. All the way down.

He loved me like family.

I loved him like a confession I'd never be allowed to make.

Last time, when the news came that he was dead, our housekeeper Marta cried until she couldn't catch a breath. And old Silas, who'd driven us since we were kids, put a shaking finger in my face.

"You did this. That sickness in you, that grabbing, greedy need. You drag every last person who gets near you down into the dark with you."

He wasn't wrong about that part.

I spoiled you, he told me at the end.

I regret ever being your brother.

He regretted it.

So did I.

They said the temple up at Northgate would answer you, if you were broken enough to climb that high. I went to beg for one thing: that in my next life, he would never lay eyes on me at all. The abbot wouldn't see me. I'd earned that. So I knelt. Season after season, year after year, until the dark stains worn into those stone steps were mine, one bow at a time, from the day my hair was black to the day it went white.

Chapter 2

In the end, when I was ancient and bent and nearly out of time, the abbot finally let me in.

"What's done cannot be undone," he said. "But a new beginning may still be possible."

He folded my ruined hands around a small silk charm.

"The thing that pulled him down into the dark, across both your lives, was never fate. It was you. Your own holding-on. A second life is wasted unless you unmake the circle you built with your own two hands."

"This will guide you," he said, "to the moment you begin again."

When I woke, the charm was still warm in my palm. Proof none of it had been a dream.

This time I won't repeat myself. Whatever it costs me. As long as he gets to be safe, and happy, and free.

The next morning we drove to school and neither of us said a word about the night before.

The quiet in the car was the kind you could choke on.

He only broke it when we pulled up.

"You got Ivy hurt the other day," Dorian said. "Apologize to her today."

Stiff. Braced. Like he'd already run the whole argument in his head and lost patience with the version of me who would fight him on it.

I just nodded. "Okay."

He looked at me, thrown for the second time in two days. Then he let it go.

At lunch I went to find Ivy like I'd promised.

I found her with him.

Warm afternoon, the courtyard loud and gold. She was laughing up at him, and she reached out and thumped him lightly on the chest. Then she caught sight of me, and the laugh died, and she ducked behind him with the bandage on her hand pressed out of sight.

He moved without thinking. Put himself between us.

"What are you doing here?" A little distant. He'd already forgotten he was the one who sent me.

I couldn't even blame him for flinching.

I really am the crazy one.

I had this possessive thing about him I could never get my hands around. He's beautiful, and he's gentle, and there was never any shortage of girls who noticed. One by one, every single one of them, I drove off.

He let me do it. He never stopped me. So I told myself the thing I needed to be true: somewhere under all that quiet, he was mine too.

Like last time. Last time I clung, and I crossed lines, and I read his hesitation as an answer. Every moment he didn't shove me away, I filed it as proof. I never let myself notice the simpler thing. That he just didn't know how to push his little sister off without breaking her.

Ivy mattered to him. Even ten years after she was gone, he still hadn't forgiven me for her.

I swallowed the sour thing climbing up my throat and bowed, fast and low.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you hurt, and I shouldn't have humiliated you in front of everyone. Can you" The word stuck. "Can you forgive me?"

Ivy's eyes went to Dorian first. Only when he said nothing did she answer.

"It's okay. Don't think about it. I forgive you."

I straightened, and my eyes landed right on his.

Something was moving behind them I couldn't read.

There was another reason I'd hated her, last time around.

More than once, I'd seen her standing too close to Holt Thorne.

Holt was my brother's enemy. Rotten to the center of him, the kind of rich boy who collected people the way other boys collected debts, always with one foot out to trip Dorian up. I'd been sure Ivy was sent to get close, to play with his heart and hand him over.

So I'd made her my enemy too.

This time I didn't care what the truth turned out to be. I was going to dig it up with my own hands. And put the two of them back on the road they'd lost.

Whatever it took.

Chapter 3

So I started shadowing Ivy. Told her I felt guilty, that I wanted to be her friend.

She was wary at first. Once she was sure I didn't have a knife behind my back, she let her guard down.

I worked my way around to it. "What do you think of my brother?"

Color climbed up the side of her neck.

"Dorian? He's helped me a lot. And he's good with animals. He used to feed the strays around here, even paid to get them fixed."

"I think he's kind."

There it was.

It went both ways.

And the thing was, Ivy deserved it. Her family didn't have much, but she carried herself like it never touched her, riding straight As and a scholarship through a school full of kids who'd never once counted a dollar. Proud, and poor, and good in a way that made you feel like the villain just standing next to her.

My brother is beautiful. Top of the year. Sitting on the inheritance Aunt Vance left him. Put the two of them in the same frame and anyone would tell you they matched.

I'd known that for two lifetimes, and my chest still went sour enough to fizz.

That night, he knocked on my door. He didn't come in. Last time, walking into my room uninvited was how he found out what was rotting around in my head, and he hadn't forgotten.

"I'm just looking at schools to apply to," I said, before he could ask. "Nothing else."

Even now. Even reborn. I could still feel him widening the gap between us an inch a day. Kiss or no kiss, he was never going to look at the sister he raised and see her wanting him. Kiss or no kiss, I was never going to be able to stop.

He cleared his throat, awkward.

"Why'd you stop walking home with me?"

That surprised me. I hadn't expected that to be the thing he asked.

Because I need to get used to a life without you. Fast.

I didn't say it. Even today, the schools I'd been looking at were the ones farthest from him. He and Ivy both had the grades. They'd end up at the same place. Me, I'd go wherever put the most miles between us.

"Ivy and I get along," I said, pulling the flimsiest excuse off the rack. "We walk back together now. It's nice to have someone to talk to."

I didn't even believe me.

He stared. Long enough that my scalp prickled.

"Am I cramping your style?" I asked, chin up.

He frowned and flicked the tip of my nose.

"What are you dreaming up in there. There's nothing going on."

He dragged a hand through his hair, restless. "Forget it. You. It's good you're making friends."

We walked home together after that, like always.

She'd started letting me in. I needed her to, because there was one thing I had to know.

Why she really went off that roof.

Last time, everyone was sure I'd pushed her. Even Dorian. I had the record for it, a long one.

But I didn't.

I never laid a finger on her. Not so much as the hem of her sleeve.

She climbed up there on her own, crying, and she went over.

I kept circling the same question. Something must have been happening to her, something bad enough to make her want out. So I tried to hand her a door.

"Ivy. If anything's ever wrong, anything at all, you tell me. Whatever the trouble is, I'll help you fix it. I mean it."

She blanked for a second. Then her eyes went red.

So there was something.

She opened her mouth to tell me.

That was when they came out of the alley.

Half a dozen of them, fast, wrong. Steel bars in their hands, the kind wrenched off the back of a school desk.

I'd picked up enough to handle myself as a kid. I held them off. Barely.

Ivy wasn't so lucky.

I saw the bar coming down at her and I didn't think. I just put myself in front of it.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 4

When I came to, the pain hit first. The back of my skull, down through my shoulders, raw and hot.

I was covered in mud. But what was in front of me wiped the surprise clean out of me.

Ivy was on the ground beside me, stripped, the way they'd left her for the camera.

"Hey. Ivy. What did they do to you?"

My voice shook. I didn't stop to think. I went for the phone lying in the dirt.

I just wanted to reach my brother.

The screen was a spiderweb of cracks. Dead.

Then light hit me full in the face.

I ducked on instinct, eyes screwed shut. Sirens. And under the sirens, Dorian's voice, furious.

Something shoved me hard. I went down against the edge of a step.

"Stella. I actually let myself believe you'd changed. And you were just sitting on this the whole time, waiting for your moment."

His eyes were red all the way through.

I stared up at him, too slow. Then it landed.

He thought I'd done it.

"Dorian. No. It wasn't me."

He scooped Ivy up off the ground.

"You're holding the phone and you're telling me it wasn't you? Delete the pictures. All of them. I'll deal with you at home."

I shoved up off the step, reaching after him. "It wasn't me." The sirens ate it whole. He didn't slow. He didn't turn. And I stayed there on the ground, watching his back shrink down the alley, my eyes filling.

Then the last of my strength drained out, and the dark came down again.

I dreamed about the last time he looked at me like that.

After Ivy went off the roof. When they hauled me in to question me.

Dorian hit me. The first time in his life. A flat, ringing crack across my face.

"How could you do something like this."

"I am so disappointed in you."

"I wish I'd never had a sister like you."

His eyes weren't even angry by then. Just grief, sunk so deep it had gone flat and quiet.

I couldn't blame him. There'd been two people on that roof, and one of them was me. Nobody alive believes a girl goes over that roof for no reason. Not a girl about to graduate, with the whole world in front of her.

He didn't believe me either. He still hired me the best lawyer money could buy.

No cameras up on that roof. No proof I'd touched her. Not one fingerprint of mine on her. There was always the chance, though, that I'd put the idea in her head.

In the end they called it an accident. Dorian wrote her mother a check with a lot of zeros on it. Her mother came to the school screaming anyway, every single day, until he pulled us both out for good.

I did ruin his life. If he'd never had me, imagine the one he'd have gotten. All that light.

Whatever the rest of the world decided, for Dorian it came down to one sentence: his sister killed the girl he loved.

After that day, there was no road back.

I jerked awake.

My own bedroom. The familiar ceiling.

Dorian was at the edge of the bed, watching me, hollowed out, the skin under his eyes a bruised gray. When he saw me surface, his whole face came undone for a second.

Then he pulled me in and held on like I might slip through his hands.

Ivy had woken before me, it turned out. She'd told them how it actually went.

I'd been knocked cold shielding her. The boys who jumped us had gotten the pictures they came for and run.

Dorian held me, and his whole body was shaking, and the apology kept coming out of him.

"I'm sorry, Stell. I'm sorry."

"Your brother got it wrong."

"I didn't keep you safe, and then I threw it in your face without asking a single question."

"You should hit me, Stell. As hard as you want."

Chapter 5

His trembling came through everywhere we touched. The warmth of him. My own eyes went hot before the rest of me caught up.

Days of swallowed hurt broke loose all at once. I cried all over the front of his shirt, the ugly kind, nothing held back.

"It's my fault. All of it." My voice came out wrecked. "If I hadn't been such a mess before, you'd have believed me."

I shook my head against his chest, desperate for him to take the promise.

"I'm done. I swear it. I'll never hang off you again. Never put you in that spot."

"I won't want you anymore. I'll just be your sister. Your sister, that's all, for the rest of my life."

I felt him go rigid for half a second. His throat worked around something he didn't say. His fingers fisted in the back of my shirt, then made themselves let go.

Then his hand started to move, slow, against my back.

We stayed like that a long time. Whatever had been wedged between us seemed to melt out of the room.

He brought me the bowl of chicken soup from the side table.

"Eat something first."

He tied my hair back for me, then reached for his coat.

"I'm going out for those egg tarts you like. Call it an apology."

He paused at the door.

"Wait up for me. When I get back, there's something I need to tell you. It matters."

I watched him go, obedient for once, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something in him had turned over. Like he'd just decided something he'd been circling for years.

He didn't come back.

What came back first was a message from Ivy.

Ivy: [Stell. Please. Come up to the school roof.]

Ivy: [Come by yourself.]

Ivy: [Please...]

I was out the door like the house was burning.

Why was it happening anyway? The abbot's words went around and around. What's done cannot be undone. Could I really change nothing at all? Then what was any of this for?

But the message was different from last time. Last time she'd sent me bait. A taunt, a lie, telling me she and Dorian were up there together.

This time was different.

This time the truth felt close enough to put my hand on.

Up on the roof, Ivy stood crying, exactly like the life before.

"Ivy. What are you doing up here." It wasn't a question. It was a plea. Get down. Get away from the edge.

She looked at me and her knees just folded under her.

"Stell, I can't get out of it. The ones who jumped us that day were Holt's people. They've got pictures of me. Videos. A lot of them. I was trapped before you even knew my name."

The blood went straight to my head.

"You knew all this and you didn't go to the police? You're the victim. None of it is on you."

She screamed, right at the edge of breaking.

"It doesn't work, Stella. I tried. It doesn't work."

"They've got my mother. My little brother and sister. Holt's family is the kind nothing sticks to. You don't fight people like that and win."

"He's not a person, he's a thing that plays with people. He's been at it for months. He wants Dorian in the ground, and the way he picked to do it was through you."

"Stay back from me. As long as you don't touch me, there's nothing they can pin on you. Dorian loves you. He'll find a way to keep you safe."

Her voice tore down the middle.

"But if I don't do what Holt tells me, my family doesn't get to live."

Chapter 6

I didn't let her finish.

I crossed the roof and got a fist in her collar and hauled her back, away from the edge, hard.

My own voice came back at me off the stairwell wall, raw and too loud.

"Do you have the first idea what it would do to him if you died? He'd carry you the rest of his life."

It was only then I realized I'd been crying the whole time.

Ivy stared at me, stunned out of her tears.

The charm slipped from my pocket and hit the concrete with a small, flat clack. It lay there, still. I could almost feel again the warmth it had carried the first time I closed my fist around it.

And all at once I understood how to take this out of his hands. Out of Holt's hands. For good.

Holt buried everything. Paid it off, threatened it quiet, made the right people forget. But there was one thing money couldn't bury and an untouchable family couldn't hush. A story too loud for any of them to sit on. And I was already the girl this whole city believed was capable of anything.

Ivy had a mother. A brother. A sister. People who could be used against her.

I had no one left in the world to lose.

"Okay," I told her, and my voice was steady now. "So we make it too big for him to bury. We drag every last thing he did into the light, and we put him under it."

I turned toward the edge of the platform.

A street away, Dorian felt the night crack open behind him.

The sound nearly knocked what he was holding out of his hands. It was the last box of egg tarts in the place. The shop he'd meant to go to had closed, and he'd doubled back through three others before he found this new one near the school.

Around him the crowd began to churn.

"I think someone's dead."

"A girl went off the roof. A student."

Dorian turned. He looked toward the school.

He couldn't have said why, but the second that sound hit, something behind his ribs had clenched like a fist