The Oath We Give (The Hollow Boys Book 5)

coraline

“I thought you said they wouldn’t be here.”

“They weren’t,” Lilac mumbles as I follow her up the front steps to our parents’ home. “I guess they got back early from their trip.”

I’d come because she needed help packing the rest of her things. It’s normal for her to stay with me most days, but I don’t want her away from me now. We’d easily been able to convince Regina that Lilac wanted to stay with me for the summer and would come home once school started again.

I’m not sure she really heard the conversation, just nodded her head while flipping through a tabloid magazine. Either way, Lilac is coming with me; the details don’t matter.

Lilac’s hand grabs the front doorknob, only to have it pulled open from the opposite side. Inside, Regina stands, wearing a perfectly ironed green dress that reminds me of a booger.

Her retouched blonde hair is up in rollers, and she has that permanent pinched expression on her face as she crosses her arms in front of her chest.

“Coraline,” she snides. “When were you planning on telling your father and I about being engaged to the eldest Hawthorne son?”

As if he heard her, my father appears from around the corner, dress pants as always. Except the look on his face is different than I anticipated. There isn’t a look of contempt or disapproval; he almost looks happy.

It would appear Silas’s coworker from the other night had officially spilled the beans about what he saw at the art gala.

I didn’t want to see them. I really didn’t want to see them now that I know they’d found out about my upcoming marriage. Because if this has to be real in public for Silas? That means I have to make it real to the two people in front of me who call themselves my parents.

I hope to fucking God Silas doesn’t want to have an actual wedding because I don’t want these people seeing that. Maybe that should have been something I mentioned when I was laying out my rules. I blame it on the fact I got distracted by his arms in that shirt.

Sex brain ruins everything.

I don’t like the idea of weddings to begin with. Not the devoting your lives to each other—that’s fine. It’s having all those people around to watch it. In my mind, something like that should be shared in private. I don’t want to be vulnerable to the world, just the one person standing across from me waiting to say I do. Only they get to see me in a state of softness, with all my walls down and nothing between us but hands.

“Hello, Regina.” I push my sunglasses up on my head. “James.”

“This is gonna be awkward…” Lilac mutters below her breath, slipping inside the house and heading toward the stairs, ready to leave with me with the vultures like a traitor.

But it’s probably for the best. She’s a terrible liar.

The conversation between me and Silas regarding this arrangement ended with us agreeing that I could tell Lilac the truth and he could tell his friends. Those were the only people that could know what was happening between us.

“And where do you think you’re going, little miss?”

Li turns to her mother, rolling her lips together, trying her best to not look annoyed. “I’m going to pack the rest of my stuff. I’m staying with Coraline for the summer. I told you that already, Mom.”

“Honey, Silas and Coraline are going to need their space. Planning a wedding, prenuptial bonding.” Regina lets out a little chuckle. “No man wants to be saddled with baggage.”

“But—”

“She isn’t baggage,” I interject, my stepmother and I making eye contact. “And we want her in our space. She’s staying with me for the summer, Regina. It’ll give you more free time to spend at the country club.”

The thing about the woman in front of me is when met with snark, she’ll always find a way to bite back. It’s almost never in the form of a direct insult. Sometimes it’s a backhanded compliment; other times it’s pure pettiness.

When I was in high school, I’d mouthed off about something I can’t remember now, that’s how small it was, but after? She slept with my history teacher, and two days after, my class grade dropped to a C, which royally fucked up my grade point average.

I had no proof, but I was convinced she’d fucked him just so he’d drop my grade.

Lilac is able to slither away up the steps, avoiding the rest of this conversation.

“No ring?” Regina pushes, heels clicking as she walks toward me, snatching my hand to inspect the naked finger. Her claws scratch the underside of my palms.

“We haven’t picked one out yet,” I snide, jerking my limb back from her hold.

Her lips curl into a subtle smirk, head tilting ever so slightly, as if she’s sizing me up. Her scrutinizing gaze tears apart my simple shorts and T-shirt. I simply lift my chin a little higher.

I don’t ever remember a time when she hasn’t looked at me like this. Even as a child, the weight of her condescending eyes made me uneasy. It was as if I was some threat, that my entire being was an insult to her.

But I’d grown up, got a backbone, and found out there are far scarier beasts in the world than the wicked stepmother.

I step fully inside my old home, noticing the recent remodel to fit Regina’s new style of the year. Once when I was fourteen, she was so obsessed with dark mauve she’d had the pool painted that color.

“Why didn’t you introduce us to him at the gala?”

I move my eyes to my father, standing with his hands in his pockets in the foyer while Regina walks behind me to shut the front door, securing me inside this house till Lilac gets done packing.

“Silas is a private person.” The lie slips out easily, mostly because I think it might be true. “We both are. We didn’t want to say anything until we were ready.”

I’m going to have to pull context clues from what I’ve seen of him so far with this conversation and try to avoid setting things in stone. Regina will report every detail of this to her friends at the country club, and it will spread like wildfire.

I should’ve, at the very least, sat down and talked favorite colors with this dude. We didn’t even work out a relationship timeline. How does he expect me to play this up in public if we don’t even know each other?

“I just can’t believe it. We were afraid you’d be a spinster, but you seemed to have lucked out.” She laughs as she wraps an arm around my father’s waist, leaning into him. “You could’ve picked someone a little more mentally stable, but with that amount of money, it doesn’t really matter.”

She laughs like it’s funny.

As if she knows him and the joke at his expense is free.

A coppery tang fills my mouth, pressure from my teeth sinking into my tongue.

Regina is but one rat in this deceitful town; these self-proclaimed honorable people who cloak their faults and skeletons beneath ego and money drenched in blood.

They walk like royalty atop their ivory towers, shoving people beneath them on their way to the top, building empires on broken bones. For years, I had been told the Hollow Boys were villains. That their reign of terror had tainted this well-respected town known to house the nation’s most prestigious university.

But you can’t corrupt something that is already rotten to begin with.

They were just scapegoats.

It’s the reason the Halo went on so long. Small-minded, dense fucking minions had their eyes trained on boys blowing up churches and pulling mindless pranks, instead of removing the veil from their eyes and seeing the men they worshipped were false idols. They were buying and selling their daughters like scraps of meat. Turned girls into a commodity. Stripped away their humanity and turned them into nothing but cash cows.

“Regina, I put up with you for Lilac’s sake.” I step closer to her, hands tightening into small fists. “I play nice. I listen to your never-ending bitching and whining.”

I watch her shrink a little into my father’s arms, but that doesn’t stop her mouth from trying to run.

“How dare you speak to me—”

“But if you say another word about Silas, if you think a negative thought about him, I’ll make sure you’re out on your ass with nothing but your sparkling personality when I take my piece of Elite.” I sneer down at her as I lean forward. “Poor has a smell, and you won’t like when I leave you covered in it.”

Just thinking about sticking around to hear whatever words she tries to string together pisses me off. So I decide not to wait. I simply turn and walk toward the steps to help Lilac.

The quicker she packs her things, the better.

I don’t want to be in this house any longer than I need to be.

So for the next thirty minutes, I swallow my rage. I let it simmer beneath the surface, taking it out on fabric as I violently fold clothes and shove them into a suitcase.

Before, I’d been able to let her comments slide off my back like water. I could ignore it and move on. I’m like that with a lot of people.

It’s easier to deflect. I have more outlets and less intense emotions. I haven’t gotten tired of people walking all over me just yet. Stephen changed that, and I guess that’s something I have to thank him for.

He forged my silver tongue from the screams of agony and constructed my steel backbone from true despair.

I’m an exposed nerve.

Every brush of oxygen, distasteful remark, and backhanded compliment sent sharp, agonizing jolts of pain through me. And something inside me chewed that pain up and turned it into anger.

Being angry is easier than being sad.

Being angry is better than being the victim.

“You almost done getting your stuff from the bathroom?” I ask over my shoulder as her door opens, turning and expecting to find her with a bag full of her things but finding my father instead.

When I look at him, it’s hard to see anything but my trauma.

I can’t look back fondly on our memories anymore because now they all feel pointless. The fishing trips and late-night brownies in the kitchen. Any and all laughter we shared is faded dust.

When my father was arrested for his involvement with the Halo, he was quick to spill his guts to save his ass. Claimed that he didn’t get involved until I had gone missing. He was simply complying to get me back home safely.

He’d told the police everything they needed to know and in exchange only served six months. He spent a hundred and eight days behind bars for providing the Halo shipping containers that smuggled trafficked girls. That’s it.

All for me, he says. All to get me back.

Is it my bitterness toward men like him what makes it impossible to believe him? Or simply my gut telling me he’s a liar?

So when I look at him, all I see is a man I used to know.

We are strangers, standing in the bodies of father and daughter.

He shifts as if he’s uncomfortable standing alone in a room with me. My eyebrows furrow together, zeroing in on the white garment bag draped across his left arm.

“Regina’s comment was out of line.” He clears his throat after he says it, wanting to say more, but I interrupt, not giving him a chance to elaborate, narrowing my eyes at him instead.

“Are you coming to apologize for her? If so, you can save your breath.” I refuse to meet his gaze, turning back to fold another one of Lilac’s hoodies into a neat little square.

I can feel his presence behind me like an invisible wall, trapping me in place.

“Coraline, I…” He trails off, as if he’s choosing his words carefully. “Are you happy? With Silas? Does he make you happy?”

My eyes roll so hard I’m afraid they’ll get stuck, and I shake my head at his audacity. A few weeks ago, this man had been trying to set me up with a dude who offered me blow in a bathroom.

“Why do you give a shit, James?” My voice is harsh, but it doesn’t faze him, only making him release a heavy sigh—a sound that holds all the weariness of our relationship.

He’s never been very good at handling my attitude. The worse I get, the better chance I have that he’ll just walk away, like always.

“You’re my daughter, and despite what you may believe, despite some of my actions, I want you to be happy.”

“Few years too late for that,” I spit viciously, turning back toward him slowly. He’s taken a few more steps into the room, a little closer to me than he was before.

“Did you come to ask if I could drop off your dry cleaning?” I motion toward the garment bag draped over his arm, my voice edged with anger.

“Here.” His hand extends toward me. “Nora would’ve wanted you to have this. This was going to be the dress she wore at our wedding—” He clears his throat uncomfortably before he continues. “Take it. Get rid of it, wear it, whatever you want.”

Disbelief strikes through me.

I didn’t even know he’d planned to marry my mother. Hell, I think this is the first time I’ve heard him speak her name out loud. All I’ve heard is the vile shit Regina has said over the years and the assumptions from her anger.

When I don’t move to take it, he steps past me, laying it on the bed next to Lilac’s open suitcase.

“You kept this? After all these years?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. Eyes flicking between the bag and his face, I search for any ounce of dishonesty I can find.

“Yes,” he replies, pushing his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know why exactly. Regina would burn the house down if she knew, but maybe it reminded me of a time when things were simpler. When I was young and in love. Before life got in the way.”

My teeth grind together.

Despite everything, the anger, the pain, the bitterness, I can see the pain etched on his face. I can see the semblance of a young man clutching a baby to his chest, all alone in a hospital nursery, tears streaking his face as he hums, knowing the love of his life lies cold in the next room over.

None of this makes sense, him giving this to me, him talking to me like this. It doesn’t make sense.

“I see so much of Nora in you. The same tenacious spirit, your white streaks. You have her eyes.”

I swallow the knot in my throat. “Why tell me all of this? Why now?”

I want to believe over the years, we’d both let Regina poison our relationship, that she’d been the wedge driven between us. There is truth in his words I can’t deny, but forgiveness is not on my tongue.

James shrugs, running a hand through his dark hair, a sad smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “There are a lot of things I regret, Coraline. Things I hope one day we can talk about when you’re ready.”

He leaves me there after that, taking my silence as a response, shutting the door behind him.

I stand there, staring at the dress that was meant to be worn by a woman I never knew, and I feel the weight of his words settling in my chest. My fingers pull at the zipper of the bag, exposing the gown inside.

There are layers of lace and delicate silk with intricate beading along the bodice and ivory buttons down the back. It has a timeless elegance that has stood the test of time.

My eyebrows knit together in confusion as I notice a small, faded piece of paper tucked beneath the white tulle, its receding edges giving it a yellow hue.

They are vows.

I feel like I am peeking into a world that was never meant for me, a world that belongs to James and Nora alone. It’s a reminder of a love that was lost, an unfulfilled promise, a dream that never came to fruition. 

As I read, tears burn the corners of my eyes, and it leaves me wondering.

Is anyone truly who they pretend to be?