Jo laughed bitterly. “No. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m your damn sister.”
There it was again. The tightness of my throat. I took a step away from her.
“It doesn’t matter what he said, or what I didn’t do. He didn’t deserve that. You can’t keep resorting to violence, Jo.”
Jo rolled her eyes. “Not this again.”
“Not this again? Two weeks ago, you killed a man. You kicked the shit out of Ben, the boy you supposedly have the hots for. You punched that doctor. And probably took Alec out of this week’s game.”
“That’s what this is about. Isn’t it?” she charged.
“Stop,” I said, pointing my finger in her face. “Don’t turn this on me.”
“It’s always about you, Logan!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
A few cars started to honk at us. We were no doubt providing a great show for those driving on Kempsville Rd.
“You want to fool yourself that you’ve changed, but you haven’t. Not when it counts. You didn’t defend me because you couldn’t stand the thought that you might ruin the “in” you have. You couldn’t even be friends with me till Jenna said it was all right. When it comes to choosing between the people you can’t stand but desperately want to be a part of and choosing me, you’ll always choose them. We’re not really friends, and we both know it.”
She was crying harder now.
“That’s crap! What about how I stepped in with your dad?”
“What about how you didn’t step in with our mom?” she countered. “You couldn’t bear it. Could you? The thought of being related to me. It makes you sick. I can see it written all over your face.”
“You’re wrong,” I said weakly.
Jo shook her head. “I’m not. In the back of your mind, you wanted to be able to walk away. The minute this was over you could ditch me. Not anymore.”
“Not true.” It wasn’t. I didn’t plan on ditching her. I didn’t know why the news of us being siblings disturbed me so much. It just did. I didn’t know how to tell her this.
“Want to know what makes us so different?” she asked. She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. She never waited for me. “You hate shifting. You hate going to that world where you feel so damn helpless it drives you a little mad. You wonder what you did to get damned into this thing.”
Jo took a heavy breath. My hand reached for her, so I took another step back to stop the insane need I felt to wrap her into my arms.
“The difference between you and me is I love the shift. I hate it here. This place. This world. I have nothing here. Do you understand me? Nothing. When they took our mother away, they made sure of it. At least when we shift, I feel like I can do something. I don’t let anyone take anything from me. I fight back.”
“What did he said to you?” I asked suddenly.
“Who?”
“Bentham.”
Jo wiped her eyes again. When she was sure she had erased all evidence of her traitorous tears, she looked straight at me. “He reminded me we were dark. He told me there would come a time when we would get to choose to save it all or watch it all burn.”
I felt a chill run down my spine. “The Dark Men, the ones who took you from your mother, they wanted your life to be bad. They wanted you to want to end things.”
I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
Jo shrugged her shoulders. Her face back to being controlled. Stoic. “Can’t place all the blame on them. They may have made sure I grew up with that lame excuse of a man, but they didn’t make the people who knew I was being abused and said nothing. They didn’t make the people like Alec who bullied me and made me feel like nothing my whole life.”
“Stop talking like this,” I replied, taking a step towards her.
“You’re just concerned because you’re worried she’ll die. Jenna. Don’t sit there and pretend you’re worried about my soul or some crap.”
“This isn’t about her.” And I meant it. Right now it was about the broken girl in front of me. The girl I helped break for so many years.
“This has always been about her,” she whispered.
Suddenly, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had betrayed her. And Jenna. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore.
Jo took another step towards me, and my body tensed up. Jo frowned and took a step back. “You see? You really can’t stand it. You were just using me to save her. Every nice thing you said and did was to make sure I stayed your partner. But you’ve only ever been my partner when it suited you.”