“We’ll see about that.” Vince downed a shot of whiskey and shook his head as if he didn’t believe her. “Sweet girl, you have no idea how sordid our past has been. We’ve done things…well, let’s just say, there’s probably a special place reserved in hell for the Buchanan boys, and that includes Dillon. Are you sure you want to know all our dirty secrets? You still have a chance to close Pandora’s box.”
“I can’t go back to how things were — completely ignorant and complacent — everything is changed. I’m changed. Please tell me what happened to that poor girl and why Dillon hates you.”
Nolan accepted a glass of whiskey from Vince, and after a quick swallow, he began with a sigh. “Isabel Walker was like an angel.” A brief smile lifted the corners of his generous mouth. “And being the true devils we were, we had to have her. But Dillon got to her first. As you already know, he has a way with women. But Dillon broke the rules, he fell in love with her and declared Isabel off-limits. Of course, that only spurred us to want her more. You see, Penny, when you grow up having any and all things at your immediate disposal, the word no has little meaning. We saw it as a challenge and simply waited for the right moment to spring. We had no idea that Dillon had stopped playing the game. We didn’t believe him when he said he’d fallen in love with her.”
Penny’s gaze flicked to Vince to gauge his reaction to Nolan’s telling of the story and when he refused to look her way, she sensed that either he was ashamed of his part or there was something else he didn’t want to share or acknowledge. “So it all started off as a game between the three of you?” she asked, trying not to cry at the callousness. When Nolan nodded in a subtle motion she looked away. “That’s despicable. You played her for fun.”
“I told you we weren’t the heroes in this story,” Nolan said. “Would you like me to stop?”
As horrified as she was, she knew she had to follow through to the bitter end. “No, please continue,” she whispered. “But right about now that whiskey is looking pretty good.” Vince filled a shot with the amber liquid and handed it to her with a grim quirk of his mouth in understanding. She murmured her thanks and downed the shot. Nolan gave her a moment for the whiskey to burn a trail down to her gut before continuing. Penny choked a little as the fine liquor seared her throat and stole her breath but she needed the liquid courage to continue listening.
“Isabel was one of those rare gems who was sweet and loving and wanted to believe the best in everyone. She was the exact opposite of everything we were accustomed to in our world. You have to understand money comes with a certain privilege but it also comes with pitfalls. People are never what they seem and you learn to be a cynic. Trust is a privilege we’ve never experienced. Everyone always wants something from you when you have an excess of wealth. You learn very young to never accept anything at face value. And we were all guilty of being the worst that money can produce. Over-privileged, over-educated, and completely bored as fuck. As you can imagine that's never a good combination. When our father had decided that he'd had enough of our shenanigans, particularly that of Dillon's he put his foot down, which was something we weren't accustomed to either. Honestly, our father never paid much attention to us. He was always too busy with his own life to deal with three rambunctious boys. I don't even know why he threw down the gauntlet with Dillon. But when it happened, Dillon bucked against our father's will and a war ensued. Unfortunately, Isabel was in the middle."
"Did your father like Isabel?" Penny asked.
"No. Aside from the fact that she was dirt poor and had no connections our father’s opinion of Isabel was that she was good for one thing and when she wouldn't give it up to him he didn't want her around anymore."
"Your father propositioned Isabel?"
Vince offered a dark chuckle. "Our father liked to sample all of our girlfriends. Be thankful he's dead."
Penney shuddered. "How disgusting."
Vince laughed. "Yes, well you can’t expect sinners like us to be raised by a paragon of virtue. Our father wasn't exactly a good man."
"I'm so sorry." Penny thought of her own Papa and how wonderful he been as a father and she wondered how the three boys would've been different if they'd been raised with someone who was kind, compassionate and moral. “What did Dillon do when he found out about your father propositioning his girlfriend?"
"He went into a rage. I've never seen him so angry. I think it was the moment he realized that Isabel meant more to him then just a piece of meat. I think Dillon would've married her." Nolan shifted, as if the memory was almost too much to bear. "Isabel changed Dillon and for a time he was a better man. I don’t know, maybe that threatened our father because it was not long after that he made his demands. The irony is that Isabel defended our father because she didn't see the harm in his request for Dillon to work for him. On the surface it appeared that our father just wanted Dillon to stop screwing around and become responsible. But we all knew it went deeper than that. Hell, none of us wanted to work for our father. But Dillon was the only one who had the balls to stand up to him. Unfortunately, he paid the biggest price. When Dillon refused — his actual words to our father were to go fuck himself — Dillon was cast out of the family."
"The old man was in rare form," Vince recalled. "God, that man was a prick."
"How could a father do that to his son?" Penny asked. "I can't imagine how hurtful that must've been for Dillon."
"Yeah, it’d done a number on him. But he was too proud to admit that he was scared and he was too pissed off to take it back. Isabel tried to talk some sense into him but he wouldn't listen." Nolan paused for a refill. "And we were too selfish and self-absorbed to realize what we had in mind for Isabel was wrong."
"What happened?" A part of her already knew but she needed the twins to admit what they’d done. "What did you do to her?"
Vince downed another shot and fixed his glazed, whiskey-soaked stare her way. "You want to know what we did? We played on the delicate sensibilities of a girl who was brokenhearted and too naïve to realize that we were sharks and she was just a guppy. We chased her into a corner with pretty words and promises of a future we had no intentions of providing her and then we convinced her that Dillon didn't want her anymore but that we would always take care of her. We lied so that we could fuck her. That's all that mattered. It's all we wanted." Vince's voice rose to an angry pitch but Penny detected a strain of something else lying beneath the surface, something that sounded a lot like pain. Vince continued, grim and final. "And when she realized everything was a sham and that Dillon was truly gone and not coming back she climbed to the top of our building and jumped off."