Page 36 of Ash Fall

The study he leads me into looks staged for a movie, floor to ceiling bookshelves, leather furniture that looks like nobody has ever sat in and a desk the size of a pool table. Jules crosses straight to an oil painting of some ancestor with his same icy blue eyes. He swings the whole thing away from the wall on hidden hinges and spins the dial of the safe hiding behind it. Watching him work, I half expect a director to jump out and yell cut.

When he swings the door of it open, my jaw almost hits the floor. There are stacks of banded bricks of cash behind it. It’s more money than I've ever seen in my life. Jules starts transferring them into a leather duffel with all the ceremony of a man packing his socks.

"We’ll use as much of this as we can while it still means something." He fills the bag methodically as he talks. "Anyone still accepting cash, we buy them out, fuel, feed, medicine, whatever they'll sell. And when the money stops working, then anything else we need, we just take. Fuck the old rules, Gage. The end of the world comes with a brand-new set of them."

He's zipping the duffel shut when one of the bookshelf panels swings open with a soft click, and both of us nearly jump out of our skins.

A girl's head pops out of the gap. Long, pale blond hair spills forward around a face gone wide with shock. She stares at us with a pair of icy blue eyes that I'd know anywhere because I've been getting glared at by their twin set for years.

"Julian?" she gasps.

"Briar?" Jules stares right back at her, the unshakable Julian Stillwell finally shaken. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Oh, fuck. My gaze bounces between the two matching sets of eyes, and my gut drops with the math it's already doing. This has to be someone related to Jules, and I honestly don't know if we can handle more than one Stillwell in the group.

Chapter 18 - Jules

What the fuck is she doing here? She's supposed to be in Switzerland, tucked away behind alps and tuition payments, a whole ocean and most of a continent between her and this house.

Briar pushes the bookcase panel wider and steps out of the hidden safe room. She stops a careful distance away from us. Her chin comes up automatically, generations of Stillwell breeding kicking in, but her eyes give her away. They keep darting between me and the huge stranger at my shoulder. Her fingers twist into the hem of her designer sweater with a grip that's turning her knuckles white.

"Who is that?" Her voice aims for imperious and mostly gets there.

"Gage. He's a friend, he's safe, and he's the least of your problems right now." Stepping closer, I search her face for answers that aren't coming on their own. "Answer the question, Briar. Why aren't you at school?"

The chin climbs higher. "I was expelled."

"Expelled?" Years of overpriced tuition and a headmaster who kissed our parents' rings at Christmas parties, and they still threw her out? It would have to be pretty bad then. "For what?"

"It doesn't matter." One narrow shoulder lifts and drops, waving off the question the way our mother waves off staff. "It's not important."

The gesture rakes over my nerves. Fifteen years old and she's already fluent in Mother's whole dismissive language, and something in my chest twists at how perfectly she's learned it.

"When did you get home?"

"Two days before the moon did its thing." Her arms cross tight over her middle, and the imperious act develops its first real crack. "The staff came the next morning but after the sky broke, nobody came at all. Nobody, Julian. No chef, no housekeeper, nothing. I've been eating crackers and weird cheese, the laundry situation is a violation of my basic rights, and the pool has leaves in it. Actual leaves. I left three voicemails for the house manager, and the useless man never even called me back."

Gage makes a small sound behind me that might be a cough or might be a man watching a nature documentary about a species he's never encountered. Choosing to ignore him is the only option that keeps this on track.

"The world ended, Briar, and your complaint list starts with the pool guy?" Rubbing at the bridge of my nose buys me a second of patience. "Why are you even in this house? Mother and Father are at the villa. Why didn't you go to them?"

The question does something to her face. Her expression works hard at indifference, boredom, all the practiced masks our family hands out instead of hugs. I've worn every one of those masks myself, and I can see straight through to what sits underneath. It's hurt, quickly buried.

"They didn't want me there." The words come out flat and rehearsed. "They told me to come home and stay here as my punishment. Father said the villa is for family who don't embarrass him."

For a second, nobody says anything, and the sentence just sits there in Father's study, stinking up the room the way everything he touches does.

Fuck. Spinning away from her, both my hands drag through my hair and pull. Fuck, fuck. Almost being drowned, captured by soldiers, super volcanoes, being in love with a girl who has four other men in love with her? That isn’t enough? I need another thing added to the list? Fucking universe.

"So now I'm supposed to babysit you through the apocalypse?" It comes out harsher than I mean it to. "Fuck."

"Jesus, Jules." Gage's voice drops into that disappointed-dad tone he’s so good at. "She's just a kid, and she's your sister. What the fuck, man?"

Turning my head, I hit him with a dark look and pitch my voice low enough that it stays between us. "Say that again after you spend more than five minutes with her."

Uncertainty flickers across his face, because Gage is a good man who believes family means what it meant in his grandfather's farmhouse, but then his hands come up in exasperation.

"And what? You want to just leave her here all alone? That's not right, no matter what."