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I nodded. “Yeah. I’ve known Margeaux since we were teenagers. This was after you’d left,” I explained to Alicia. “And I think that’s why you’re missing a key component of who Margeaux is. She wasn’tmeantto be aRose. Etienne planned to make her everything you said—royalty. She was going to be a socialite, probably still a monster, just… a different kind.”
“So then what changed?” Alicia asked. “What happened to make them take such an extremely different course with her?”
“Saanvi happened,” I said, shaking my head. “She settled in Italy, after… everything. She was back on the rise, and then fifteen-year-old Margeaux arrives for vacation, in the same town, and the perverts go wild. Her presence gets Saanvi’s attention, and she… decided it was her chance to orchestrate whatever vengeance she felt she still needed.”
“On an innocent fifteen-year-old?” Carmen asked, hand to her mouth. “That’s a child!”
I let out a dry, mirthless chuckle. “I don’t know that my mother was capable of the humanity it requires for age to be deterring factor in violence. After that though… they considered Margeaux damaged goods. A lost cause. So they dumped her inThe Gardenprogram and… the rest is history.”
Keira asked, “So… was she following you or something? Is that how she found Saanvi? Did she already know—”
“They suppressed a lot of shit for her,” I answered. “It’s what they do for most people they bring intoThe Garden. Constant programming, to eliminate anything that isn’t your existence inThe Gardenfrom your mind. Everything with them is psychological conditioning. I never got the memory suppression, but they did it to damn near everybody else.”
“It’s aharddetox,” Miranda spoke up, and Alicia and Carmen nodded.
“And it’s not… linear,” Alicia said. “I’m… damn near two decades removed and didn’t remember I had a sister until five or six years ago; didn’t remember therealhorror of it all until I ended up seeing her by chance. It made a crack. And from there, everything blew wide open.”
“That’s how it was for Margeaux. We all knew she was a Belrose, but none of us knew why she was with us. I won’t front, I got a kick out of sneaking around with her, like I was somehow getting back at her father and uncle by having a relationship with her. We were both wild as hell, damaged as hell, so we had something in common. The difference was, I knew wheremyshit was coming from. And then… after the fall, once I came back to the world, I ran into her. We… rekindled or whatever you want to call it. But I never talked to her about any of that shit—not with details. She knew the bare bones, but no names or anything. One day, she came to this little apartment I was holed up in and she saw a stack of pictures I had. Of Saanvi. She didn’t say shit to me about it, but I didn’t see her again until I ran into her coming out of my mother’s house. After she killed her.”
“Those pictures,” Tati mused. “Those were her… as Alicia referred to it… hercrack.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
“So what makes her killing your mother different from you wanting to kill my father?” Blue asked, crossing his arms. “You wanted to kill her for what she did. Why shouldn’t I want to put my foot up your ass?”
“Ourfather,” I corrected him, making his jaw flex in anger. “And the difference is, I didn’t know what my mother had done to Margeaux. I was angry initially, which made Margeaux quick to spill everything she knew. She led withI know where your father is. So here we are.”
Blue grunted. “The shit doesn’t make any sense. You were so angry on your mother’s behalf that you wanted to kill my father, but this chick killedherand all it takes is a location for you to be good?”
“You’re misunderstanding,” I said. “My mother made sure I understood I was hated from the time Icouldunderstand it. And then she handed me over to be beaten, raped, and brainwashed at the hands of the very monsters who’d victimized her. She wasnota sympathetic character for me. My loss was in not getting to ask the questions I wanted,” I explained. “So… yeah. Me and Margeaux are good because I know what my mother did. Whatever Margeaux did to her, she deserved.”
“But she took her revenge on the person who orchestrated it,” Blue countered, grasping at straws.
I appreciated getting to burst his bubble though.
“She got the names of every single one of them, found out where they lived, and violently sodomized them in front of their families after she made them admit what they’d done,” I said, relishing the horrified looks on everyone’s faces. “So… yeah. Everybody involved paid forthat. Any other points you want to make?”
“Fuck you,” Blue grumbled, shaking his head.
“I’m knocking your face in as soon as we leave this room,” I told him. “I’m tired of being cool.”
“Why wait?” he asked, pushing away from the table to stand up, and I was right with him, at the same time that most of the women stood too, creating a chorus of variations of, “Sit your ass back down.”
Alicia was only talking to me.
Tati was talking to both of us.
Carmen and Miranda were only talking to Blue.
Keira and Cree looked at each other, both probably wondering that the hell they’d gotten into.
“We donothave time for this shit,” Tati declared, glaring back and forth between us. She was the one keeping us separated and held up an admonishing hand at both of us. “If you need to fight it out later, fine, put on some gloves and handle it in the ring. But right now? Our concern is either getting Margeaux to give up whatever else she knows or a bullet in the head for Renard Belrose. It’s all so messy that I don’t even want answers anymore. I just want motherfuckers gone, so we can have some damn peace around here.”
“If I put myself in the open a few times, Margeaux will find me,” I told her. “That won’t be a problem. But we do need to talk to her before we call ourselves going after Renard. We need all the information we can get, especially about how manyRosesorThornshe might have on hand, and who they are.”
“Describe Margeaux to me.” Tati looked between me and Alicia for a response. I was still trying to figure out why she needed that when Alicia started talking.
“Stunningly pretty. Skin like polished mahogany. Nose ring—”
