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But now I have to finish what I started. My secret hangs in the crisp air, and I need to speak it or it will become a cancer between us. I ball my hands into fists and stare down at the railing. If I keep looking at those rows of teeth being torn up by the relentless ocean, I’ll start screaming and I won’t be able to stop.
“The night my parents died, I… I didn’t tell you everything.”
“I figured,” Noah says dryly. He really does know me.
“I woke up in the night to the sound of someone in my room. I tried to fight them off, but they already had a hold of me. They dragged me out of bed and pressed a cloth soaked in chloroform into my mouth. As they carried me downstairs, I saw my mother slumped in a chair, still dressed in her clubbing clothes – a beautiful silk dress and stiletto heels. She’d been stabbed multiple times. Her blood arced across the wall behind her and splattered across the window. I could see my reflection in the glass, behind the blood, and I remember thinking in this weird detached way that it almost looked as if I had her blood on my skin, as if I’d been the one to stab her. I must’ve passed out then because the next thing I knew, I woke up inside a coffin, buried beneath the earth. I—” I clung to Noah as the memories assailed me. “I could feel the weight of the dirt on top of me. With every breath, I felt my life slipping away. I tried to claw through the wood, but it was useless. I… I…”
I died that night, on the inside.
“How did you escape?” Noah’s arms tighten around me. His voice tightens too, as though there are things he wants to say but he’s afraid if he lets the words free they’ll become weapons in my hands.
I know that feeling all too well. My stomach tightens as the words form, then die, form and die, on my tongue. I’ve carried this secret on my own for so long that speaking it aloud feels like giving Noah a piece of my heart, and I shouldn’t be dishing out secrets to coal-eyed boys who hated me only a few weeks ago.
Noah dissolved a guy in potassium hydroxide and flushed him down a bathtub drain for me.
I trust him.
“Antony. He saw Brutus’ men at our house and followed them. As soon as they left the cemetery he dug me out again. But he couldn’t save my father.” I choked out the words. “The greatest gentleman crook of our times lies in that cemetery in an unmarked grave.”
Noah strokes my hair. It’s such a tender, un-Noah-like action that it makes me want to weep. It’s something Eli would do. I can’t think about Eli now or I’ll fall to pieces completely. I snuggle deeper into Noah’s embrace, breathing in his intoxicating scent, pressing my ear to his chest to listen to his heart beat rapid-fire for me. Something about the steady rhythm of it reminds me of the music from the dance – the band drawing out the wildness in all of us like a frenzied pagan rite.
“Thank you for tonight,” I whisper into the folds of Noah’s shirt.
“What for?”
“I went to a real school dance with two hot boys.” I lean back and tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I’m still wearing both my crowns. The homecoming one slides down over my ear again and I reach to clip it back in place. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to wear her skin to have all this. I wish I was the Ice Queen of Stonehurst Prep instead of a mafia queen in hiding. I wish her life could be real for me.”
Noah looks out over the people teaming onto the balcony. It looks as if the dance is over for real, as a long line of cars pull up outside, discharging more people in glittering outfits. “Look around. Everyone is living a fake life. We’re all wearing a mask. Cleo’s a seventeen-year-old living her life on the internet and she has no idea which version of herself is the real one.”
“What’s real, then?”
“This.”
He kisses me. It’s rough and raw and beautiful, the kind of kiss that spreads an ache across my chest. Noah’s lips part mine, and his tongue threatens to devour my darkness. He is a sin-eater, taking my crimes into himself to sate his own lust for revenge. He slips under my skin to wear my misdeeds as his own.
As Noah wraps his arms around me and pulls me closer, melding our bodies together, I believe. For the first time, I believe that he sees what’s underneath, the black heart at the center of me, the heart-shaped box I’d carried since Brutus took my parents from me. That it doesn’t frighten him. That he could even be falling in love with it.
And that is the biggest lie of all.
I pull away, because he is everything I crave and I will not destroy him. I look into those eyes that reflect my heart-shaped box back at me, and I find the words to break the spell that binds us. “Where’s Gabe?”
Noah blinks. I don’t think he’s heard me, so I repeat the question. As the words leave my mouth, the spell unknits. Noah has let go of my sins, for now.
I haven’t seen my rock-god since he was pulled away to talk music. I cast my eyes over the people on the deck. The party has filled up since Noah and I moved out here, and I hardly recognize anyone. I can’t see Gabriel anywhere. A knot of worry tightens in my chest. We’d neutralized our enemies, for now, but I didn’t like having Gabriel out of sight.
Noah must be thinking the same thing, because he threads his fingers through mine. “Come on. Don’t let go.” We shove our way back into the fray, checking every group for Gabriel’s beautiful face. He’s not on the terrace, and I can’t see in him the blue-lit swimming pool on the floor below.
Inside, the place is wall-to-wall people. Noah charges ahead, using those broad shoulders of his to force our way through, like his namesake parting the Red Sea. Rising over the music is someone laughing – wild and throaty and slightly unhinged. Gabriel’s laugh.
My heart thumps harder.
We find him in the kitchen, gripping the counter as he battles some punk-looking guy at a drinking game. I don’t understand the rules, but Gabriel is holding some kind of elaborately-carved horn aloft, sloshing liquid from the brim. The punk recites a poem with his hand across his heart. Both of them have runic symbols scrawled on their cheeks with hot sauce, and the crowd around them roars with laughter, phones raised to capture the magic.
As we draw near, I recognize the punk kid from a popular Emerald Beach band. He’s got two bananas strapped to his head, sticking out like horns, and he seems to be improvising a drinking poem. “Fill your cups, feel no distress… your brain cells will soon be less… For what’s there to do when you don’t wanna think? Join Gabriel Fallen for another drink.”
Everyone claps, and Gabriel hands over the horn for the punk to drink from. A girl reaches up with a squeezy bottle of hot sauce to scrawl another rune on his cheek.
“Claaaaawwws,” Gabriel drawls. He throws an arm around my shoulders, not knowing or caring that he’s leaned his entire body weight on me, and we’re going to topple over at any moment. “Come here, my beauty, my love, my musey muse muse. We’re singing bard songs. Songs of drinking! Now that you’re here, I feel words of profound wisdom coming to me…” He whips the horn from the punk’s hands and holds it out to me. I push it aside but that’s a mistake, because Gabriel sloshes it everywhere as he sweeps his arm through the air and pronounces dramatically, “Booze goes in my mouth, and love goes in my heart. But if your hand goes up my ass, you’ll get the mother of all—”
