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Beside me, Gabriel reaches across and squeezes my hand. It’s such a tender move, making my heart flip.
I need tonight to go flawlessly. I need answers, and I need the two of them beside me if those answers aren’t what I want to hear.
We head away from the nightlife into an industrial district of towering warehouses. The world darkens. I shift in my seat. “We’re almost there,” Noah says.
The car judders as it bumps over a disused railway line.
I swallow my heart as I squeeze Gabriel’s hand tighter. I’m glad he’s here. I’ll need to borrow strength from both of them.
I’m about to walk back into a world I swore to leave behind.
I’m confronting the empire that might’ve been mine.
I’m about to see for myself if the man I’ve loved as a brother has truly become a monster.
Eli
“Why have they come all the way out here?” George’s knuckles whiten as she grips the wheel. “I don’t like this.”
“Her cousin has a club on this side of the city. I bet that’s where they’re going.” I don’t take my eyes off the Chevy in front of us as they cross the railroad tracks and turn again. Luckily, there are several cars on the road alongside us to disguise our pursuit – far too many for a creepy industrial area in the middle of the night.
It’s hard to believe that less than an hour ago I was sound asleep on George’s trundle bed with Gizmo smushed into my armpit. George had a ping on her phone that she was on the move. She woke me up and we piled into her tiny Beetle car to follow them. We caught them just as Noah pulled out of a storage lot behind the wheel of a beat-up Chevy Caprice. The sight of Noah in a car like that on any other day would’ve been hilarious, but now it’s just creepy, like everything else about tonight.
Why are they all in Tartarus Oaks at 11PM on a school night?
Noah parks up outside a derelict warehouse. We’re on the edge of an abandoned railway yard – nothing else around but rotting train cars and weed-choked scrap. I notice all the parking spots around the Chevy are filled with cars. George drives past and finds a parking spot around the corner. “Get out, quick. We need to see where they’re going.”
“You worry too much.” George holds up her phone, where a blinking pink dot on a street map tracks Claudia’s location. “Besides, we can’t go to a club dressed like this. They won’t let us past the door.”
I glance down at my underwear, Stonehurst Prep hoodie, and school dress shoes I shoved on as we ran out the door. I hadn’t given a thought to what I’m wearing, and now there’s no way I’m getting inside that club. “Fuck, what are we going to do?”
“Luckily for you, I came prepared for covert ops.” George wriggles around in the backseat.
“You just happen to keep a fake mustache and bag of disguises in your car?” I peer at the pile of clothing strewn across the backseat.
“Duh. I’m a true-crime podcaster working at a vintage clothing store. Of course I do.” She emerges holding a pinstripe suit with enormous ’70s lapels. “Tada!”
“I’m not wearing that. I’ll look like a pimp.”
“It’s better than looking like a hobo.” George tosses the suit toward me.
I sigh. She has a point. I peel off my hoodie and tug on the suit, while George wiggles into a skintight red bodycon dress, tucks her hair beneath a platinum blonde wig, and winds three strings of pearls around her neck. She looks completely ridiculous with her cutesy tattoos on display, but she must’ve thought of that, too, because she wraps a fox fur stole around her shoulders. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
We link arms and run back around the corner to the Chevy. Claudia and the guys are gone, but we spy a couple of other people heading between a gap between the warehouses. We follow them at a respectable distance and see them heading through an open gate in a high chain length fence into the abandoned railway yard.
“What is this place?” George peers around her as we hike along a torn-up track bed toward the towering roundhouse at the far end of the lot.
It’s a train graveyard. Train cars line the tracks on either side, their hollowed bodies rusting in place, empty cabs like soulless eyes watching our journey to the underworld. In places, the tracks have been yanked from the earth, probably by the earthquakes that regularly shake the city. George pulls her stole tighter around her shoulders and stares at me with those giant eyes of hers.
People mill around the narrow entrance into the roundhouse – four lanes of track approaching the turntable around which the sheds housing the locomotives are arranged. I can’t see over their heads into the space beyond, but lights and music reach across the desolate yard, drawing us in. As we get closer I notice the people around us dressed to the nines, gold and diamond jewelry on display. Black-clad bodyguards survey the crowd, fingers toying with guns on their belts. My pimp suit fits right in.
We step into the crowd and approach one of the broad-shouldered guards who are nodding people through to the roundhouse. “I’ve never seen you around here before.” He narrows his eyes at me. “This isn’t a frat party. It’s invitation only.”
Fuck.
George throws herself in front of me. “But you remember me, don’t you, sugar?” she purrs.
The guard stares at her, licking his lips. George tilts her head to the side, her fingers running along his muscular arm as he taps his pistol. I’m forgotten as he leers down at her. “Why don’t you jog my memory?”
