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“I can’t make her talk to me.” I drop George’s phone into my pocket to return to her later. “I just wish… I could make her talk to me.”
“You can talk someone’s ear off for years and never say the right thing,” Gabe points out.
I know he’s thinking about Dylan, all the pretty words he wished he’d said but wrote into song lyrics instead. The investigation might’ve revealed Dylan’s death was murder, but Gabriel still blames himself. My fallen angel carries the pain of the world on his wings. His bones crack from the weight of burdens that aren’t his to carry.
“I’m fucking this all up.” I rub my eyes. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.”
“None of us do.” Gabriel strokes my hair.
I press my ear against his chest. His heart raps against his ribs – a steady rhythm, so unlike Gabriel who was always racing from one thing to another. “Are you okay? I’ve been so focused on Eli I don’t think I’ve asked you. About Dylan and the drugs and the ranch and everything. I can’t imagine what you went through when you saw what happened to me.”
Gabriel stares off into space. His fingers touch his pocket, where he usually keeps his weed. But we just smoked his last joint. He’s trying to stop drinking and smoking so much, and I think that’s a good thing. If he doesn’t have those vices to fall back on, he’ll start writing music again, and the world will be brighter.
He turns to me, and his words slice through my chest. “I felt like I lost a piece of myself. When we arrived at the ranch and found you on the porch with Eli… there was so much blood. Your eyes were open, but you stared up at the sky, and you just didn’t move. I felt like I was looking at a life-sized doll – you looked like you, but there was no one inside. You’d left.”
He swallows. Gabriel has already lived through the pain of having someone he loves die in his arms, and I put him through that all over again. I hold him so close and so tight, and I wish I could take some of his weight for myself.
“I’m not leaving you,” I whisper.
“Dylan left, and I didn’t save him.” Gabriel’s shoulders shake. “I could have saved him a thousand times over if I hadn’t been so bloody selfish. I expected him to be in my debt for taking him away from his father’s life. I expected him to do all the boring band stuff I didn’t want to bother with, and to pick up the pieces of my self-immolation. We might’ve run away from the castle, but I still treated him like a servant. And nothing’s changed. I haven’t changed. At the ranch, everyone was running around, fetching things and helping you and protecting us. All I did was stand there and watch. I couldn’t even pray, because no god will listen to me. I’m bloody useless.”
“Don’t say that. I need you.” My voice wavers. I can’t stand to see him like this.
“You don’t, though. When I saw Noah walk out into the ring and pound that guy to dust, I wasn’t even surprised. That guy will burn the world for you. And Eli’s as smart as they come. You need people like them, and George, and Antony, although he’s scary as shite. But what do I bring to your fight? I’m just a guy with a guitar who holds your beer while you storm the barricades.”
I take out my phone. It’s on its last legs. I’ve thrown it against things so often in the last few weeks that the screen is now held on with Scotch tape. I scroll through until I come to my playlist. “Here’s what you bring.”
I press play.
Gabriel’s voice comes through my speakers, tinny but still powerful and raw with emotion. The echoes of his pain sing in every note. I let the music wash over me, but instead of closing my eyes, I keep them locked on Gabriel. I let him see all the dark shit that pools inside me being dragged to the surface. I let him see how I need that darkness to keep on fighting.
On the track, Gabriel erupts into a scream of anguish as if the hounds of hell truly are tearing at his flesh. The hairs on my arms stand on end as the sound hits me in the gut.
His scream courses through my veins, and I remember screaming along with this song when the weight of being alone cracked my bones, too. And now I’m staring in that same boy’s eyes.
“Ever since I found your music,” I whisper, “you’ve screamed for me. You let all the shit out so I can be brave. That’s your superpower, Gabriel Fallen. You feel things so us mere mortals don’t have to. You eat sin and drink heartache and make it into something beautiful.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know if I’m that guy anymore. It feels like the music has left me.”
“I don’t think it has. I think it’s been there all along. You just don’t want to listen. You’re afraid of what you might hear.”
Gabriel’s fingers entwine with mine as the song bleeds into another. He stares out across the athletic fields for a long time. His breath makes clouds in the frigid air.
When he turns back to me, there’s a grim determination in his eyes I’ve never seen before. He brings my hand to his lips and kisses the knuckles. The kiss is hot, reverent, a pagan god to his goddess. “I think we should see my parents.”
“Are you sure?”
He shifts. He’s uncomfortable. It’s kind of adorable. “I’m not sure at all. But the duke won’t accept my ignoring him for much longer. If I don’t go to him he might come to me, and I think that’s much worse. Besides, I’ve heard you want to see my castle.”
Eli
All day I can barely focus on my classes. I’m dreading my first day working for Nero. I’m not starting my work experience officially until we get back from Germany, but he wants me to come today to meet the team and the animals. He says he’ll be too busy to give me a personal introduction – I know it’s because he’s preparing for Saturnalia, but I don’t tell him I know that. Instead, he’s given me an address for one of his clubs and told me they’d look after me.
In my mind, I turn over everything Claudia’s told me about Nero and his business, how he’s threatening Ms. Drysdale, how he extorts money from film producers and club owners and has his fat fingers in Brutus’ prostitution ring. I balance that with Claudia’s precarious position – she’s the only surviving heir to a criminal empire that’s about to become the most hotly-contested property in all of Emerald Beach. In so many ways, it’d be easier if we just disappeared somewhere… but we can’t. Claudia’s worried about Antony and about Mackenzie showing up. I am too, and also…
If I can find a chink in Nero’s armor, something that will give Antony and Claudia their freedom, then we can all have a shot at a future without the Triumvirate.
I just have to survive working for the city’s most powerful crime boss, while secretly dating his enemy.
