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Every brick. Every tile. Every triple-glazed window and gaudy column and faux Roman statue. It’s mine, and I’d fight any asshole who stands in the way of making Malloy Manor my own.
Queen Boudica leaps onto my lap, batting at my phone. I’m lying on the chaise lounge in the ballroom – one of my favorite rooms in the house and one where the French doors face the back garden, so the press at the gate can’t see inside. I pull one of her toys from between the cushions and toss it across the room. She skids on the marble floor, tiny black limbs flailing everywhere as she tries to beat the fuzzy mouse into submission.
“Gabriel keeps asking me to hang out with him,” I tell Antony.
“So do it. Go ‘hang out,’ which you need to learn is teenager talk for ‘fucking each other’s brains out.’ I won’t stop you. I think you should have some fun, Claws. It’s your senior year. You’re almost all grown up—”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Antony chuckles. “I know, you’ve been grown up since you were born. All I’m saying is, if you want to jump up and down on that posh prick’s cock, it’s not going to screw up our plan. The world already knows Mackenzie Malloy is back. It might even work in our favor, give the press a new story to chew on.”
I rub my temple. What if it does, though? There’s so much at stake, and not just for me. This is Antony’s life, too. Queen Boudica drops the mouse onto my chest, and I toss it for her again. As she claws her way around the bottom of the curtains, I notice a shape moving along the top of the garden wall. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Some bastard paparazzi has climbed the wall.” I can see him precariously perched on the narrow ledge, using wire clippers to cut away the barbed wire coiled around the top. Bastard. He’s the first one of those slimy snails to try to climb the wall – so far the rest of them had settled for peering through the gates and snapping photographs of me as I entered school. Stonehurst employs a security team to keep them away from students, but they still hang around. This cheeky shit is trying to get the scoop on me, and for that, he will pay.
“I’ll send someone to sort it out—”
“No. I’ll take care of it. I have to go.” I drop my phone on the sofa and back away from the windows. It’s too late to turn out the ballroom lights – he’s seen me lying around in booty shorts and my Octavia’s Ruin shirt, tossing fuzzy mice for my cat. Page ten, have I got a scoop for you.
I won’t have him out there, staring at me, polluting my house. I don’t like being watched. It reminds me too much of… other things. Times in the past when eyes have followed me with ill intent. I’m not supposed to feel unsafe here. This is my house, my castle. How dare he sit on the parapets like he’s earned the right to my presence?
My jaw clenching with determination, I storm up the staircase to the third floor. I hardly ever come up here – it houses the master suite and a strange turret thing with a hot tub and a small balcony and windows overlooking the hills and sprawling city below.
I turned the circuit breakers off in this section of the house years ago to save on power bills, so I creep across the room in the dark to the bar area, where crates of wine had been piled in the small walk-in. My parents – rich assholes that they were – kept barely any actual food in the house, but the four wine cellars (WTF) are stocked to last at least three apocalypses (what’s the plural of apocalypse? Apocalyii? I guess there doesn't need to be a plural as there’s only going to be one…)
Anyway… I stacked the bottles by the window months ago for… just this reason. I yank a couple of bottles out of a crate, fling open the window, and toss them at the pap.
“Fuck!”
He leaps off the wall just as one of the bottles smashes into the stone right where he’d been sitting. The second bottle flies wide, sailing over the wall and smashing on the other side. Great, now the guy’s stuck on this side of the wall. He steps forward into the square of light cast from the ballroom windows, and I gasp as I recognize him.
It’s Eli.
“I’m covered in sticky wine now,” he shouts up at me.
In response, I lean out the window and flip him the finger.
“Mackenzie, I want to talk to you.”
“We don’t always get what we want.” I hold up another bottle of wine. “If you don’t get off my property in ten seconds, I’m shoving this one somewhere unpleasant. I’m counting. One.”
“I don’t think I can climb over the wall from this side,” he points out, a little petulantly. “And if I open the front gate you’re going to be swarming with reporters.”
“Two. Hope you’ve lubed up your asshole.”
Eli throws up his hands. “You run away from me at school, you ignore my texts. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Three.” He’s Jace. That’s the only explanation. Which means that for some reason, thirteen-year-old me didn’t want anyone who might pick up my phone to know I was talking to Eli. I want to ask him about that, but I can’t, and that pisses me off.
“I thought you were dead.” His voice cracks on the words, and the pain on his face is open and raw. “All these years I’ve tried to find out what happened to you, but you just vanished. I couldn’t even grieve for you because my fucking parents would figure it out. And then you just show up and act like you don’t know me. Why, Mackenzie?”
No. no no no no no. This can’t be true. Eli’s talking like we used to be an item. But that was four years ago. Eli has girls falling all over him now. Why does he give a fuck about a girl he knew when he was thirteen? The way his face twists – he has feelings for me. Or, at least, for the old Mackenzie. For the Mackenzie who’d never been buried alive in her own coffin, who had her life stolen and her memories tainted forever.
I checked every last corner of my room. There was no mention of a guy, no loose ends I needed to tie up. I had to be sure of that or Antony and I never would have risked me attending Stonehurst. Yet somehow we missed both Noah and Eli.
I watch Eli’s face twisting with pain, and it hits me.
