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That’s why I love Gabe’s music so much. He can capture with a haunting riff and a few lines of poetry what it feels like to be trapped inside a house that’s on fire while the fire department has gone on strike. Claws says he can sing the stars, and she’s right – when I listen to Octavia’s Ruin, it’s like I can suddenly see the sky through the bars of my cage, and they’re the same stars Gabriel Fallen sees.
Gabe drowns himself in alcohol until he can’t see the walls of his cage anymore, and I put my head down and study as if I might one day be able to think my way out. And maybe that’s what he’s offering me.
He grabs my shoulder and gestures shakily at the room – the cat castle, the rack of knives and swords set up against a target, Tiberius stalking in front of the French doors, his finger tapping the stock of his weapon. “This is Claudia’s life now. She had the chance to walk away from the August family legacy, and now she’s ruling it. The moment she made that choice, she changed the course of my entire life, all our lives. I may be useless dead weight to her, but I’ll follow wherever she leads, even if that makes me no better than cannon fodder in a gang war.”
“You shouldn’t say that.” Absinthe churns in my gut, and I know it’s partly the fact I’m tipsy, and when I’m tipsy I’m always desperate to talk, but I must convince him of his importance. It feels somehow essential. “It’s not as if you planned your life based on needing to be useful to a mafia queen. Claws chose you because she needs art and music and poetry to make sense of the bloodshed. What you do is important, and she would never want you to stop.”
“I know,” Gabriel says this with sadness, and I’m not so sure he does know. “I had my choice, too. I chose her. And I’ll choose her a hundred more times. But you’re different, George. You have more to do than cleaning up the trail of bodies left behind by a mafia queen. But if you keep getting your hands dirty, there will come a time when you can’t wash the blood away. If you want to escape Emerald Beach and the Triumvirate, your window is closing fast.”
I stare at the list of prerequisites for the scholarships. Candidates can’t simply have perfect grades – they need to excel at extracurricular activities and show themselves to be outstanding leaders in the community. “I don’t see how I could possibly qualify for this scholarship. I can’t exactly put ‘performs underground autopsies for criminal organization’ under extracurricular activities.”
“No, but you did make a world-famous podcast and put a con artist behind bars. You’ve already done so much in your life, George. Don’t throw in your lot with us when you can do so much more.” He nods. “Think about it.”
Gabe snatches the absinthe bottle from my fingers and tips his head back, draining the final few dregs. I fold the brochure and shove it into my pocket, where it burns blue-hot against my skin.
Noah
In the basement, Eli yanks open a large storage cupboard. Random sporting equipment tumbles out. He ducks to avoid being decapitated by a set of skis, and drags out a large bag containing ropes and harnesses and other climbing equipment.
“I can’t imagine any of the Malloys using this stuff,” he muses as he digs through the bag.
“You ever used this type of gear yourself?” I peer at the bag with trepidation. Felix did a bit of climbing with his friends over the summers, and he’d always invite me to come along, but I preferred to spend my summers in the pool. I think about how I gave up swimming to switch to track because I wanted my father to look at me the way he looked at Felix, and my hands clench into fists and I want to smash that rogue ski through the big screen TV.
I wasted far too fucking long offering the best of myself to my father and it still not being good enough. And all that time, he was the one who destroyed our family. Every shitty thing that’s happened to me is on his shoulders.
I’m done.
I’m fucking done.
If I find out he’s in any way connected to this attempt on Claudia’s life, I’ll squeeze the life from his body with my own hands.
“Nope, but it can’t be that hard.” Eli pulls out a tangle of rope. “We’ll find a YouTube video. All we need is for one of us to climb up into that hole, then we can rig a permanent ladder or something, in case we need to get in there again in a hurry.” He starts dragging the bag toward the stairs, his brow furrowed. He’s in problem-solving, protector mode, which is a good thing because I’m in punching-holes-through-the-walls mode, which gets nothing productive done except better indoor-outdoor airflow. But I know Eli well enough to see that he uses it to hide from what he’s truly feeling. And maybe I want to see Eli lose his fucking shit for once. Maybe I don’t want to be alone.
“Eli.”
He looks up. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
Mackenzie fucking Malloy, the girl he’s been crushing on since before we were friends, just broke in and shot someone dead under our fucking nose. Eli might not have seen Mackenzie in the dark, but she was literally breathing down his neck. That’s gotta do a number on him.
I’m not exactly sunshine and roses myself. That bitch might not have had as much to do with Felix’s death as I thought, but she’s trying to kill Claudia. And I’m gotten too damn good at imagining what it will feel like to wrap my fingers around her scrawny neck and squeeze until she’s no longer our problem.
I want to choke a lot of people. Every time I close my eyes, I see visions of violence etched on my eyeballs. I’m jittery, on the edge of fucking losing it.
I need to get back in the ring. It’s been too long since I washed this poison from my veins.
Eli runs a finger through his hair. “She smells the same.”
“Huh?”
“I thought it was a hallucination. You know, from the absinthe? Odette was rambling on about spirits and I could smell Mackenzie – violets and bubblegum – just the way she used to smell when we were kids.” He shakes his head. “She was right there, in the room with us. We could have reached out and touched her.”
Rage coils around my heart to think about it. “What I don’t understand is how could she miss at such close range.”
“I think George is right, that she mistook Odette for Claudia,” Eli points out. “It was too dark to see faces or distinguish the dress colors. We got lucky, is all.”
“We need to find her,” I growl. “Emerald Beach is only big enough for one Malloy daughter, and I know damn well which one I want to triumph.”
