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Claudia
Grace dies in the night.
The doctors do everything they can. They pump her stomach, give her charcoal, and run test after test after test to try to figure out what made her sick. Eli thought to head up to her room and shove every pill bottle he could find into his bag and bring them to the hospital, but nothing matched the symptoms she demonstrated.
I think back to the way she acted at the party, how she leaned hard on her cane for support, how her glassy eyes swam with pain and determination. And I think of Brutus’s glazed eyes peering up at me, baring me to end it all. A horrible, sickening feeling clutches my stomach and won’t let go.
Noah holds Grace’s hand as she closes her eyes for the last time. His face is desolate. Noah is gone. In his place is a monster.
Two orderlies hover in the doorway, waiting to wheel her away to the morgue. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Noah roars, flinging himself at them. He kicks their gurney against the wall. They scatter in terror, and I know it won’t be long before we’ve got security on our asses.
I call Galen. “I need you to pull some strings for me.”
My loyal doctor comes through for us. An hour later, another pair of orderlies knock on the door. “We’re here on Galen’s orders,” one says. Noah turns, his fists curled, but I throw myself in front of him.
“They’re going to take her to Galen. He’ll give us the answers we need. Then you can give her the funeral she deserves.”
Noah sags against me. The fight hums inside him, the monster begging to be unleashed. But he lets them take her.
Tiberius drives us across the bridge to Tartarus Oaks. Galen has set up shop in the basement of the largest veterinary clinic in the city. Upstairs, unknowing citizens bring their sick pets to the best vets in the city, who earn a top salary as long as they don’t ask questions about the locked basement door and look the other way when medical supplies go missing. Tiberius leads us down a hidden stairwell into the basement.
Galen has an impressive setup – the veterinary clinic is housed in the one remaining wing of an old hospital building. Galen’s makeshift infirmary, laboratory, and morgue stretches the entire length of the old hospital. I can see him and George in the morgue through the glass that separates the areas, moving around the body on the table, making notes, taking samples. Noah paces across the floor, his body rigid with hate.
I lose count of the hours. My ass is numb and Noah has worn a hole in the carpet by the time Galen approaches, his face grim. Noah lunges at him, grabbing his collar. “What happened to her?”
“She was poisoned,” Galen says.
“The fuck?”
“There’s a small needle mark on the inside of her arm. She’s been injected with a drug. Grey Death, but not a kind I’ve ever seen before. It also contains high amounts of deer antler velvet.”
Noah’s head snaps back. He drops Galen and staggers away, his eyes wide as saucers. I know exactly what he’s thinking.
Galen continues. “This injection probably happened fairly recently – sometime this morning. The dose would not usually be enough to kill a human, but when it’s on top of the regular amount of this drug she’s been taking, it’s caused a toxic build-up that stopped her heart.”
“What the fuck did you just say?” Noah yells.
“That this woman has been using this deer antler velvet concoction on a regular basis, most likely daily, for months. If she wasn’t on some kind of illegal sports enhancement, then it’s likely someone was trying to poison her.”
Noah cries out. He lunges at Galen, who darts away just in time. Instead, Noah grabs a trolley of medical implements and hurls it across the room. An expensive-looking microscope follows, crashing into a filing cabinet and shattering to pieces.
I probably shouldn’t let him turn Galen’s lab into a rage room.
“Noah. Noah, look at me.”
Noah gasps as he hurls a computer screen into the wall. I catch him as he reels, grasping his face in my hands. Anguish rakes her poisoned claws across his skin, opening deep wounds that he will never, ever be able to heal. He will bleed forever because he has already lost so much. Because even a soul as strong as Noah’s can only endure so much heartache before his humanity is burned away to ash.
I know this, because I’m made of ash and vengeance.
Noah struggles against me, but some part deep inside him recognizes me, sees his own hate reflected back at him. It calms him a little, only enough so I can get through.
“Noah.” I whisper his name, call him back from the brink.
“My father did this.” Noah’s face burns red. The anguish lives in his bones now. “He did it to send a message to us. We meddled in his shit and he killed her to make me stop. All those drugs he had her taking, pretending he was caring for her…”
“If he thought this would make you cower, he doesn’t know you at all,” I say. “You give me the word and I’ll have his throat slit by tonight—”
But Noah wasn’t listening, not really. He was throwing himself against the walls of the cage his father created. “Grace knew what he was doing to her. She never intended to leave that house. She knew she was already dying.”
