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“Not until you stop running away from your problems and listen to me,” she shoots back, wrapping her fingers around my wrists. Her implication is clear – she’s not letting go, so if I want to get away from Nero and my parents, I’m taking her with me.
“Lady, I’m not allowed to park here,” the driver yells as a car behind him blows the horn. “Are you in or out?”
“Out,” I yell, and the same time Claudia barks, “In.”
The driver plants his foot and takes off before she’s even shut the door.
Claudia
“I know you’re upset,” I say as I lean across the seat and pull the door shut. “But you can’t run away every time something happens that shatters your fragile reality. What are you going to do when you’re at college and you get your first ever C on an assignment?”
“That would never happen.” Eli sits rigid in the seat, back upright, hands folded in his lap. He won’t look at me.
“I never told you to agree to Nero’s bananas plan.” I grab his arm and shake it, trying to get him to look at me. “But I need you to not shut down a potential opportunity like that before we’ve had a chance to explore all the options. Nero’s showing his hand. I knew he had a weakness, and now we’ve found it. And it’s you.”
“You want me to do it,” his tone is flat.
“Of course I don’t want you to marry Livvie. You’re mine. But I have to think about more than us. I have to consider the doors this might open.” I tap a few buttons and hand him my phone. “You seen what’s happening out there?”
The screen plays a video from in front of Constantine’s restaurant and training club. A group of angry people armed with pipes, knives, and bats slam into each other. There’s a sickening CRACK as a guy’s head hits the pavement. Eli’s jaw clenches as he watches the chaos unfold, as he sees the insignias worn by the mob.
Lucian. Dio. August. The three families turned on each other.
“What do you want me to do about this?” he says in that flat voice that tears my heart in two.
“Nothing. That’s not your job. I’m the one that has to stop this because I’m the one who caused it. Mostly this is about whether Cali has the right to rule Dio, but it’s about so much more. It’s about Nero killing Constantine, and it’s about two women having a seat at the most powerful table in this city. People’s worlds are turning upside down, and they don’t like it.”
Eli stays silent. I search desperately for the right words.
“You think I’m throwing you away. You’re asking yourself if I think you’d be more valuable to me if you were Nero’s heir?” The quiver in his lip tells me I’m right. “You’re my conscience, Eli. You’re the moral compass pointing me north and the angel on my shoulder stopping me from disappearing into the void. I need you. I can’t go into war without my guardian angel.” I trace the line of the August tattoo on his wrist. My eyes cloud with tears. “Please come back to me. Daddy had a quote from some ancient philosopher for every occasion. He loved this saying from Plutarch: ‘I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and nods when I nod. My shadow does that so much better.’ That’s why I need you, because Noah will follow me into the abyss itself and Gabriel will sing my funeral dirge, but I need you to keep me away from the edge even if I’m the one pulling us all in. My father thought he knew what he loved until he was faced with the choice to give it up for me. If you ask it of me, I’ll give everything up for you, but I have to make sure no one else dies for a pointless war first, okay?”
Eli wipes his face with his hand. “If your dad hadn’t been a crime lord, he could have been a philosopher.”
I dare a tiny smile. “Oh, I doubt it. He had this other favorite saying from Aristotle, about love being a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Which sounds lovely and like the exact kind of platitude Cleo would post on her Instagram, except Daddy would take great delight in telling you the rest of the story. Aristotle wrote this satirical essay claiming that long ago humans looked very different – we had large round bodies with two faces and two sets of limbs, and we’d wheel around like giant beach balls with doll legs and arms sticking out. We humans got cocky and tried to roll right on up to heaven, so Zeus got pissed off and chopped them all in half. And now we all wander the earth as these half-orbular beings, searching for the other half of our souls to put back together again and— holy shit,” I breathe. “Eli, I’ve figured it out.”
“What?”
I hammer on the back of the driver’s chair. “Hey, you. Drive faster! We need to get to Malloy Manor.”
“Claws, what is it?”
I throw my arms around Eli, plastering his face with kisses. “I know where the treasure is hidden.”
Eli
Claudia refuses to sit still on the ride back to the manor. She calls the others – interrupting Gabe’s practice session with Broken Muse and George’s college interview – and tells them to get home immediately. She barks orders to the driver and keeps urging him to take dangerous shortcuts. She won’t stop kissing me, which despite how angry I am with her right now, I can’t help resist. I’m caught up in her excitement.
That’s what Claudia August does to you – she dazzles you until you don’t know which way is up.
Her face lights up like Christmas as we pull up behind the house. She tears off toward the maintenance shed. I jog after her, my head still spinning from the conversation with Nero.
She leaves the maintenance shed door hanging open – something she hasn’t done since Brutus got into the house. I step into the car tunnel, but she’s already disappeared.
“What is it? Claws, where are you?”
I follow the sound of her footsteps – through the garage, up the stairs, down the hall, to the large display room beside Mackenzie’s old bedroom where she kept most of her doll collection. I remember. Her father got her those creepy dolls – one for every birthday and Christmas, and every time he made a visible mark on her body he needed her to cover up.
“He’s trying to buy my silence,” Mackenzie used to say, staring into the eerie, silent face of her latest acquisition.
