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The casualness with which she speaks of her own attempted murder makes my cock jerk to attention. The alcohol hums in my veins, my whole body drowning in a sweet warmth that makes the danger and insanity of this conversation seem utterly comical. “What happens now? We whack Brutus and Bollywood, and then what?”
Claudia laughs, and the sound is glass shards tinkling against cold hotel room bathroom tile. Beautiful in the way all pain is beautiful, and instantly sobering. “You’ve known the truth for all of seven minutes and you’ve already jumped to whacking.”
“What can I say? I’m a fast learner.”
“You don’t just go around taking out crime bosses on a whim,” Antony snaps. “For one thing, Brutus has gone to ground. How do you plan to get close enough to him to ‘whack’ him?”
“Also, no one says ‘whacking’ anymore.” Claudia rolls her eyes. “This is politics as much as it’s crime. There’s an honor code, and we need to be careful how we approach this or we could land the city in an all-out gang war.”
“Intriguing,” I drawl. Noah manages to wrestle my vodka away. I lurch toward him but misjudge… everything, and end up in a giggling heap on the floor. Possibly it’s for the best. I wave goodbye to my vodka as Noah pours it into a potted plant.
I burp loudly and shoot my arm into the air again. “I have another question. Why does he call you Claws?”
She raises a hand, curling her fingers over, her long fingernails dripping blood-red polish. “Because I may be tiny, but if you come too close, I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
Why do I have a feeling she means that literally?
Why do I find that so damn hot?
Claudia shoves Buzzcut and Cave-In Face (I’m too wasted to remember their names) out of the ballroom and pulls the doors shut behind them. She leans against the ornately carved panels, her chest heaving, her blonde curls plastered to her face.
“So…” she looks like she’s ready to bolt.
“You’re not Mackenzie,” Noah says. “You’re not her.”
He looks relieved. Such a weird face for Noah Marlowe. It doesn’t suit him.
She shakes her head. “I’m not going to apologize again. I’m not sorry I stole her life. It was up for grabs and I did what I had to do to survive. I am sorry that I dragged the three of you into this. I checked Mackenzie’s room before I started at Stonehurst. I’ve been using her old phone for years, so I read all the messages. Apart from Eli’s incessant texts that eventually stopped coming, there was nothing that talked about close friends or cute boys, so I thought I was safe if I could keep up her Ice Queen facade. I didn’t find her diary until later – the one that talks about her friendship with Eli and the crush she had on Noah. By then, the three of you…”
She trails off, her eyes flicking between the three of us. When they settle on me, she shakes her head. “…I got carried away. I blame Gabriel. I can never refuse the boy who sings the stars.”
What does she mean by that?
The phrase catches in the fog of my mind, and it drags another memory from the depths of my addled brain. A memory so warped by time and substance abuse that I can’t be certain it’s even a memory at all, although the sting of the words branding my skin feels real enough.
It was the night my parents sent their lawyer around to my London hotel to inform me I’d officially been cut off. I knew it was coming, of course. I’d been taking public jabs at their stiff-upper-lip for years, and changing my name was the final nail in my lead-lined coffin. But I thought the Duke of Blackwich might at least have the bollocks to do it in person. I should have known better – my father never wanted to face up to me before. That would mean acknowledging his own failures. I was just an annoyance, a bug to squash under his shoe. So he sent his lawyer over with a wax-sealed letter like we were in fucking Elizabethan times, and just like that, I was out of the family. No title, no inheritance, no invite to carve the Christmas roast. Fuck you very much.
I screwed up the letter and tossed it out the hotel window. “I don’t care.”
I did care. And I didn’t know why I cared so fucking much. So I decided to drink until I didn’t care for real. It took a lot of alcohol. And some random pills I found under the mattress. And no less than four groupies who brought more drugs and did interesting things with the heated towel rails. Then the groupies left and I cried on the floor of the shower until Dylan pulled the curtain aside and found me lying in my own vomit.
“Hel…” I tried to say something, but I couldn’t make words happen. “Dyleeeeeeelp…”
“You’re disgusting.” He nudged my hand with the toe of his boot.
“Wasssssidoooo…”
“What did you do? What did you do?” Dylan’s voice was a cannonball bashing between my ears. “You have to get on stage in four hours, Gabe. I have to sleep in this room that you’ve completely trashed. Did you even think about that? Course not. You were thinking about Gabriel bloody Fallen and no one else.”
“Leeeetteeeeeerr…”
“I know about the letter. I was here when you opened it. Not that you’d remember. You stopped paying attention to me a long time ago.” Dylan lifted his boot and ground my hand beneath his heel. I registered on some level that it hurt and that it would make it hard for me to play, but I was too far gone to care.
“So go on, Gabe,” Dylan spat as he dug his heel in deeper. I heard something pop in my fingers, and the pain ratcheted up a level that started to register through the haze. “Curl up inside your guitar case and cry. Beg for death because your daddy doesn’t love you. Because no one loves you. There are a thousand broken souls who’ve forked over fifty bucks a ticket to hear you scream their pain back to them, who believe you carry the stars down to earth, but you’re going to burn out their love the way you do everything else that’s good and pure and beautiful. I loved you once, and now you’re ashes, Gabriel. You’re fucking ashes.”
I felt like ashes, pieces of me scattered in the wind. The cold of the shower tile touched my cheek, and then the old injury in my hand throbs, reminding me that at least some part of the memory is real. I blink, and when I look at Claudia again, I’m a good deal soberer. Soberererer. Soberish…
Okay, maybe not much soberer. But enough that I can comprehend what she’s saying if I focus hard. “…the three of you are staying here until we can clear this up. We’ll send Tiberius around to your places if there’s anything you need. If you have to leave the house, we’ll have someone on you at all times.”
