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“How can you be here?” Anton asks her.
“Oh, come now,” Lila says, low and dangerous. “You know how I got here. I walked. From Wallingford. On my little paws.”
I try to shift, just a little, so it will be easier to stand later.
Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone’s watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he’s actually sawing a girl in half. You think he’s doing one trick when he’s actually doing another.
You think that I’m dying, but I’m laughing at you.
I hate that I love this. I hate that the adrenaline pumping through the roots of my body is filling me with giddy glee. I’m not a good person.
But deceiving Anton and Barron feels fantastic.
I can hear footsteps echoing around me, moving toward her. “I’m sorry, Lila,” says Anton. “I know that—”
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” she says.
Someone touches my shoulder, and I almost flinch. Rough bare fingers on my neck, looking for a pulse. The one thing I can’t fake. He pulls open my jacket. If he unbuttons my shirt, he’s going to see wires.
“You’re a little devil, Cassel Sharpe,” Grandad says under his breath.
Clever as the devil and twice as pretty. I force myself not to smile.
“Give me the gun,” Anton says, and this time I do open my eyes a sliver. He’s got the knife in one hand. “You know you don’t want to do this.”
“Get against the sinks!” she says.
He drops his knife and swipes his hand toward her, knocking the gun out of her grip. It skitters across the floor.
She lunges for it at the same time he does, but he gets to it first. I try to get up, but Grandad presses me back down.
Lifting the gun, Anton fires three times into her chest.
She staggers back, but she isn’t wired up so there’s no bang, no blood. The pellets hit her harmlessly, bouncing to the floor.
We’re made.
Anton stares at her, then at the gun in his hand. Then he looks at me. My eyes are wide open.
“I’ll kill you,” he growls, throwing aside the fake gun. It hits the tiles so hard a piece of it chips off.
This is bad.
My grandfather gets between us, and I try to shove him out of the way, as a voice comes from the other side of the room.
“Enough,” Zacharov says, into a sudden pocket of silence. He climbs unsteadily to his feet and stretches his neck, as though it’s stiff.
Anton stumbles back, like Zacharov’s a ghost. We all freeze.
Barron points an accusing finger in my direction. “You played me.” He sounds unsteady.
“You’re all playing,” Zacharov says in his accented voice. “You were like this with water pistols when you were children. Waving them around and soaking everything.”
“Why did— What did you know?” Anton asks. “Why did you pretend—”
Zacharov grimaces. “I would never have believed that you, Anton, would betray our family. I would never have believed that you would plot to kill me. You, of all people, who I would have made my heir.” Zacharov looks at my grandfather. “Family means nothing anymore, does it?”
Grandad looks from Barron to me, like he’s not sure how to answer.
