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Gabi’s laugh mangled the silence. “So, you stayed with me because I’m the only gay girl you know?Seriously, Joy?”
“Sorry,” Joy breathed, and meant it. She just wanted Gabi togo, to leave her alone for a while. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’tthinkwith the roaring between her ears, and Gabi’s presence only made Joy hurt more.
Every time Gabi asked if she was okay, or if there was anything she needed, it was another reminder of where Joy had been when her mum died. Not here, not home where she should have been. She couldn’t stand it.
“So you don’t love me,” Gabi clarified, her voice flat.
Joy screwed her eyes shut and said the final word that would buy her silence and a reprieve from the crippling guilt.
“No.”
I just want silence, she thought but couldn’t find the words to say.I just want this torn-apart thing in my chest to stop hurting.
“You don’t want me.”
A tear wobbled at the bow of Joy’s lip. “No.”
Silence, and the scuff of Gabi’s shoes on the carpet—and then the front door slamming shut.
Joy curled up on her side and tucked her face down, inhaling the smell of her mum’s shirt, and cried herself to sleep.
SIX
GABI
The last thing Gabi wanted was to get held up in the lobby of Town Hall—she needed to get home, organise her notes, organise herlife, but there was a pile-up of spectators in the lobby, snooping as an angry young woman hissed and snarled at a mountainous security guard. Gabi elbowed her way around the gossipers and crossed the lobby, not caring one single bit about the drama until the mountain of a guard replied—in a voice several octaves higher than Gabi’s judging mind had expected— “Paulina has given orders. No visitors in the cells.”
Visitors. Gabi paused in surprise, and then resumed walking twice as quickly, the elegant statues of the town’s founders blurring as she took the marble floor at speed. Gabi had been down to the cells—there was only one prisoner. Which meant this was someone who cared about Joy.
Something like relief unknotted Gabi’s heart, the fear that Joy had been on her own all this time, that Gabi had walked out and left Joy utterly alone.
The angry woman—Gabi put her about twenty—had black, poker-straight hair to her waist, a distractingly beautiful face if you forgave the sneering, murderous intent scrawled across it, strong eyebrows that promised at least one injury to the security man’s person, and bony limbs wrapped in varying shades and textures of black. Tight jeans, heavy boots, leather jacket, and a vest artfully ripped down the middle of the band print. This was a species of person Gabi did not usually get close to—she looked to be the antithesis to Gabi’s organised calm. This girl was chaos and fury and—and she was currently thrusting the tip of her black wood wand into the security guard’s chin.
“Hey, now,” Katrina, the pretty blonde receptionist, said, her face bleached with worry. “There’s no need for that.”
“Shut it, Yoga Bitch,” the dark-haired witch spat. Gabi glanced at Katrina, who clearly knew the confrontational one at least in passing, but the pale witch just shook her head and sighed, returning to her desk.
“That’sit,” the guard snapped in his high voice, reaching into his back pocket—not for cuffs, Gabi knew, but an incapacitation spell.
“It’s alright, Griswald,” Gabi said coolly, drawing the man’s attention as she approached. There was a moment of confusion when he looked at her, that first assumption of knowing her because she’d spoken his name turning to bewilderment becausehedidn’t recogniseher.
Yet.
If she passed Paulina’s trial, everyone would know that she was the new Pride, Clover’s heir. Then everyone would drop their problems at her front door. She’d be chased down the street because something or other needed fixing, or the infamous Daryl had cursed his neighbour again—not with magic but with dirty words, which in a small, seaside town was far worse. But for the moment, no one had figured out who Gabi was.
“I’ll take over, if you don’t mind,” she went on, taking advantage of Griswald’s slowness, and honestly wondering how he hadn’t realised his name was printed on the tag clipped to his breast pocket. She supposed Paulina employed him for brawn, not cleverness. And Gabi was getting judgemental again—she heard her dad’s voice warn her to be more forgiving, that as Pride she needed to make an effort to understand people, not just facts and figures. Maybe Griswald was a genius at carpentry or a talented artist or—Gabi gave up. Trying to understand people was hard under usual circumstances but impossible with Joy incarcerated.
“Excuse me, bitch—” the snarling woman began, but Gabi gave her a look that told her she was not fucking about.
“Either you come with me or Griswald here incapacitates you with the spell he’s got in his hand.”
Her eyes dropped to the guard’s hand, in which was a paper sachet, easily ripped, its contents poised to hit the woman right in the chest where she’d inhale them without much choice. She swore, letting her wand drop. “Fine, I’ll leave. But I’ll be back every fucking day until you let me in, I swear to—”
Gabi huffed a pissed off sound. She reallywasn’tin the mood. “Only one person can approve that,” she said shortly. “And Paulina’s never going to approve you. There’s no point shouting at poor Griswald, he’s just the door guy.”
“Thank you,” Griswald exclaimed, and then paused, not sure if she’d insulted him.
Dark and Snarly opened her mouth to spew more poison but Gabi cut her off, hurt and anger boiling up in her after the conversation she’d just had with Joy and cutting her temper short. “Friend of Joy’s, I assume?”
