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“Why?” She lets out a hollow puff of laughter, wipes a trembling hand across her face. “Your parents already hate me.”
“Yes.” I turn her to look at me, press closer to her, angry, triumphant, itching for the fight. “They fucking despise you, Lynch. They think you’re gold-diggingtrash.”
“I don’t… I don’tneedyour fuckinggold,” she breathes.
And that’s when I realise something’s wrong. Willow isn’t looking me in the eyes. She’s not giving me that mocking look, like a glove to the face, like a challenge. There’s no laughter in her voice, no arrogance in her smile.
She’s not smiling at all.
She’s clutching the stone railing, eyes glazed and unseeing. Her chest is rising and falling fast. Her face is pale, her lips tremble like she’s about to cry.
But Lynch doesn’t look like she’s about to cry. She looks like she’s about to come apart at the seams. I’ve never once seen her this way before, not once, not with her leg in Cerberus’s teeth or her neck under Simon’s hands.
“Lynch.” I tilt her face up to mine, frowning when I feel her entire body shaking. “Lynch—Willow. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” she lies wanly, without effort, right to my face. She pushes me away from her. “Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong.”
But something is wrong because this isn’t the Willow I know; this isn’t laughing, feral Willow Lynch, running her mouth like it’s a machine gun, ready to fight or die fighting. She’s shaking so violently I hear the chattering of her teeth in her head. I reach for her, but she steps back, covers her face with a hand.
“I thought I was ready,” she says to herself out loud. “I am ready, I’ve been ready for so long. Why do I feel this way?”
She covers her face with a shaky hand, lets out a shaky breath.
“Oh fuck.” She looks at me through her fingers, shakes her head. “What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” I take her face in my hands, pull her close, resting my forehead against hers. “What happened?”
“I saw him.”
The words drop from her lips, tremulous as a sob. She doesn’t sound sad or angry or even afraid. She sounds small, surprised. She sounds young in a way she never has before.
“Who did you see?”
“Richard,” Willow whispers. “Richard Thornton. Ifoundhim.”
I don’t recognise the name at all, but I do recognise the initials of it.
RT. I remember these initials well because I remember going through Willow’s little notebook that first time I drugged her and brought her back to my house. I remember flicking through her cramped notes and finding her revenge list.
Every name on that list was crossed out, every name but one.
RT - for everything you did. I will destroy you.
And I begin to see, vaguely, how the scattered stars of Willow’s existence begin to form a constellation, an image forming as a sum of every glimpse I’ve been given.
Willow, feverish and medicated, telling me there’s nothing inside her but a big dark nothing.
Willow, living in a shabby apartment in Greenleigh and yet owing a loan shark hundreds of thousands.
Willow’s revenge list in that notebook she cared about so much she signed my contract for it.
Willow’s dead mother, the unread suicide note.
The wavering note of Willow’s voice and the tightness in my chest when she whispered,It’s not my fault that I had a bad childhood.
The scars on Willow’s arms and thighs, those neat, meticulous lines, like she was keeping score.
What could have made Willow—the reckless, fearless creature that is Willow fucking Lynch, that hurricane-made woman—take a blade to her own flesh?
