“This is Shaw’s bid for the sculpture in Corona Heights Park! If chosen, he’ll do a larger version of this. And I haven’t even received your design yet. The deadline is this week …”
“I know the deadline,” Cole hisses.
“Well, better hurry,” York says, his eyes glinting wickedly. “You’ll have to come up with something good to beat this …”
York hurries away again, probably spurred by the murderous look on Cole’s face.
My own feelings of repulsion are so strong that I find it hard to speak. I feel exactly as Shaw intended: enveloped in this web, trapped by it, screamed at from all sides.
Cole says, “He would never have had the confidence to do something like this before.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, turning to look at Cole’s black stare.
“Everything Shaw has ever made is commercial.” Cole gestures around at the brilliant, dripping ropes. “You can’t sell this. It’s an experience.”
I nod slowly. “He’s leveling up.”
As if summoned by those words, Alastor Shaw himself materializes, striding toward us.
He navigates the web with confidence, easily maneuvering his bulk through the fluorescent strands.
Shaw glows with health and happiness. His golden hair, rich tan, and shining white teeth beam at us. His shoulders seem a mile wide as he stretches his arms open, greeting us in his booming voice.
“Mara! Cole! So glad to see you!”
He’s so loud that a dozen people turn to observe our meeting. Camera flashes wink at us. Everyone loves a tête-à-tête between their two favorite rivals.
We’re frozen in place. Trapped in his web. Watching the spider approach, grinning at us both.
“Cole.” Shaw slaps Cole on both shoulders, with such a loud sound that it feels like a detonation between us. “My oldest friend. Look at you. You know the thing I love about you? You’re unchanging. Your principles unwavering. That must be what Mara loves about you, too.”
While I still don’t know everything about the dynamic between these two, I understand the barb all too well.
Shaw abducted me as a provocation. To try to tempt Cole into breaking his own rules.
And it worked. God, how it worked. Better than Shaw ever could have dreamed.
Cole is breaking every rule for me, and me for him.
We’ve ensnared each other, more deeply than Shaw could ever have dreamed.
Cole is changing. And Shaw is mocking Cole’s pretensions of discipline and stability. I see how his words dig under Cole’s skin.
Still, Cole stands silent—it’s too true to refute.
Now Shaw turns toward me. It’s my turn for a blast of his smug sarcasm.
“Mara,” he says, his face twisted up in an expression of mock sorrow. “I heard about your friend. Erin, wasn’t it? You know she and I had a fling once. She was quite the wildcat.” He winks at me. “You know what I mean.”
His pretend pout has turned into a lascivious grin.
I am boiling with anger. Shaking with it.
How fucking dare he talk about Erin to me. How dare he stand here, flushed with happiness and triumph. Gloating right to my face, in front of everyone.
I look at Cole, expecting him to say something. Expecting him to cut Shaw down to size with some devastating retort.
He’s silent, the garish colors of Shaw’s web reflecting on his pale face, in his dark eyes.
For the first time, Cole has no response. Because for the first time, Shaw truly does have the upper hand.
Raising his voice a little louder so everyone can hear, Shaw says to me, “And don’t worry, Mara. I forgive you for pointing the finger at me. You must have been in a terrible mental state, after how brutally your friend died, in agony. What you must have felt, finding her there in your bed … No hard feelings from me, it’s all water under the bridge.”
All his shots fired, and every one landing right on target, Shaw gives us one last aggressive, “Good to see you both,” and strolls away.
His departure feels like a vise around my skull finally releasing. I can breathe again, but I’m shaking harder than ever.
I’m sick. Furious. Choking on everything I wanted to shout at Shaw that I had to stuff down inside instead.
Everything about him enrages me, from his taunts to his gloating grin. Even now I can hear the excited babble of guests interacting with Shaw’s vast, triumphant installation.
Why should Shaw get to experience a night like this when he’s taken so many lives and caused so much pain for everyone else? He doesn’t deserve this.
Cole looks at me. “Are you ready to kill him yet?”
My fingers itch with violent impulses. My mind runs wild, too far and too fast for me to rein it in.
I mutter, “I’m damn sure getting closer. Right now, I might be angry enough to do it. But you told me what it does to a person. It changes you. Breaks you away from humanity.”
“Good,” Cole hisses, jerking his head toward the throngs of people fawning around Shaw. “Why do you want to be like them? A blind fucking sheep?”
I can’t take my eyes off Shaw, who stands surrounded by admirers, bathed in his own private golden glow.
This motherfucker killed my friend, and don’t forget, he abducted me too, cut my wrists, pierced my fucking nipples. He’s living flagrantly, joyfully, rubbing it right in our faces. He can kill anyone he wants, do anything he wants.
“I want revenge,” I mutter. ”But I don’t want to take it. I don’t want to give in to it. I said I’d always rise above, I swore it.”
For the longest time after I left my mother’s house, I was tormented by anger. I had run away from her and Randall, but the memories of everything they’d ever said to me, done to me, came along with me, jammed in my head. I couldn’t get them out.
The longer I was away from her, the more I realized how wrong it all was. How monumentally fucked up.
I wanted them to pay.
My mother’s always gotten away with everything. CPS came to our house, summoned by teachers who reported the bruises on my body, the lack of food in my lunch. My mother cleaned the house and bought groceries for a week until they went away again. She was pulled over multiple times for DUIs, she got the fines reduced or charges dropped on technicalities, on overcrowded dockets, by begging and pleading and deploying her best sob stories.
She brought men into my life and me into theirs. Not just Randall—a succession of assholes of every flavor: drug dealers, ex-convicts, even a fucking neo-Nazi who pushed hand-printed copies of American Renaissance and The Daily Stormer into my hands.
While Randall wasn’t the first one who put his hands on my mother (or on me), and some of them went so far as to shove a gun in her face or push her down a flight of stairs, the devastation she wreaked in their lives was always greater than anything they did to her.
She’s sailed through life unpunished, unrepentant.
The worst people are free to maim and defame however they like. There is no justice. There is no fairness.
Cole and I had intended to stay at the party for several hours, to network with the dozens of Cole’s acquaintances all around us, but neither of us can stand Shaw’s malevolent glee, or the omnipresent discussion of his work. To say nothing of the technicolor spiderweb wrapped all around us.