I decide how it ends.
Every night except one.
But right now—
swimming in the gold-dust light, with my eyes and his locked together, staring into the earnest leaf-green sea-green summer-green and seeing the golden boy I’m supposed to see instead of the wolf he is—
—I could forget that this is all just a plot. Make myself fall for him, if I wanted to. The same way I’ll make him fall for me. The same way I’ll make him fall.
But I don’t forget.
It’s a spell, but only for him. On him.
He’ll speak first. I decide that.
I count it in my head, one-two-three, and then he says, “Jade.” I smile—I let myself smile. And his cheeks go a little red. “Lilia’s friend. Right?”
“Just Jade,” I tell him. I’m nobody’s friend here. “And you’re Andrew.”
“It’s Mack,” he says, even though Piper told me you shouldn’t call him that. Not yet.
“Mack,” I say, and I take one more step, so we’re almost toe to toe. I have to look up to keep the gaze, and I do: a proud chin-tilt that makes the chopped ends of my hair brush back across my blouse. I look straight into his eyes and I say, “You won the game.”
“It was all of us,” he says.
“Don’t be so modest.”
“Dunc got the points. Banks kept them down. Duff went hard. Connor—”
“Connor almost lost it for everybody. Until you saved them.”
He stays quiet.
“You won the game,” I say again. “Duncan said it, too.”
He’s trying not to admit it, but I can see the pride about to break through his loyal-soldier mask.
My fingers graze his arm. The shock electrocutes us both and the sky flickers brighter for one shattered second.
“You won,” I tell him: third time’s a charm.
He smiles, finally, and it lights him up—
green eyes and ruddy-tan skin and blond hair a little too long and tangling, and tall and strong and ready to take Duncan’s place as soon as I can make him want it—
—and I will. I know I will. And then I’ll ruin them, every last one of them, and the more they beg and fight and try to run, the more I’ll make them wish they were already dead.
My hand locks over his. “Say it.”
He says, “I won.”
The First Kill
We walk in together. The golden boy and the new girl, turning gold now, too. Alchemy by association.
Our entrance is so good I couldn’t have made it any better even if I’d planned it. We’re at Lilia’s house, perched up in the hills looking down on everybody else. It juts glass corners out of a stone lawn where every plant is pale and spiny. I parked my father’s car too close to Duncan’s: a bullet hole against the concrete drive.
The front doors swing on their hinges, unguarded. The first floor is bare and waiting, stark except for the trail of bags and blazers and crosses they all shed on their way in. Duncan’s pack and Lilia’s flock sprawl dirty and drunk on three white-leather sofas that stare down at the skyline.
They look. All of them. At Mack and me, at us, together. And they all go silent.
“Damn, new girl, you work fast,” says Duncan. He’s at the center of the biggest sofa, a careful space on each side of him and Lilia but no space between them. His left arm locks her against him. Her eyes are mirror-blank.
“Only when I know what I want,” I say.
They laugh. Duncan glossy and on-purpose. Duffy because Duncan did. Banks with a little edge, like Duncan without the polish. Connor too hard and hungry: enough to get caught.
“This is Jade,” says Mack with his yes-ma’am manners.
And Piper says, “We know.”
Duncan’s eyes stay on Mack and me, because Piper wants everything too much: Duffy, and all the things Lilia has, and all the things Duncan can hand out. “Heard you got kicked out of boarding school,” he says. “Is that true?”
“Heard you throw unforgettable parties,” I tell him. “Is that true?”
“Sometimes the girls forget,” says Connor. He’s still Duncan’s third choice, sitting third-nearest after Duffy and Banks with the two stupidest flock-girls hanging close even though they know better.
Banks’s laugh cracks open. “Watch yourself.”
“Or what?”
They share a loaded look that drags too long.
Duffy breaks the standoff. “God, Banks, you’re tense. Gotta do something about that.”
One of Connor’s girls reaches over and swats the girl closest to Banks and she goes pink on purpose. Banks slides one hand farther up her thigh, but he says, “Shutting Connor up would do the trick.”
And Duffy grins. “It’s those three bitches in the masks, isn’t it?”
“I still think you’re making that shit up,” says Connor. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Cute, Banks,” Piper cuts in, curling closer to Duffy, swirling an almost-empty bottle. “Imaginary girls. The only way you’re getting any this century.”
Connor’s black eyes glisten and he laughs again. He’s back in his St Andrew’s shirt, with the collar unbuttoned and his tie hanging loose and uneven. “Maybe not the only way—”
“Try me, Connor.” Banks shoves the girl away from him. “Go ahead. Tell Dunc what you told me after the game. Show him what you sent to Mack. Go for it. We’re all waiting.”
But Connor doesn’t stand up. “I didn’t send shit to Mack.”
I look at Mack for the first time since we walked in—since his golden wolf-pack started facing off one-to-one. I make my eyes say innocent, innocent, innocent.
He nods. Just for me. Just enough that the rest of them will miss it.
He trusts me.
Knowing it jolts hard under my ribs. Because it’s working: Mack is almost mine already; the plan is almost real already; the boys are almost dead already—
“You better watch yourself, Connor,” says Banks, and he gets up and stalks over to the bottles jumbled across the island. He grabs one, not even looking, and drinks.
The room is betrayal-quiet. They’re all watching Banks, because Duncan might be the one who tells them what to do, but Banks is the one who tells them how to feel. The good-times boy. The one with enough real charm to run for office and win someday, because he’s almost-but-not-quite as perfect as Duncan. Just rough enough and still magnetic. Banks, last in the room on Friday night, hanging in the doorway, yelling back to somebody. Laughing. Turning—and he faded darker and brighter but I could still see his whole face change. Campaign trail to kill room.
“The fuck is it so quiet in here?” says Banks. He slams the bottle down and laughs. Fake, but everybody else laughs, too, and then it turns real. It’s a party again, because Banks says it is.
“That’s more like it,” Duffy says. “Damn.” And one of the flock-girls gets up and links her phone to the sound system and music spills out of the speakers, and Mack puts a hand on my arm and leads me over to the rest of them, and we sit. The girls chatter about nothing. The boys pour another round.
Nobody looks at Connor. Not even the stupid girls next to him.