“He asked for it,” I tell her.
I grab the door and step around her and go back to the starlings and the second-string. Malcolm stands blessed but uneasy at the counter, lining glasses up in too-even rows. Not quite smiling. Not quite ready to rule the way his brother does.
Not like Mack.
I sit down where I was before, across from Lilia. She hasn’t moved. She has both hands around a bottle and she’s staring out at the city with her eyes glazed over.
Piper sits and grabs the bottle. “Turns out your new girl’s a sadistic bitch,” she says.
Lilia smiles. “Good.”
It’s almost dark out, but the only lights on in the living room are the gallery lamps shining on three canvases on the wall. They’re thick with silver-blue paint.
In the half-dark, they drip like shining blood.
The music swells. Piper drinks. The skyline glows bright and brighter, filmy white-gray.
The boys come back.
First Mack. Then Duffy and Banks. Then Duncan, pausing halfway down, his shadow darkening the space behind him.
“Out,” says Duncan. “Everybody. Her parents will be home soon.”
“Where’s Connor?” a flock-girl asks. Wide-eyed, with one hand trembling near her lips.
“Up on the roof, drunk off his ass.” Duncan’s voice is satin.
He waits. He doesn’t ask again.
Malcolm’s second-rate boys cave first, and then the girls. The music stops. They trickle back out onto the concrete and thorns.
Then Banks.
Then Duffy, scared and sweating, one hand tight around Piper’s shoulder with her shrugging him away.
“Mack,” says Duncan when the rest of them are gone. Across the room, Lilia sinks deeper into the white leather. The shadows wind around her. She could almost be a ghost.
“Thanks for keeping their story straight,” says Duncan.
Mack waits at the front door. He looks taller. Different.
I go to him. He takes my hand—
like we’ve been together for years—
like it’s instinct, the two of us—
—like he’s mine and I’m his, already.
“Connor,” says Mack. “You’re really going to do it?”
Duncan nods, once and certain.
And Mack says, “Are you sure?”
On Friday night, when the room twisted in on itself and the sound and the light bled hot together, Connor was the first one to grab my wrist. To lock his arm around me and pull me down the hallway to where Porter stood by the door at the end, melting into the floor, melting into the wall.
Then I knew.
And I fucking fought.
But his grip was steel and everything else was smoke and he pushed Porter out of the way. Took my earring and talked back. The room was all white and sparkling, dizzying, glittering. And I sank my claws into his arm and my heel into his foot and he laughed. Outside the door, Porter said, are you sure?
I bit down hard. Sank my fangs into Connor’s skin. He pulled his hand free and I said, you picked the wrong girl—
He threw me down and I tasted blood: his and mine.
He said, yeah, I’m fucking sure.
Tonight, right now, I look at Mack and his king, and I say, “Yeah. He’s fucking sure.”
Duncan’s teeth shine in the dark. “Don’t let that one go,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
We pick up our bags from next to the door. Only Connor’s things are left—his wrinkled blazer, his too-soft leather bag, his crosse.
“Lilia,” says Duncan. “Come up.”
She’s almost invisible. “No,” she breathes out.
“That wasn’t a request.”
Light catches on a bottle as Lilia tips it back. She drinks for a long second, and then she lets the bottle fall and shatter on the floor.
Duncan doesn’t move until his queen is next to him. She’s fading. When he puts one arm around her, she almost disappears. “Dunc,” she says, “I don’t want to watch.”
“Yes, you do,” he says.
Mack and I walk out into the night. He reaches back to shut the door that’s been open since before we were here—
—and good-king Duncan turns. “Mack?”
“Yeah?”
Duncan says, “You’re one of us.”
They disappear up the stairs. Mack shuts the door behind us and we cross the driveway, together and silent. My heartbeat is so loud I can hear it. The whole night shines, from the concrete to the sky.
We get in the car. On the roof two silhouettes stand dark against the last red glow over the hills.
Two wolves. Moving closer and closer to the edge.
“Connor will fall,” says Mack, so quiet it’s almost reverent. “They said—”
I don’t pretend to be a flock-girl. I take his hands in mine and we shift closer together until his eyes are all I see.
Golden-boy Mack. Noble Mack.
“He can’t,” he says.
“He will,” I say.
And he says, “The girls in the masks. They were right.”
The air goes so still I almost can’t breathe.
I kiss Mack.
Lilia screams.
Connor falls.
Loyalties
“What the fuck,” says Jenny. “What the actual fuck. You like him.”
We’re in Summer’s room, the four of us, drinking wine from the Horowitzes’ cellar, so dark red it’s almost black. Or Summer and Jenny and Mads are drinking it. I’m drunk enough without it, on Lilia’s vodka and Mack’s kiss and Connor’s blood.
“Stop it,” says Summer. “I think it’s beautiful.”
Jenny grabs the bottle out of her hand. “Right. Because you know all those boys who got all stupid over you turned out so well. You know they totally could’ve held themselves together to finish another three murders—”
“Come on,” says Summer. “That was boys. This is Elle.”
That name pulls me out of the warm night haze. “It’s Jade,” I say, dagger-sharp. “And I’ve known him for five hours. I don’t like him, Jenny.”
She drinks. “Yeah. You better not. You better just be drunk.”
I turn my back on them and cross back past Summer’s bed and out to the landing. From the railing I look down on the living room and the lazy crawl of people out to the patio and back. Circling with champagne flutes while a man in a white tux and a bronze tan clatters jazz on the grand piano. It’s Monday night—still, somehow—but every night is a party at the Horowitzes’.
I stand on the landing in my St Andrew’s blue, staring down at them. Nobody looks up—
—nobody even thinks that maybe there’s a girl looking down on them, fresh off the kill.
“You did it,” says Mads, low. She’s next to me now, quiet but coiled to spring. Always, and especially now. Especially since Friday night.
“Thank you,” I say, because she’s the first one to even say it. That I’m one day into St Andrew’s and already, nestled safe in Hollywood Hills, there’s a bloodstain Lilia’s father’s gardener will never be able to power-wash out of the concrete.
Downstairs Summer’s stepmother, twenty-seven years old and straight off a reality show, squeals as obvious as a freshman flock-girl. She needs them to believe that she’s holding court. That she’ll last longer than the other two wives, or at least long enough to lock down the alimony to keep her in Beverly Hills. She’ll never be a good enough actress to pull it off, or Summer’s father would’ve bothered to get her something better than a reality show. He’s a producer. She’s no one.