“Connor,” says Mads. Without even turning I know her eyes are on me, ringed with gold shadow. Red-orange lips, like always. Hair in Bantu knots. “It’s good he was first.”
I nod.
“Duncan next?” she asks.
I nod again. I’m still looking down at the party instead of back at her. I know exactly what I’ll read in her eyes.
“Oh, come on,” Jenny yells from Summer’s room. “Don’t be a bitch. It’s actually really fucking entertaining to see you in love.”
“Oh my god, it’s not love,” says Summer.
“Like you’d know,” Jenny shoots back.
And it shuts Summer up, because all the boys and the girls she’s destroyed have always been nobody. Just for sport. Except she’s only playing the game because she’ll never tell Jenny the truth and Jenny won’t ever see it. Because Jenny is Jenny, loud and blunt, and Summer is sweet black-widow poison—
—or that’s what she wants us to think, but Jenny’s the only one who doesn’t see through it. We’ve known, Mads and me, for so long I can’t remember not-knowing.
Summer loves Jenny and only Jenny. She’ll never settle for anybody else.
And right now Mads is looking at me the same way she looks at Summer when Summer pretends Jenny doesn’t matter.
“Mads—” I say, but I still can’t look. Downstairs, Summer’s stepmother spins in a circle. Her dress is fringe and thirst.
I start again. “Duncan’s easy. Mack already wants to take his place. He just doesn’t know yet.” Mack, their golden boy. He might think he’s noble, but he’d kill just like any of them would if he wanted it enough.
“He thinks he has his honor,” I tell Mads. “He has to be able to tell himself what he’s doing is the honorable thing. He hates who they are.”
“Does he?”
I think of the way Mack’s eyes went dark when he said, Dunc had a party Friday night. Something happened. The way he flinched, pride and shame and rage all at once, when Duncan told him, You’re one of us.
Mack has never done the things that bind the wolves together in rule and ruin. And Duncan let him in, still and at last, because Mack found his own way: standing steady with Connor’s fate spelled out between them.
But he didn’t find his way. I found it for him.
“I can make him do whatever I want,” I say. “Trust me, you know I never lie—”
She laughs.
I turn so my back is against the railing and we’re shoulder to shoulder. Lean back and look down. The marble floor is straight under me with nothing to stop me from falling as hard as Connor did.
I look at Mads. She blinks a slow flash of gold.
“I don’t lie when it matters,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m not lying now.”
She shrugs. “Not about the plan.”
Mads never lies, ever. No matter what the consequences are for telling the truth.
“I don’t like him,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter either way,” says Mads. “You’re still going to kill them. You’re still going to make him take the fall.”
“Of course I’m going to kill them,” I say, and the hot thrill comes back as sharp as Lilia’s scream cutting through the almost-night and Connor’s shadow plunging hard and fast to hell.
“Jade, come back. Jade,” Jenny whines from Summer’s room. “We’re supposed to be planning how you’re going to get your precious Mack to murder somebody. Not fucking around on balconies like we’re in a fucking movie.”
Mads tips her head toward mine and I do the same. Until we’re foreheads-together, eye to eye, no room for lies. “You tell me when you need me.”
I say, “I don’t need anyone.”
She laughs, but it’s the most beautiful sound in the world. She says, “I know.”
We go back to Jenny and Summer and settle in close. All four of us, pressed together on a comforter the same color as Summer’s lipstick. Jenny scrolls through trash-news with blurred zigzags of light in front of Lilia’s driveway.
Cops + paps outside composer John Helmsley’s house. Blood + body bag. Guess who?
“Guess who,” says Jenny, and she laughs. “I fucking love this town.”
Summer elbows her.
“Oh, shut up,” says Jenny.
I lean closer. “Are there pictures?”
“Jesus, Jade, wasn’t it enough to see it in person?” Jenny grins at me, and her eyes glow with the light from her screen.
“I didn’t see all of it. He wasn’t dead when I left.”
“Okay, but can’t you trust this Z-list update shit? They said body bag.”
“I need to see it,” I say.
“It’s such a beautiful story,” says Summer, and Jenny shrieks laughter in her face. “For real. It really is a movie—”
My phone lights up. Summer is still talking, screenwriting Connor’s fall even though he doesn’t deserve a fine-print line at the very end of the credits, but I’m not listening, because the message on my screen is from Mack.
He’s dead.
Just two words, but the best two words I’ve ever read.
“Jesus.” Jenny cuts Summer off. “That’s him, isn’t it?”
I can’t look up from those two perfect words. “Who?”
She crows. “Mack. God, you’re fucked.”
I stare at the words for one more second, and then I hold the screen up for her—for all of them. They crowd in.
“Well, I’m not wrong, am I?” says Jenny with a smirk.
“Fuck you,” I say, but I’m smiling broad and brilliant.
“Jade,” says Summer, and she throws herself back into her ten pillows and sighs a beautiful deep sigh that warms up the whole room. “I knew you’d do it.” She pushes her hair out of her face. “You better tell us we can wear those masks again.”
I nod. And I take my phone back and steal one more look at Mack’s words: He’s dead.
I type, He deserved it.
“Are you sure—” Mads starts to say, but I send the text before she finishes.
“That’s one way to play it,” says Jenny. “I hope he likes sociopaths.”
“It will work. I know it,” I say.
Summer is still staring up at the ceiling. “You always know everything.”
“Of course she does,” says Jenny. “Just ask her.”
My phone lights up again: They’re terrible. You don’t know how terrible they are.
I text him back: Take Connor’s place. You’re better than he ever was.
“Duncan,” says Mads, to bring us back. “When?”
“Soon,” I say, the same as I said to Mack this afternoon.
“How soon?”
I look at my coven. Summer is sitting up now, and they’re all watching me—bright eyes, lips just barely parted, drinking everything in.
“As soon as I can turn Mack into exactly who he wants to be,” I tell Mads.
“Who you want him to be,” says Jenny, proud. “You evil bitch.”
“But really,” Summer says, “you’re almost there, right? With Mack.”