His eyes search mine.
“You know,” he says.
The scream in my throat finally dissolves. The velvet bristles under my skin and the cobwebs float weightless. My voice slides out smooth. “I know.”
“I thought it was over—” His hands grip tighter. “Because Connor posted that picture. Because too many people know, and even Lilia’s ready to tell. And because Connor’s dead. Dunc killed him for it and I let him, I let him, because I thought then they’d have to stop. But Banks—my best damn friend, since we were five, and it’s not like I didn’t know the way he is when he’s with Dunc and the boys—but when I told him, he laughed in my face. It’s not over, it’s never over, and now I’m one of them. I killed for them—”
My heartbeat is even. I won’t lose myself again.
Mack still has his eyes on me, wild and betrayed. “You—” he says, like he’s just now realizing how spinning-unwound I was when he found me and I found him. “What happened?”
I’m steel and control. I’m winged and ready.
I say, “Duncan—”
We’d be good together. You’d like it—
I weld his threat into what I need. Let it show just enough and just the right way.
I say, “He knows I know. Piper told me and he found out—”
Lies. But lies that tell the truth.
I say, “He was talking about Connor. He said—” And I take good-king Duncan’s words back and hold them up to his neck, blade-first. “‘Betrayal doesn’t get you anywhere.’”
Mack’s hands tighten to fists.
“He said he doesn’t trust me,” I whisper.
Our nook swallows the words up whole. The narrow flames stand broken-clock still.
“I know,” I tell Mack. “And nobody who knows is safe.”
He pulls me into his arms. He kisses me. Soft and plain, but with something running under it that shocks through me like lightning. His weakness is cracking away. What’s left is loyal and ruthless.
He says, “I won’t let him hurt you.”
I say, “He’ll get away with it.”
Truth.
His eyes stay on mine. The flames glow bright.
He says, “He won’t if we stop him.”
Lair
Mads—Madalena dos Santos, my best friend and my blood-sister and the hard heart of our coven—is on her front steps between the crowding palmetto branches when I pull in.
The house sprawls California classic, stucco and terra cotta, behind a gate vicious enough for a country where warlords set the rules. Her father makes deals with men in Lagos and Malibu; in São Paulo and Shanghai. Men who show up at this gate, wrecked and raging, when the land they sold for nothing sells again for everything.
The gate keeps them out but lets me in.
“Jade,” says Mads when I get to the steps. The security cameras blink. She’s in visor-heavy sunglasses and a dress the color of fire.
“It’s done,” I say, and we go inside. The housekeeper takes my blazer without a word and disappears down a corridor. “He’ll kill them.”
“You’re sure?” Mads asks.
“Yes,” I say.
She wraps me into a hug and we spin around and through the hall. “When?”
“This weekend.”
“Does he know?”
Of course she asks, because she knows me better than anyone. Of course I answer, because she’s her. “Almost,” I say. “Soon. He’ll do it and he’ll think he chose it all on his own.” We come back outside, along the courtyard and in the shade. “His parents are out of town this weekend. Duncan already told him to have a party on Friday.”
I could have told her eight hours ago when Mack went from follower to king just for me. Instead I texted the coven one word, Closer. I’m not leaving a trail anyone can trace. Not when Duncan is watching me almost as close as I’m watching him.
“How’s he going to get away with it?” Mads asks.
I open the door to the training room. “I’m going to make his watchdog take the fall.”
“Duffy?”
“Porter,” I say. The boy who stood at the door and asked Connor, are you sure? “He carries a knife. He’s not smart enough to see anything coming and he’s not smart enough for Duncan to think he’s a threat.”
She nods. We sit down along the wall. The training room echoes empty: her father’s weights, her brothers’ boxing ring, her fencing piste. Window-lined and sparkling clean.
We’re safer here than anywhere else in the world. Here behind the humming fence in the house where almost everyone carries a gun and everyone knows how to use one.
No one is weak at Mads’s house.
“Mack kills Duncan and Porter gets framed,” says Mads. Her sunglasses are still in place. She stares straight ahead like she can see through walls and time and lies. “What happens to Porter?”
“Let him self-destruct.”
“Too risky.”
She doesn’t know how weak Porter is. Hunching in front of the door. Panicking when Banks asked for his knife. Afraid enough to carry a weapon to a party where everyone is his friend. Where everyone has deadly secrets, and he knows every last one of them.
Afraid enough to snap. Everyone will believe it, just like everyone believed Connor couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“He’ll defend himself,” says Mads. “Even if everybody thinks he’s lying, they’ll start looking at the rest of you.”
“Then I’ll make him self-destruct,” I say. “Make the guilt ruin him.”
Mads cracks her knuckles, one at a time. “Guilt won’t ruin boys like them.”
“It already is,” I say. “They let Duncan kill Connor. Banks is ready to kill somebody else. Duffy’s so nervous it’s embarrassing. The whole thing—” I wave one hand: the pack, the flock, the perfect untouchable crowd with their iron grip on St Andrew’s. “The cracks are showing.”
“It’s not guilt,” says Mads. “It’s fear.”
“Fucking cowards,” I hiss. For one fleeting second I’m proud of every bruise and every scratch—
the dark handprints on my arms and my neck and my ribs—
my broken claws—
the slash across my cheek—
—because every mark they left, everything they did, didn’t even get close to breaking me.
I’m ten times stronger than they’ll ever be.
A thousand times more ruthless.
“Fear,” says Mads again. “That’s what’s ruining them.”
I nod. Slow, but then certain. She’s right. It’s fear that turned the pack against Connor and made Porter drop his knife. All the brash brave boys with their crosses and their secrets—
They’re fucking terrified.
“They don’t even know what fear is yet,” I tell Mads. She pushes her sunglasses up. Underneath, her eyes gleam cold. “By Friday they’ll be looking over their shoulders so hard they won’t even see what’s right in front of them. Porter’s going to snap. I know it.”