“Connor didn’t do this.” Duncan’s voice cuts deep. He turns to Duffy: “Take care of it.”
Duffy hurries double-time down the stairs. He crosses the lane to the parking lot without looking.
“We don’t talk about this,” says Duncan. “Not until we’re alone.”
He looks at Mack—golden-boy Mack, noble Mack, one of them now but all mine.
“Tomorrow,” says Duncan. “Mack’s house. The party’s still on. Nobody gets in unless I say they get in. Until then—”
He lets the space hang heavy.
He goes back inside and the rest of them follow. Glancing over their shoulders. Watching Duffy pull the last note out from against the last windshield.
Afraid.
“Jade,” says Mack from the door, “are you coming?”
For a second Duffy flounders, all alone in the dead-still parking lot, staring down at Connor’s empty eyes and the smearing red threat.
“Yes,” I say. Another hiss even though I don’t mean to. But I don’t move until Duffy looks up and sees me watching.
I smile bright and fearless. He shudders hard enough that I can see it from the top of the stairs.
I text the coven: Perfect. I turn on my heel and let my skirt flip a little.
No one trusts anyone anymore.
Tangled
We meet late, at Mads’s house. We sit knee-to-knee in a circle on the fencing strip. When Summer comes in she tries to turn on a light but I don’t let her.
We don’t need light.
“Tomorrow,” I say, the same as Duncan said, except he was circling his troops to weather the storm and I’m circling mine to bring it. “Duncan dies.”
Shadows weave in through the branches outside. They don’t ask me if Mack promised. They don’t ask me how. They already know.
“I’ll wait for Porter,” says Mads.
“We’ll wait for Mads,” says Jenny.
“Jade,” says Summer. “Are you sure?”
Jenny laughs her little-girl laugh. “Of course she’s sure.”
“I’m serious.” Summer puts one hand on mine. “This is real. You can’t take it back.”
Mads says, “Neither can they.”
“I know,” says Summer. “But what if you get caught?”
“I won’t,” I say.
And Jenny says, “The shittiest defense attorney in LA could guarantee she’d walk.”
“I know,” says Summer again. Her eyes cut quick to Jenny. “But what if Mack gets caught?”
“Oh fucking well,” says Jenny, and Summer’s lips press together.
“We won’t get caught,” I say. “And I’m glad I can’t take it back. I hope I dream about him dying every night for the rest of my life.”
Jenny says what she said the first time I told them what I was going to do to the boys:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
I take Summer’s hand and Mads’s. They take Jenny’s. We sit still in the rolling shadows. The room whispers Jenny’s words back to us. Outside, the leaves stir.
We’re magic. I can feel it right now in the dark. We’re invisible when we need to be and then so firework-bright no one can look away. We’re patience and brilliance. We never forget.
We never forgive.
We walk out together. The security fence hums overhead, friendly and warning. The spotlights star our shadows on the lawn.
Jenny stares up at the clear night sky and says, “A storm is coming.”
It’s the last thing we say. We don’t say good-bye—not tonight. Jenny drives out first, and then me, and then Summer. Mads watches from the steps.
Summer follows me home and parks in the street. When I walk down to meet her she’s already out and leaning against the door, looking up into the jacaranda leaves.
“Don’t do it,” she says. The breeze stirs through her hair. She smells like myrrh.
“It’s done,” I say.
“I don’t mean don’t kill him.” Her gaze comes down and locks on me. “I mean don’t fall in love.”
“I’m not one of those boys you throw away.”
She takes my hand and swings it back-and-forth the way she did back in our cul-de-sac days when the nanny dropped her off to play with Jenny and Mads and me, before the nanny tried too hard to take Summer’s first stepmother’s place and got sent back to wherever she came from. “Neither is he,” she says.
“He’s nothing,” I tell her. A lie, because anyone who kills for me stops being no one the second the knife falls—
a lie, because he isn’t nothing if he wants everything enough to twist guilt and fear into whatever he needs it to be so he can pretend he’s noble instead of just ambitious—
—a lie, because my heartbeat shivers faster every time he looks at me with dark resolve hardening his face.
Summer swings our hands higher. “Kill the king,” she says. “Kill his boys. But don’t—”
“Like you have any room to talk.” I shouldn’t say it, but I do.
She sighs and I hear her whole heart in it. “Exactly.”
I come closer. “You know she loves you, too.”
“She doesn’t. Not like I love her.”
“It’s just the way she acts. You know how she is.”
Summer shakes her head. Her hair shimmers on her shoulders like wings. “Even if you’re right—”
“I’m right.”
“Of course you are,” she says with a little laugh, but it isn’t sharp the way Jenny would make it. Summer, the deadliest of all of us, and still the one whose heart beats closest to her skin. “But even if she loves me we could never be together. It would ruin the coven.”
I don’t tell her she’s wrong. The breeze picks up again, warm and thick and wanting.
“Don’t fall in love,” Summer says. She lets go of my hands. “Not with him.”
The Fortress
Mack lives high in the hills, a long winding drive away from the heat and light of the city. Past Lilia’s house and Duncan’s. Up so many twists and turns that when I look back to where we came from, the skyscrapers are small enough to brush away with one hand.
“They’re never home,” says Mack when we pull up to his drive. There’s a gate, but it isn’t like the gate at Mads’s house. It’s a gate that asks you to stay out. At Mads’s house, it’s an order. “They’re always away on business.”
The gate slides open. Sturdy metal letters spell out INVERNESS along the top row of bars. “My dad used to be around. He’d take a whole week off and we’d take the yacht down to Mexico. Then he got his promotion, and you know …” He looks at me and shrugs. Behind him the lawn is green like his eyes. Green with promise.
“Ambition,” I say.
That one word squares his shoulders. “Last summer I took it out myself. The boat, down to San Diego. They never knew. He called while I was out—like, ‘Hey, it’ll be another week, we’re right on the edge of a deal that’ll blow everybody away.’”