She nodded slowly. “And this would?”
I swallowed thickly to clear the lump rising in my throat. The sisterly note in her voice—a comforting mix of affection and reassurance—dissolved my defenses.
April’s eyes caught on the folder in my hands and I moved across the room to lay it on her desk. “Go ahead.”
I settled myself on the familiar pink bedspread, smoothing my fingers against the stitching.
She picked the folder up and opened it. Her eyes darted over the page, and I saw the moment when she registered why I was here asking for help.
“It’s Gideon.” The sympathy in her voice cut right to the quick, exposing the soft parts of me I shielded from the world.
“April, I can’t do it. Even if I could somehow engineer it to not be that bad, I’d still never be able to live with myself.” Without meaning to, my mind cast ahead to the Winter Showcase, framing the outline of Gideon’s takedown. If the Red Court was going to crush him, that would be the place to do it. Last year, he’d worked for months on a collection of poems, only to be told he was “trying too hard” by his Honors Lit teacher. I knew he’d held on to those pages and the handwritten feedback. If anyone else ever saw them, he’d be beyond humiliated. Gideon was a private person and displaying something so personal would gut him. Haley was right. The people who knew you best knew how best to hurt you.
I may have had a whitecapped ocean of anger and sadness inside me when I thought of what the Red Court did to April. But with Gideon, it was protectiveness awakening within me. Our relationship was a thread woven through my past that continued beyond the horizon toward my future. He was my friend, a true friend, and I knew enough of the world to know how valuable that was.
I let the steel shine in my voice. “I would never hurt him. Period.”
April smiled. “I’d like to say that you should walk away from all this, but I know you feel like you can’t. So, I have an idea for you.”
April riffled through the rest of the papers in the dossier.
“Aha.” She produced a note from the stack and handed it over to me. “This is what you do next.”
I accepted the page with a quaking hand. Relief hit me as I inspected the page and saw what she meant. A name I recognized leapt out at me. The person who made the request was Matthew, Gideon’s ex.
“So? What do you think?”
“I think Matthew is about to find himself rescinding his request.” My moral compass spun again, finding a new north. If there was one thing I’d learned about myself over the last month, it was that vigilante justice was kind of my thing. Exacting revenge against those who deserved it lent a righteous angle to my position. All I needed was a cape and mask.
* * *
That night, as I lay awake in bed, I waited for an idea to form. Brainstorming was like gathering a pool of water from condensation, each drop adding a new dimension to the whole.
First, I had to figure out why Matthew wanted to take Gideon down. They broke up last summer, but it wasn’t ugly or anything, and it was fairly drama-free. Granted, I had only Gideon’s take on things. Matthew might feel differently. It was worth looking into.
Matthew and I had been on good terms when he was dating Gideon. Not close, but friendly. If his car had been broken down on the side of the road, I’d have been the first to offer him a ride. Blackmailing Matthew, uncovering something big enough to make him balk, pricked at my conscience. I tossed in my bed, grumpy that my conscience couldn’t see the bigger picture. I was doing this for Gideon. Just like I was doing this for April.
What I needed, if my goal was to get Matthew to withdraw his request on his own, was leverage. The right amount of pressure on just the right pain point would bring him to his knees. A small voice in the corner of my mind wondered what happened for Matthew to go this far. And though I’d never acknowledge it, the small voice also wondered if Gideon deserved it.
“Gideon,” I whispered aloud, “what did you do?”
When I finally drifted off to a fitful sleep, dark dreams plagued me. In them, I swam against an endless avalanche of playing cards—each one the Queen of Hearts. A girl’s voice cried out for me to save her. I couldn’t see where she was, but it sounded unnervingly like Gigi. Waves pounded my hands as I tried to protect myself, and a thousand tiny paper cuts nicked my palms. I was sticky with blood, and everywhere I looked, there were red hearts and red queens. Red, red, red. The color of my revenge.
CHAPTER 27
BUZZ.
Buzz, buzz.
I reached into my bag and silenced the burner phone. My fuse was short this morning and I didn’t want to risk reading another of Haley’s snarky texts. I might explode at the next person to look at me sideways. Days had passed since we met in the theater room, and my momentum on The Gideon Problem stalled out. With all my attention on Matthew, I couldn’t spare a moment to continue my search for the Queen of Hearts. Dodging Haley’s texts was only getting more difficult. She made her expectations clear, and each day I didn’t deliver a design for Gideon’s destruction, her suspicions grew.
Much to my disappointment, Matthew was a creature of routine—a boring routine. His route to and from school never deviated. He religiously spent his off-hour in the chem lab, studying or reading. So far, there were no telltale signs that he had a bone to pick with Gideon or any secrets I could exploit. After spending a worthless week shadowing Shauna, too, I was earning an advanced degree in stalking.
I was also getting to school earlier each day and returning home well past the normal hour. It was eating away at my precious free time and peeling myself out of bed before dawn was becoming more difficult by the day.
I was waiting for Gideon at the bottom of the stairs to the third floor, planning my campaign speech for coffee, when my regular phone dinged with a text.
Gideon: I have to stay and talk to Mr. Hall about issues with my physics project. I’ll see you later.
Me: Ok. Good luck!
Tucking my phone away, I took a deep breath. Even worse than all the extra sneaking around was keeping something else from my best friend. Logical Ember knew telling Gideon about Matthew’s request before I fixed it would end in disaster. Emotional Ember keenly felt the weight of the lie by omission. I was grateful for a few minutes to myself, to be myself.
As I wove between cars in the parking lot, I saw a figure lingering near the hood of my Jetta. My pace slowed as I squinted against the bright sunlight to see who it was.
“You came,” Chase said with a tentative grin.
“What?”
“Our coffee run.”
I had a brief moment where I thought I was going insane because I definitely did not have plans to grab coffee with Chase today. It was one of those things I’d remember. Probably forever.