I stood on my toes and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. “Thanks for coming back.”
I turned and faced the doors to Heller while Chase went the other direction toward Carson’s classroom on the third floor. One way or another, nothing would be the same after today.
CHAPTER 46
MY HANDS SHOOK as I waited alone in the dark theater room. The damp cold of the basement seeped into me, chilling my bones. I was by myself, but I wasn’t alone in this anymore. Two people I thought I’d lost were backing me up. I felt invincible and quickly checked myself. It could all go south in an instant. I had to be ready.
Unsurprisingly, Haley was the first to arrive.
“What are you doing, Ember?”
I merely motioned to the tattered couch where we first met and invited her to sit. “You’ll see.”
“Whatever you’re planning, watch out. I might be the Queen of Hearts, but I’m not your biggest worry.”
“I know.”
I didn’t want to underestimate Haley, but the more I considered our partnership, the more it seemed like friendship, however unlikely that might have been at the beginning. I had no reason to trust her, but I did. It was also time to trust myself again.
In the minutes leading up to seven o’clock, more girls filed in. I mentally checked them off, picturing my corkboard. The only one who surprised me was Jess Lantz. Jess was a sophomore as well, but she was quiet and unassuming. She led the coat drive for the freshmen class last year. I never considered putting her on the corkboard with other likely candidates. She went right to the list of distant maybes.
Gretchen shook her head sadly at me as she found a seat. Gretchen was clever. She must have figured out that the Red Court’s reign was ending. It was hard to forget the fervor in her eyes when she’d approached me at Alec’s house. I wasn’t most worried about her, but she was a close second.
The last to grace us with her presence was the Fire Alarm. She swept into the room, looking balefully at me before raking her gaze over the rest of the girls, then finally Haley, who held her eye for a full five seconds before the Fire Alarm plopped onto the floor with her back against the door.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for coming—”
“Cut the shit,” Shauna said. “What do you want? Favors? How many?”
Clearly some of the other girls thought the same thing as they nodded their agreement. Half of the girls had malicious twinkles in their eyes, which seemed to say they were angry at themselves for not blackmailing the whole of the Red Court for their own gain. Others seemed unsure, disbelieving.
“No, I don’t want favors. The Red Court is done. I want it all to stop.”
Several dramatic gasps cut through the tension.
The Fire Alarm scoffed and stood up, dusting invisible bits of lint from her skinny jeans. “I can’t believe I woke up early for this. There is no stopping the Red Court.” Each terse word was thrown at me.
“Yes, there is.”
I picked through the stack of manila folders in my bag, each labeled with a different name. I removed the one for Jenna Lowell and grabbed what I had collected for Jess from the collection of backups, glad I’d overprepared despite how unlikely some of the candidates seemed. I handed the edited stack to Haley. “If you wouldn’t mind, Haley?”
I noted Haley’s curious expression before she delivered a folder to each girl. She didn’t seem angry. The mood in the room shifted slowly as each girl was faced with her own photo and the words Red Court Member emblazoned across the top. Under that was a list of each member’s friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, exes—anyone they knew—who’d been targeted by the Red Court or owed us a favor.
“You all have been under the protection of the Red Court for long enough. Now it’s time you understood what it’s like for someone to hold a secret over your heads, to bend to someone else’s will because of your choices.”
Olivia, a pretty blonde junior, slammed her folder shut, causing soft-spoken Jess next to her to jump. “We all stop or you rat us out? To who? Our friends? Our parents?” All the color in her face drained away, and her mouth was pulled into a tight, colorless line.
I nodded, casually checking my nails. “That’s the gist of it, but just in case a piece of paper doesn’t feel immediate enough, there’s this.”
I picked up my phone and brought up the video Gideon had texted me. The screen filled with more than a dozen bewildered kids sitting in Carson’s otherwise empty classroom. “I’ve called a few friends of the Red Court for their own little meeting this morning.”
I turned my phone toward the other members. “How do you think your boyfriend Nate will feel, Brianna, when he hears you’re a part of the same Red Court that broke up his last relationship? Or your best friend Cecelia, Taylor? Do you think she’s still going to want anything to do with you when she learns that the Red Court sabotaged her bid for varsity soccer captain? Each one of you has someone in this room, someone I’m sure you don’t want to know what you’ve done or what you are.” I slipped my phone into my back pocket before anyone could examine the video too closely. Gideon and I had gathered as many students as possible on such short notice to cover nearly every possible Red Court member, but there were bound to be some people missing.
Haley rose from her seat and moved to stand in front of me. She looked at the burner in her hand for a long moment before turning to Shauna.
“Maybe Ember’s right. What we did to Mrs. Martin wasn’t right. I’ve regretted accepting your favor request ever since it happened. I let you bully me into it and that is something I’ll have to live with forever. We ruined her life and destroyed her family.”
Even the Queen of Hearts had a line in the sand, one she had to cross to realize it was there. Whispers began to rise as every person in the room recognized Haley for what she was: their leader.
Shauna sneered at Haley, like her display of conscience was deplorable. “She only got what was coming to her.”
“Don’t pretend like that was why you did it.” Haley’s eyes shifted to me.
Me?
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Haley turned to me. “When you said that everything with Alec and Gideon and Mrs. Martin felt personal, it was.”
“Be quiet, Haley.” Shauna was shaking with anger.
“It was Shauna’s idea to use Alec even though he’d graduated. We could have done that job a hundred different ways.”
“Haley!” Shauna looked around the room in a panic. “Stop it.”
“The request from Matthew was real, but Shauna wanted you to take down Gideon, and when I objected, she told me I was going soft. I’m sorry, Ember. I knew it would hurt you, but I let her convince me that it would be better if you did it. It wasn’t until she asked for the job on Mrs. Martin and you told me that you knew Gigi that I figured it out. All this time, Shauna was trying to hurt you.”