Chapter Twenty-Three Nina
Polly Prescott was unchanged.
Unless you considered the gown she wore, her red-painted lips, and the deep circles beneath her eyes.
She didn’t wear a wig like I did. Didn’t hide from her name.
The music thundered on, the dealer called for the first player, the spectators drank and fumbled for parts of one another and took no notice of the slow collapse between me and her.
Could she feel it? The depth of her knife in my back.
Her eyes told me she could, that the guilt of it had whittled her down to nearly nothing. She looked furtively over my shoulder to Theo, terror turning her ashen. “Nina,” she said simply, on a breath. “Please.”
The hole inside me expanded, swallowing me. I shook my head, displaced tears on the brim. Here she was, in all this finery, while Kenton Hill swept its ashes into piles.
I turned to take the pistol from Theo’s jacket pocket. The bodies pressed in; someone laughed raucously and dropped their champagne glass. The dealer flaunted his shuffle to a rapt audience. No one saw the glint of steel as I pressed it to Polly’s side. “Get. Up,” I said, voice shaking. “And walk.”
Polly’s eyes closed, and when she opened them, I saw surrender. She stood.
“Nina,” Theo warned, his hand at my elbow, his mouth at my ear. “Nina, put the gun away. Now.”
But my hand was cinched so tightly I thought I might fuse myself with it. It shook uncontrollably in my hand. Everything shook.
The chandeliers overhead rattled and swayed, the band stopped mid-song as the celloist toppled sideways from his stool. Dancers and cardplayers shouted and grabbed hold of banisters, of one another. The sound of breaking glass rebounded. “Union attack!” they shrieked.
“Stop, Nina!” Theo panted in my ear, his hand around mine, trying to pry my fingers from the pistol. I was barely aware of anything but the tremor in my core, finding pathways into my blood, into the earth. The balcony teetered. Polly lost her balance.
“Nina!” Theodore pleaded.