Chapter 29 Pandora
PANDORA
The pillow is too fluffy.
I think that’s what woke me. I couldn’t get comfortable with how it elevated my head and of course I’m going to get a crick in my neck.
You’d think a place this fancy would have perfectly contoured memory foam pillows.
There’s a black smudge on the pillow too. Somebody’s mascara must have smudged. I’ll tell River to buy higher quality stuff. They make waterproof mascara for a reason.
I finally sit up and look around. I’m alone in the bedroom suite. My clothes are all laid out neatly on the chair next to the bed. Even my boring white underwear is there.
You’d think one of them would have stuck around in bed to keep an eye on me. What if I changed my mind and found some other weapon to bludgeon them to death with?
After I’m dressed, I go out into the living room area. All three of them are sitting around the coffee table.
Asch is sitting really close to Blaze, while River took the armchair. Some containers of Chinese food are half-eaten on the table.
“Wow. You really started without me,” I say with a smile.
Asch instantly looks wary, but River rolls his eyes.
“Don’t be so lazy, and we won’t have to wait until our stomachs are trying to eat themselves,” River remarks. “Your mapo tofu is over there.”
I sit down on the couch between Asch and Blaze and grab my food. I inspect it carefully.
“It’s not drugged,” Blaze says. “Asch, go eat some of it and prove it to her.”
“Why do I have to do it?” Asch asks. “You’re the one who likes tofu.” He takes the container, but he hands it to Blaze.
“Because there’s pork in it,” Blaze says, passing it on to River. “Fine. You do it, River.”
River takes it without complaint and takes a bite. “There.” He offers the container out to me. “I am your personal taster, apparently.”
I wait a few seconds, then say. “Okay, you aren’t immediately sweaty. This can’t be authentic.” I take a spoonful of the tofu. It’s spicy, but not that spicy. “Daddy would say this has no flavor.”
“Your Daddy could eat a ghost pepper without breaking a sweat,” River remarks. “Raw. So I don’t think he counts.”
Asch and Blaze exchange a look, but it’s Asch who ventures carefully, “Your Daddy and your Papa are two different people, right? Damien Rossi and Giulio Pavone?”
“Yeah.” I keep eating. “Papa would say this is a waste of good tofu, and doesn’t Harmony have any good restaurants?” I tap the spoon against my lower lip. “Uncle Slayer would probably have glugged two cups of milk by now.”
“Your family dynamic is as strange as… this,” Asch remarks. “No wonder you’re so open to all of this.”
River nods, eating his own food — kung pao chicken, from the looks of it. “Her mother, Vanessa—” He cuts himself off, looking at me. “Well, Pandora can tell you what she wants you to know.”
What I want them to know.
I’m drained, like all the blood trickled out of the punctures in my chest. But, strangely, I don’t feel like the world is trying to murder me anymore.
“It’s fine. Mama is a pushover who pretends everybody is a lot nicer than they actually are.” I add some rice to my mapo tofu. “Anyway, I wasn’t even checking for drugs. I was checking if the food was worth eating.”
“Sure,” Blaze says. He’s got veggie lo mein in front of him. The fried tofu is probably for him too. “How are you feeling?”
“Like three guys fucked me hard,” I answer glibly. “My pussy is absolutely wrecked.”
“Your pussy would be even more wrecked if we’d DP’d it,” Asch says with a smirk in between his own beef and broccoli. “Which we will be doing at some point. It was too good not to share.”
“Wait. You DP’d her cunt?” River asks, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth.
“Just Asch.” I steal one of Blaze’s tofu. “He’s got double dicks.”
“Yep,” Asch says, deadpan. “Haven’t you noticed?”
River shakes his head, going back to eating. “The three of you are wild.”
“The three of us?” Blaze scoffs. “You’re the one who followed Pandora to university. Out of everywhere in the world, you chose to come here.”
“I wasn’t here to play games,” River mutters. “I was here for…”
Revenge.
Asch quirks a brow. “Yeah, what were you here for then?”
River gives me a long look. “I don’t even know anymore,” he says. “But it’s not what it was.”
“It’s because he couldn’t stay away from me,” I say. “Every time he fucked some other chick, he thought of me. Every time he was rubbing one out, he thought of me.”
It’s what I want to believe, anyway.
That’s what I’d thought when I’d first seen him at Dyschord.
“That’s not—” River lets out a frustrated sound, stabbing his food with his fork. “Okay, fine, I thought about you a lot. But I didn’t come here to fuck you and do all of… this.” He gestures to Blaze and Asch.
“Well, you can’t have her to yourself,” Blaze answers immediately. “Pandora is—”
“Ours,” Asch finishes for him.
Aww, how sweet.
It’s like they actually want me or something.
I glance down at my food. “Anyway. I’m sure you didn’t say all that stuff earlier about me needing help because you want to throw me in the loony bin.”
“No,” River is the first to say, and I appreciate how quickly he gives the response. “But you need to start accepting help from us. You call us your boyfriends; that comes with certain responsibilities on both ends.”
“I know I hadn’t said I was sorry before,” Asch says quietly. “But I am.” He sets his food down and gets closer to me, setting a hand on my shoulder. “Words are cheap. I’ll just have to prove to you that I won’t fuck up again.”
“Yeah.” I have no idea what to say to that.
They regret everything.
They don’t hate me.
Shit, I’m not even supposed to care if people like me or not. I’m above it all. I’m a whirlwind, a destroyer of worlds.
I feel like Pandora, staring at an empty box.
Asch strokes my hair gently, working some of the tangles out of it. “Finish eating,” he encourages me.
“It’s not even good Chinese food,” I say half-heartedly. “Papa is right. Does Harmony actually have real food?”
Blaze rolls his eyes. “You’re insulting the fine cuisine in this well-established, storied city?”
“Well-established? Didn’t this town spring up around the university?” I finish off my tofu. “It’s like, a hundred years old at most.”
“Yeah, and you’re right, they don’t have any decent food.” Blaze starts laughing. “We need to get you down to New Valence so you can try real food, not whatever trash they serve in New Bristol.”
My jaw drops. “You did not just insult New Bristol.”
Blaze grins back at me. “I did. I’ll say again: New Valence is a more interesting, more cultured city than New Bristol.”
“It really is,” Asch says calmly, sitting down on the arm of the chair I’m sitting at. “You can’t say it’s not until you’ve been there.”
River snorts. “Good luck getting her down there,” he says.
“You have to back me up here, River,” I complain. “New Bristol is the best city in the world. There’s no way NewVa has even half the stuff NB does.” I point to my dishes. “Like Chinese food. I bet the Chinese food in NewVa sucks.”
“NewVa has a great Vietnamese presence,” Asch says. “We’ll have to take you to one of those restaurants. You’ll like it better than Harmony’s Chinese food scene.”
“I don’t know. I’ve had some pretty good pho.” I smile at River. “Like the one just two blocks from high school. Rachel—”
I stop.
Rachel loved the pho at that place. We went at least once a month, but sometimes even more often than that, if our schedules allowed. River joined us plenty of times.
River looks at me, his eyes searching. “We have… information,” he says slowly, hesitating over the words. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Information,” I repeat, my voice flat. “About Rachel?”
“Yeah.” Blaze picks up several of the empty containers and gets up. “One second. I’ll be right back. You can sit with Asch if you want.”
I don’t move as he goes to the kitchenette area. He rinses all the containers and drops them into the recycling bin.
He’s stalling.
Before I can point that out, he grabs something from the kitchen island and walks back toward us.
He hands me a file folder.
“What’s this?” I ask.
Blaze takes a seat next to Asch again. “The information.”
I don’t open it. “You just had this lying around?”
“No. I went to get it while you were sleeping,” Blaze says. He runs a hand through his hair, mussing it further. “We figured… well, if we’re going to be a team, if we’re on the same page, we can’t withhold stuff from each other. From you.”
“Oh.” I stare at the file folder.
If I open it, what will I be confronted with?
More images of Rachel’s mutilated corpse?
Pictures of her in compromising positions?
Or worse: Rachel, happy and smiling, completely unaware of what’s about to happen to her?
“It’s a modeling contract,” River says by way of explanation.
Asch’s lips purse, but he doesn’t comment.
I steel myself and open the folder.
The first thing I notice is the photo of Rachel, taken in what is clearly the corner of the secret frat house room. She looks more excited than nervous. I wonder who was behind the camera.
The rest of the page is information about her, in her handwriting. Name, address, phone number, next of kin.
She’d left that line blank.
Why would she leave that line blank? I would have been there for her. If she’d written my name, somebody might have realized it was a bad idea to take her!
There’s a date in the corner, and I frown.
“This is from before she was taken,” I say quietly. “She came back to New Bristol after signing this.”
“From what I understand,” Asch says, still speaking in that cautious tone even as he gently extricates his fingers from my hair, “that would be when they did the background check. Obviously they didn’t do a very good check, though, or they’d have found you.”
“And me,” River says, his lips curling into a sneer. “Two Pavone links — they never should’ve dared to take her.”
“I don’t think Zayden did much of a check at all.” Blaze clenches his hands. “She wasn’t procedure. We don’t… that is, she wasn’t even enrolled here yet. There was too much of a risk that somebody would notice she was missing. Students who are far from home are easier.”
“I noticed,” I bite out. “I knew immediately she was gone. But nobody believed me.”
River sighs. “I believed you. I just… didn’t know what to do about it.”
“So you sold her off to somebody who cut her up into small parts,” I say. “And stupidly dumped her in a New Bristol garbage lot.” I smile widely. “Who was it? Who do I need to decapitate?”
“I don’t have that information,” Blaze says. “Not here. I’ll try to find it, I promise. If I can help you avenge Rachel—”
“And Samantha,” I say. “You forgot about her.”
“We didn’t forget about her,” Asch says, shaking his head. “We don’t think she’s dead. We know she was dating Zayden, and that was a link. The fact that she’s missing is bad enough.”
“The goal isn’t to murder the girls,” Blaze says.
“Women,” I correct. “They’re women. Not children. Don’t dismiss women like that.”
Blaze grimaces. “Yeah. Okay. But I’m pretty sure Zayden dropped Samantha off at one of the usual facilities. I might be able to find out where, but the problem is…” He sighs. “This is still my family’s business, Pandora. You get it.”
I get it, because it was my family’s business too.
It might even still be our business.
Papa says he runs strip clubs or sex clubs, but we all know not everybody who shows up to dance naked is there willingly.
From how Aunt Lucia speaks of Papa… yeah, even Mama might not have started out entirely willingly. She’s fine now though. Happy.
Maybe Aunt Lucia was exaggerating.
It’s one of those things where I’ve always thought: I just don’t care.
Those other people aren’t my business.
They shouldn’t have fallen for the obvious traps.
But Rachel wasn’t an idiot. Rachel simply didn’t want to be at home. She wanted the fantasy of some older guy sweeping her off her feet and rescuing her from her shit life.
And she didn’t tell me about it because I’m not trustworthy.
“So you’re saying we can’t do anything at all?” I meet Blaze’s eyes. “You want me to sit here, knowing Samantha is in danger, and do nothing?”
Asch tightens his arm around my shoulder. “No,” he says. “We’re not entirely sure what to do yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to let it go.”
River grits his teeth. “It only means that we have to try harder to figure out what to do, that’s all. But we’ll get her back, Pandora.”
As long as she’s alive.
“Okay.” I take a deep breath, and finally smile properly. “But you do know, I’m not going to take prisoners. Uncle Slayer sent me a new knife, and it needs to be broken in.”
“A single knife isn’t going to be enough,” River says. He glances at Blaze. “Can’t you figure out how to pull some of those connections? They have to be worth something, right?”
“I’ll get us the location,” Blaze says. “I don’t want to go in without a plan, though, some way to ensure none of this blows up in all of our faces.”
I giggle. “Oh, Blaze. That’s cute.” I get up and lean down over him. I tap his nose. “The explosion is the point.”
His lips part, and his eyes go wider—not in fear, but in anticipation.
“Fuck, Pandora.” He wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his lap. He immediately nuzzles my collar. “You’re something else.”
“Well, if I were anything else, you wouldn’t want me. That’s what you said!” I kiss the top of his head and glance at Asch. “What about you, boyfriend? Are you going to help me blow up the world?”
Asch watches me and Blaze. “Yeah. I can’t let the two of you go on doing something stupid without me, now can I?”
“I’m in,” River says. “I don’t care what it takes. We may not have been able to help Rachel, but we’ll get Samantha back.”
We will.
Samantha isn’t yesterday’s trash.
I refuse to let her be.
And maybe, once she’s back, I can fit all the pieces of me back into a single, coherent whole.