Chapter Forty-Six
FORTY-SIX
Molly
Nine months ago
“Take this.”
The voice was slow and sticky, sun-warmed honey on the skin of my neck. One hand gripped a bottle so heavy it bent her wrist, while the other was cupped like a shell.
“A gift from Mikko,” Gigi said, cocking a shapely eyebrow, “that he doesn’t know he gave us. I swear he’s got enough of these to get the whole village high.”
I’d laughed at that, but didn’t doubt that she was right.
I did wonder where she’d found the pill that was nested in her hand.
The last time I saw Gigi, she was still in the corner with Woody, consumed by a conversation with a guy old enough to be her dad.
I didn’t get it, but she had no interest in cruising with me, so hey. To each her own.
From the moment we’d stepped through the door, the mood had felt more like a club than a private residence, every surface a jumble of liquor bottles and the space between them seething with people.
Gigi had cracked open the tequila and had been nursing it for hours, the bottle’s lip stained blood red.
She and I had shared a tube of lipstick before going out.
My sister and I used to do the same thing.
Gigi reminded me a lot of Jenny, who was only twenty-one when she died and left me alone.
Mikko’s house wasn’t what I’d been expecting.
It was the furniture, for one thing; my grandmother had been dead for years, but her place had looked a lot more modern.
Classier, too. There was a water-stained pink leather couch in the living room that probably started out as red.
Next to it, someone banged on the upright piano, making a show of their talentless hands.
The rooms were small and padded with carpet the same milkshake brown as the walls.
It was bringing me down, the house, so I reach for the pill, along with the tequila that glowed silver in Gigi’s hand.
Somehow my fingers were red from the lipstick and, as I slipped the pill into my mouth, I smelled wax and a trace of something chemical and sweet.
At least our host was hot. He was the reason we’d come. I’d been determined to get Mikko alone, to pepper him with questions and maybe hook up, but he’d blown me off early on. Which was why I had no qualms about drinking his booze and taking his stash.
As soon as the drug took effect, something changed.
An easy numbness washed over me, lightening the very air, and I knew our time had come.
We could have spent this night, our last, on the full-size hotel bed, eating fried river fish from Styrofoam takeout containers and watching too-loud nineties reruns on TV.
Instead, we were in Mikko Helle’s tattered house with a few dozen strangers, swaying to music I didn’t recognize, the lyrics strange and slippery to my ears.
It was late, it was dark, we were in the house’s grip, and there was a message we needed to heed.
Staying now, like this, would only lead to trouble.
Only once I’d managed to rise unsteadily to my feet did I realize the bottle Gigi had been holding, half-empty, now sat on the table. It made a shiny wet ring on the scarred wood, not that anyone cared. I scanned the room, peering through blue smoke, but not one face I saw was familiar.
“Gigi?” I managed, my voice shockingly weak. “Where’d you go?” The music swelled, tightening my chest.
“Gigi?” I repeated, louder now, but her name was swallowed by the noise and the mark was all that was left of her, a halo glowing in the hazy light.