Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
LYDIA
“My people went to his house, tried to trace his phone, but we’ve got nothing. It’s like he’s fucking disappeared.” Berlin paces in front of me inside Astor Memorial’s private waiting room, Eve sitting opposite me in the plush blue chairs lined along the white walls.
We’re the only ones in the room, and my brother is just down the hall. Nothing has changed with his condition; nothing has changed with his prognosis.
“Lydia. It’s not good.” Dr. Mitchell’s words angered me, and it was Berlin and Eve who both dragged me out here.
The doctor wasn’t on shift when Lynx and Hawthorn came by, and all of my guards in this building claim they didn’t go into Lele’s room. They assumed because it was my uncle—and therefore, Lele’s uncle—the men were allowed in.
I’ve told them this is not the fucking case.
Fox is outside the hospital entrance doors, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. If anything, it feels as if everyone is fucking with me.
I attempted to scry on my bedroom floor after I got home last night from the marina. But nothing save for my own reflection peered back at me.
“He was here two nights ago.” The word are torn from me through clenched teeth.
Berlin stops before me, then kneels down. He knows better than to touch me, but his familiar eyes hold mine.
“But he didn’t touch him, Lydia.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
Eve is watching us. I brought her here because I trust her as much as I’m starting to trust anyone: Not at all. But she’s strong, and she claims she knows the type of person my uncle is proving to me.
“No, it shouldn’t,” Berlin says, placating me. “But it means he was showing Hawthorn Leary proof of something.”
My lips part, but my heart races, and I find I don’t have anything to say as my mind tries to puzzle out exactly what Berlin’s implying.
“Last night…” I’ve already told them both about what happened at the marina. “Storm didn’t know who killed the boy at the top of the stairs. And he said…” I close my eyes tight.
My mind flickers to Fox.
I clench my jaw.
It all seems to pop into place.
When I open my eyes again, I don’t look away from Berlin.
“Someone killed Indie. The girl I only wanted drugged.” As payback to the chemist who made the product that fucked with my brother.
As a message to Storm so he’d understand exactly how he fucked me over.
“And I followed Fox to her house, where he dropped her off. Brought her inside. Said he’d given the pills to her. ” Too many, but not enough to kill her.
Yet she wound up dead.
I’d walked the perimeter of the house she shared with Grey.
And Grey… He was the corpse last night.
Someone killed him, and it wasn’t me.
Did Fox end them both?
Eve shifts on her seat across the room.
Berlin watches me, waiting for me to reach a conclusion.
The truth is lead in my stomach.
“Lynx is fucking with Storm.” And it can’t be on behalf of my brother, or he wouldn’t be avoiding me like the plague. “And Fox is…helping him.” Betraying me.
Berlin nods once, but still, he doesn’t speak.
“That means Storm isn’t the enemy. Not right now.” I lift my eyes and find Eve’s. “Lynx is. But where Storm goes…my uncle seems to follow.” For reasons unknown to me, but the people around Storm are ending up dead like flies, and yet Lynx can only drive past my home while avoiding my calls?
It seems I know where to find him. It’s just never where I expected.
“You still flinch at the sight of blood.”
I stare down at my makeshift altar; crow feathers and red string along the cement of the lower deck, a fire contained in the pit, the woods spread before me, a chill in the air, and Fox and Eve both seated around the fire.
They came back with me from the hospital an hour ago.
Eve is sworn to silence. It’s my job to ensure Fox doesn’t feel anything amiss.
I am the only one on the ground. My legs are crisscrossed and I clack my sharpened matte black nails along the bone in my hand. The pelvis of a rabbit, humanely collected, as all of my curio is.
“Unless it’s your own.” Fox’s words lodge somewhere inside of my chest but I refuse to show him he has affected me in any way. “Do you remember when Lele crashed his dirt bike, walked up the hill to your uncle’s, and blood was pouring down both knees, soaking his white socks red?”
I clench the bone tight in my fist and lift my eyes to Eve.
She is in an Adirondack chair, like Fox, and her blue eyes hold mine.
There is something she feels with his words, the way her tongue is pressed to the roof of her mouth.
I can see it in her throat. She’s offered to sleep over.
To help protect me, where Fox clearly can’t, or won’t, not without stabbing me in the back. Berlin has men around the house, too.
And people keeping an eye on Storm Leary.
Fox knows nothing of it.
And between all of us, we have spoken no more of my uncle.
Too many wolves circling. Too few answers. But now I know how to get them.
Fox’s eyes are already on mine when I cut my gaze to his.
He is sitting with perfect posture, his blond hair pulled back in a short ponytail, chin lifted, a small smile playing along his lips.
Dressed in all black, with a gun in his holster.
He should be patrolling my estate, but I feel safer with him closer.
Not because he won’t kill me. But because I’ll see it coming when and if he tries.
In my head, the man on the stairs is blue.
Storm Leary kills another. Red spray.
Darkness, crawling around my mother. I was old enough to get up. To scream. To run.
I didn’t do any of that.
I crawled like a toddler.
“But once I walked in on you while Lynx was away. You were probably eighteen at the time, maybe nineteen. Just graduated that awful private school he made you attend.”
I hear Fox, and I’m looking at Fox, but in my head, I am far away.
“There was blood pouring down your arm. You were trying to stop the flow with your other hand, and a hunting knife was on the floor.”
The trees whisper with wind, the fire crackles a few feet from my spot on the ground, and the crow feather is held in place by the ball of string.
“You looked up at me, your face pale, and at first, I thought you were scared. That somehow it was an accident. But you laughed at me, your teeth flashing, and you lifted up your bloody forearm and said, look, Fox! I did that!”
Fox doesn’t smile. He speaks evenly. But there’s something pulling at him, I see it now that I’m here, listening. The way he swallows. His hands are clenched together in his lap.
“Did it scare you?” My voice is hoarse. “Does it scare you?” Both questions seem valid.
Eve is watching me.
I feel both of their eyes.
I should be inside.
I should take a sleeping pill.
I’ll need to be ready when Storm leaves that precious angel girl’s apartment.
Fox glances at the fire. The orange dances in the amber of his irises. “I wouldn’t work for you if it didn’t. I wouldn’t stay if it doesn’t.”
I smile sweetly at him. It feels like hatred. “Can you get us a drink? I need to pour offerings, anyway.” I nod toward the ground.
Fox’s brow furrows, but he doesn’t question me. No, he wouldn’t do that to my face, would he?
He gets up, heads inside, closing the door behind him.
“Lydia.” Eve says my name like a gasp, as soon as we’re alone. An exclamation. A fear.
I don’t look at her. I’m staring into the flames. I’m remembering the way Lynx broke my fingers. How he locked me in a closet. The things I would beg him for in order to keep his hands off my brother.
I remember the summer.
The hotel room.
The ways I allowed him to degrade me, all for Lele. All for nothing.
“Whatever you think you know, it could be wrong.” Eve’s voice is low and quick. “You’re not sure, and what you’re thinking is an expensive bet on being unsure.”
I smile at that. Wild and wicked. My heart pumps strong inside of my ribcage.
I don’t look at Eve. She’s still his victim, isn’t she?
But me?
I’m done being that.
“I don’t ask for permission, Eve. And I’ve never asked for yours.”