Chapter 7
SEVEN
GEMMA
I felt like my sister, Abigail, sneaking back into Crowne Hall. She was always the one coming home at all times of night. It was hours after the party ended. I’d stayed outside, stuck, watching the body disappear into the water.
Now I paused before a floor-length mirror, some gilded monstrosity my family had had for centuries. In my bloody dress, I felt like some ravaged princess of an older time.
Gemma Crowne, forever marked by the Reaper.
“Gemma?”
For a moment I froze at my mother’s soft voice. She’d see the blood on my clothes. She’d know. But then I saw her glassy eyes, her droopy shoulders, and the way she clutched the wingback for support. She wasn’t going to notice a railroad spike coming from my eye.
“You disappeared from the party,” my mother said. “Where did you go?”
My gaze traveled to a floor-to-ceiling window. Outside, stars suffocated under the storm, and I touched the bruises disguised as hickeys.
Where were you, Gemma?
“I was with a boy,” I said. “I don’t know, someone from the party.”
My mom gestured for me again, and I went to her, wrapping my arm in her silk-clad one.
“What time is it?” she murmured.
“Late.”
We walked to her wing, and I slid out of my ruined dress, tossing it in the trash so she wouldn’t question it tomorrow. I put on a pair of her silk pajamas and sidled up into bed with her.
“Who was it?”
My mother’s eyes were glassy, her face soft. Tansy Crowne was not known for chatting. She was hard. Elegant. But this was a side I knew well. A side I think only I knew.
I didn’t have to wonder what my mother had taken tonight. She loved her benzos just as much as I did.
Like mother, like daughter, right?
“Hmm?”
“The boy.” She patted my hand. “Who was he?”
“Oh, uh…” I thought to the boy who’d haunted me for years, a shadow at my back for a decade. The night replayed like a puppet show in my mind. Me, Grim, the body between us. “No one worth mentioning.”
The first death between Grim and me was a mistake.
I was always taught never to give away my location, but I was in a club in the meatpacking district, something I’d been paid to promote, and everyone knew where I was that night.
I’d done so many drugs, the memory was all a watercolor.
The mirror dripped pearls into the quilted red satin walls.
I’d bent over the sink, doing another line, when suddenly a shadow appeared behind me like smoke, engulfing the room.
Engulfing me.
He could have been anyone. I was eleven the first time I read something about my body in print. Thirteen when it started becoming a daily thing online. Fifteen when it started turning sexual. Eighteen when I found my first real death threat.
There are so many people who want to kill me.
I remember the way his hands felt on my neck.
I remember him telling me how he was going to kill me. Down to the last little detail, like he’d imagined my eyes popping out hundreds of times before.
But then he was off me, and Grim stood in his place.
When I could finally breathe again, it was…it was like the lights turned on. Gray vanished into Technicolor.
I’ve done every mind-bending drug from shrooms to Molly to LSD, but nothing flipped me open like that.
I didn’t remember what happened to the body or Grim. I pushed through the nightclub, into the streets. The rainwater was a goddamn baptism. The neon reflecting red in the puddles on the asphalt vibrated and burned.
I almost died and finally came alive.
For…like, a day.
And then everything went gray again. The volume turned down.
The keys slowed. I couldn’t remember why the color in the puddle affected me so much.
Or even really the color of it. After that, I’d post my location every now and then.
It felt a little bit like driving without a seat belt.
If something happened, it was still an accident.
“I worry about you, Gemma,” my mother said, her sleep-soft voice cutting into the memory. “Who will take care of you? You have no husband. No prospects.”
Part of me wanted to tell my mother I could take care of myself. That it wasn’t 1821. Instead, I stayed quiet, because I knew it didn’t matter.
“Mom…” I caressed a stray silk thread on the pillow, picking it. “How much did you take tonight?”
“Oh, just a little melatonin.” She sighed and patted the pillow beside her sleepily, eyes closing.
“You’ll never leave me, right?” my mom asked through closed eyes.
“Of course not.”
“Because you’re my perfect little girl.” She gripped my wrist. “I knew you would be the day I found out I was pregnant.” I rolled back, staring at the ceiling, my mother’s hand still tight on my wrist.
A few moments later, my mom’s soft snores demarcated she’d fallen asleep.
I got out of bed and walked to her bathroom, checking the little orange bottle lying haphazardly on its side. Only four pills were missing, plus a bottle of wine.
I grabbed the antique 24K gold wastebasket on my way out.
Years ago, my mother tried to kill herself.
It was after my father died in a car crash.
Death wasn’t something she planned, but she definitely wasn’t trying to live.
She would have died had I not found her and forced her to throw up a month’s worth of pills and alcohol.
As I placed the basket on the floor beside her, I caught my image in a floor-length mirror. My hair tangled. Bags under my eyes. It felt like I’d stepped into quicksand five years ago, and now it’s starting to reach my torso.
The bruises on my arms and neck were darker. Fresher. I ghosted my touch across the purple spots. Maybe Mom thought if something had happened tonight, it was still an accident.
I shook that off and slid back into bed.
We never talked about that day, but for a year I sneaked into her room and hid her pills. At night I would come to her room and find her knocked out on whatever was left.
Then I got engaged. It was like a switch flipped in my mom, and suddenly she was normal again. For years my mother was focused on me—my reputation, my wedding, my life, but after Grayson blew up our family…
I glanced at my mother, her mouth hanging open as she slept.
I stayed up, watching the sparkling stars fade into inky black, snuffed under the clouds. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but then the caw of seagulls woke me up. It was still early in the morning, the sky iron blue with lingering night.
“You’re awake.”
I jumped at my mother’s voice.
My mother sat on a chaise longue beneath her window, two fingers to her temple. I pulled the blankets off me and went to her, touching her shoulder. She went stiff at my touch.
They say every sibling was raised by different parents. The mother who raised me never stopped hoping for my dad to love her again. When he died, a vacuum formed in its absence. The gnawing hope changed her, made her unable to love anything.
Without another word, my mother stood up and left me alone in her bedroom.
The next week passed uneventfully. There were no parties, my brother and his wife were out of town, and my mother ignored me.
I didn’t hear from Grim until Thursday morning, in text.
One hour.
I sighed. As Lock and Raze had pointed out, I’d already missed the last two check-ins. I knew if I pushed back too much, I’d regret it.
So I found myself walking along an empty beach toward the Wharf, blowing candy-flavored smoke from my vape into the air. It had snowed a little, and the flakes dusted the beach like powdered sugar—
“Ow, shit.” I rubbed my wrist, where a red mark in the shape of my vape had burned the skin.
I shook my head. Fucking rookie shit.
Less than an hour later I approached the rusted Ferris wheel that marked the Wharf. This was my favorite part of Crowne Beach.
The sand always felt softer.
The fog sweeter.
Like something was going to slip out from the thin white tendrils and steal me away forever.
Grim waited at the pier, leaning on a nearly rotted wood railing. Fog swirled at his feet, the Ferris wheel at his back. He didn’t react when I approached.
“You know the drill,” he said.
“It’s outside. And it’s winter.”
Grim looked up from his phone, eyes hard.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to.
I tore off my shirt, unbuttoned my pants. I stayed like that, naked save for my La Perla, clothes in hand.
Grim’s eyes traveled down my body. Slow. Lazy. Leaving a trail of fire as they went.
These “check-ins” were categorically different from when the rest of the Horsemen were around. Those were bureaucratic, like a banker following up on a credit check.
But these?
“The rest.” His voice was cold with an apathy that matched his gaze.
Rolling my eyes, I unclasped the bra at my front and shimmied out of my underwear. The winter wind blew across my skin, frosty and bitter.
Grim stared without shame.
The Horsemen were not gentlemen.
I wouldn’t expect them to be.
Grim did a slow circle around me, his inspection cold and clinical. “Lift up your arm.”
I did as I was told.
For most, a debt meant they asked something of the Horsemen—revenge, wealth—boring shit like that. My contract was not so simple. Grim saved me, and in return he owned my life.
He grasped my wrist, looking at the fresh burn. “What is this?”
“You think I tried to kill myself with my vape?” I glared at him. “I burned my wrist.”
His grip remained tight on my wrist, eyes hard on mine, as if trying to spot the lie.
The day after Grim saved me, he appeared with his tattoo freshly wrapped on his chest. The red ink was too bright. I didn’t realize until after it was because of the blood.
That was how it all started.
Grim never said that I had a contract now, or I had to do this to get that. No, that moment was more primal. The tattoo a fucking statement.
I slid back into my life easily, and it was because of that ease that I never really fought back. Months would go by without me ever seeing him, but it was almost like he could sense when the ocean was starting to look tempting.
Grim dropped my wrist.
I quickly threw on my clothes.
I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking he cared. To Grim, and to everyone else in the world, I was merchandise, useless when broken.
Living was my punishment, and the Reaper was going to make damn sure I was punished.