Chapter 35 - Juliet
JULIET
“Get the fuck up.”
Roquel’s voice cuts through the silence, and the gun aimed at my chest gleams beneath the rooftop floodlight—an unholy halo framing the woman standing in front of me.
Slowly, I push myself up, palms dragging against the rough concrete until the grit grinds into my skin. My ankle screams in protest, an ache winding up my leg, but I don’t give her the satisfaction of a wince as I get to my feet. I straighten and meet the gaze of a liar and a murderer.
She looks feral. Unhinged. A trembling muscle tics in her jaw, and her usually fashionably messy hair more tangled and wild than soft.
She’s dressed as if she’s supposed to be attending the formal below, a black cocktail dress wrapped around her thin frame and dark, opaque tights shielding her legs, ending at a pair of ankle boots.
Her eye makeup is dark and sharp. If she weren’t standing there with a gun aimed at my chest, I’d say she was pretty. Now, she just looks insane.
Roquel’s gaze cuts past me. “You too, asshole. I know you’re awake. I didn’t hit you that hard.”
Honestly, I’d argue if I didn’t think it’d get me shot. She was not aiming to merely incapacitate Lex, but probably intending to knock his ass out.
Behind me, Lex groans—a low, guttural sound that could be pain or strategy.
I pray it’s the latter. The sound of the bat meeting his skull still echoes in my head as a nasty reminder that this woman is not who I thought she was.
The scrape of fabric rustles behind me, accompanied by the drag of boot soles on gravel—he’s moving, deliberately slow. Buying time.
The night presses in, heavy and suffocating.
My heartbeat slows to a dull, steady thud, like my body’s trying to muffle the terror or the rage clawing at my insides.
I stare at the girl holding the gun and see every memory of her unravel: staying at her house, hanging out with Mads, walking the halls of Silverwood Public.
It feels obscene now. Like watching a home movie of a ghost. It reminds me of the reason I came up here.
“Where’s Mads?” I demand. My pulse kicks hard, fury rising like blood in water. Madison’s terror on the phone wasn’t fake—she’d been warning me.
Roquel snorts, her grin sharp and ugly. “Relax. She’s here.” She jerks the gun toward the dark corner of the roof. “Took a little nap after she made her call.”
I don’t look behind me, too afraid to see if that ‘nap’ was the forever kind. Instead, an icy anger floods my veins. “If you fucking hurt her, I—”
“You’ll what, Juliet?” Roquel interrupts, a hysterical-sounding laughter spilling out of her mouth. She tilts her head at me, arching a brow. “Are you gonna beat me up?” She gestures with the gun, daring me. “Go ahead. Try it. Let’s see if you can take a bullet as well as your boyfriend.”
Anger is a seething animal inside me. Violent. Edgy. Hungry. I taste copper on my tongue from how hard I’m biting down, trying not to lunge.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Roquel’s upper lip curls back, exposing the whites of her teeth. It’s an odd expression—somewhere between a smile and a snarl. “What am I doing?” she repeats, her voice shaking and more than a little higher in pitch. “I’m finally doing what I should’ve done months ago.”
The wind howls across the rooftop, tugging at my hair. I already know what she’s about to say, but I ask anyway. “And what’s that?”
Her eyes blaze. “Kill you.”
“Of fucking course you are,” I breathe, the sarcasm covering the panic clawing its way up my throat.
Is Mads dead or just unconscious? How badly is Lex hurt? I can hear his harsh breathing behind me, but I don’t look back, not wanting to remind Roquel of his presence.
I shake my head, trying not to let those questions and unknowns distract me in the moment. “Roquel, I don’t know why you—”
Roquel’s gaze flicks over my shoulder as I’m mid-sentence, something flashes in her eyes—panic, recognition—and before I can turn, she moves, whipping her arm to the side as she pulls the trigger.
A gunshot detonates the air.
The explosion rips through the night, so loud it swallows everything else. My ears ring. My heart stops.
For a fraction of a second, I can’t tell if I’ve been hit.
Then I hear Lex curse—raw and vicious—and I spin around.
He’s on the ground, his hand clamped to his thigh, blood spilling hot and fast through the tear in his suit pants. The smell hits me—iron, smoke, gunpowder—and bile rises in my throat.
“Fucking cunt!” Lex grits out, teeth bared as he presses his palm harder against the wound. His voice is pure fury wrapped in pain.
“Lex—”
My words die as Roquel strides forward, her ankle boots crunching against gravel. Her shadow cuts between us, gun steady, eyes alight with a kind of madness I’ve seen before—in Morpheus, in Gio, in myself.
And then I see it.
The phone near Lex’s leg—the faint blue glow of the screen illuminating the ground before it goes dark.
She sees it too.
Without hesitation, she kicks it across the rooftop, the sound sharp and final, like a coffin lid slamming shut. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lex had been trying to warn the others.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid?!” Roquel’s tone is annoyed and still marred by an edge of hysterical pitch. She uses the gun to gesture between Lex and me. “No one is coming to fucking save you, not this time.”
Lex tries to stand, his face contorting with anger and pain for a brief second before he goes back down. He’s half up, half on his unwounded knee, with his eyes glaring at her. I try to shuffle closer to him, wedging my body in front of his as Roquel moves over to the fallen phone.
We watch as she points the gun downward and shoots at the thing. It leaps up from the force of the bullet before skittering sideways across the gritty rooftop once more, out of reach and useless.
“You’re so fucking dead,” Lex seethes, his voice low and trembling.
“Shut up,” I snap at him. Antagonizing the psycho bitch with the gun is not going to end well for either of us.
I close my arms over my chest, digging my nails into either side as the icy wind whips around us.
Roquel’s face falls into a carefully blank mask as she steps away from the phone and back towards us.
“Yes, Alexio,” Roquel agrees. “You should really shut up.” The smile she passes my way is more than a little off. It’s as if the muscles of her face are stretched taut over bone and nothing else.
“Not a chance,” Lex growls. “If you’re going to fucking kill me, you might as well know—”
I take a step towards him and slap my hand to his mouth, cutting off his tirade. God, I love him, but he’s fucking so smart sometimes and dumber than a box of rocks at other times.
“Stop. It.” I bite out the words, meeting his angry look.
His lips are firm against my palm and a beat passes before he opens his mouth and teeth nip at my flesh.
It’s so not the fucking time. I release him and attempt to turn my focus back to the woman threatening us.
“Why are you here, Roquel?” I ask. “Why did you do all of this?”
It’s as if the question reminds her exactly what we’re doing here on this rooftop.
Red creeps over her skin, invading her cheeks and flushing down to her neck.
Whereas before, she’d held the gun with obvious comfort, now her hand begins to shake.
Not in fear, not in uncertainty, but in pure, undiluted rage.
“Don’t act like you don’t already know!” she yells. “I know they showed you the recording. You must think you have it all figured out.”
The recording? How does she know about the… It hits me. The woman that was with Morpheus in the hotel the night he raped me. We’d never seen her face and I hadn’t recognized her voice. She’d sounded younger, almost childlike. I’d thought it was because she was trying to play a part for him.
No. She was a child.
She must have been fifteen or sixteen. It’s only been a few years, but now that I hear her voice and think back on the recording, I can hear the similarities.
“Oh, my god…” I stare at her.
Roquel, the first person I met at Silverwood Public that didn’t outright hate me. The one who tried to involve me in school, who gave me warnings, who came when I was trapped in Morpheus’ house…
The girl I thought was my friend.
“It was you…” I shake my head. “Why?” The question is a whisper as it slips from my lips, but she hears it.
With a bubble of hysteric laughter, Roquel sucks in a lungful of air before she answers. “He fucking loved me until he thought he could have you.” Her eyes fill with a hazy sheen of tears. “You ruined everything—you always ruin everything!”
“Roquel… he was a monster.”
“No!” The word comes out on a shriek. “No, he was my lover! He was going to marry me!”
Behind me, I feel Lex’s hand on my leg. Unwilling to leave him on his knees a moment longer, I bend—not turning away from the woman in front of me—and lift his arm over my shoulders to help him to his feet. He keeps most of his weight on one leg as he comes up.
“Morpheus Calloway was a fucking asshole,” Lex states, and a part of me wants to shove him back to the ground for that. Roquel is obviously insane, and antagonizing a crazy person is never recommended.
Roquel’s expression slowly shifts, the laughter and anger fading until it’s as if she’s donned a mask. I wonder if this is how she fooled everyone for so long.
“You didn’t know him,” she replies to Lex. “I knew him. I was the only one that did.” Her gaze flicks to me. “The only thing that I ever disliked about him was his obsession with you.” Though her expression doesn’t change, she spits the last word as if it’s a curse.
“But you knew about it.” Lex tries to take a step forward and I push a hand against his chest, gritting my teeth in annoyance. “You knew what he fucking did to her and you still befriended her.”
“What he did to her?” Dark, choppy locks of ink-black hair shift along her shoulder as she tilts her head. “You mean the night she took him from me?”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“I knew I wasn’t his only lover,” she snaps.
“I didn’t give a fuck about the others. He told me about them.
He didn’t have to hide it from me. Because, unlike all of the other whores,” she sneers and jerks the gun in my direction as if trying to punctuate the fact that I should be considered one of those whores, “I actually loved him.”
“You’re fucking delusional.” The words slip from my mouth in a moment of shock. They’re a new brand of poison—acidic and burning—when I realize that she didn’t just accept what Morpheus had done. She’d… helped him in a way.
My body trembles, not with fear but with something far colder.
Rage.
Bile climbs up my throat. She knew. She knew what he did to me.
Worse than that, she’d been there. She could have stopped it.
She could have helped me. Even if I didn’t give a shit about the girls at school, I’d been willing to follow that one into the woods to keep her from experiencing what I had. Not Roquel, though.
She’d chosen a monster and a rapist.
That night, in my memory, has given me nightmares, so much confusion as I’d tried to forget. The sleeping pills. The alcohol. Anything to take away the reminder and the sensation of filth under my skin that he’d left in me.
Yet, here she still stands, clutching that gun like she’s the victim, and not for the first time, I want to kill. I want to wrap my hands around her throat and watch as the light dims from her eyes. She deserves far worse.
The hand I have pressed against Lex’s chest curls into a fist. He reaches up and cups his free hand over it, and I glance down to find that it’s the one he’d tried to staunch the blood from his leg.
The red smudges coat my skin, slick and warm, a violent reminder of how close we are to losing everything, and it’s all because of her.
I face her again as she tilts her head, eyes flashing with a mixture of satisfaction and anger. “What I am,” she hisses, “is tired of trying and failing to kill you.”
Her laugh breaks, sharp and bitter. “God, I don’t know what it is about you—it’s like the fucking universe is on your side.”
Lex releases a curse beside me, low and rough, before biting out an accusation. “You killed that girl because you thought she was Juliet, didn’t you?”
The warmth of his hand over mine grounds me, pulling me back from the edge I’m ready to leap off. Still, I stare back at the woman mere feet away, holding us captive with that damn gun.
Roquel’s mouth twists. “That was an accident,” she admits. “But yes, she was wearing that stupid wig and I thought…” Her eyes narrow, and for a split second, her voice softens into something unholy. “How much easier everything would’ve been if you’d just died when you were supposed to.”
I blink. “When I was supposed to?”
She rolls her eyes, exasperated. “Oh, don’t act like you’re fucking stupid, Juliet. You didn’t really think Otis broke into your apartment on his own, did you?”
Ice forms inside of my bones. “That was you?”
Her lips curve upward, slow and smug. “Of course. The pathetic bastard was supposed to make sure you disappeared. I told him he could fuck with you but to kill you before he was done. I didn’t care what he did with your body.
” Her amusement dies a quick death at that, though.
“The little weasel must’ve just scared you and skipped town,” she huffs. “It was such a waste of my allowance.”
Right. Because she couldn’t know what actually happened to him. Now that she’s caught her wind, the words seem to spill from her like blood from a wound.
“I thought maybe it was the universe again—fucking laughing at me,” she goes on, her tone unraveling with each word. “So I burned your apartment down. Watched the flames from my car. I thought, finally—finally she’s gone. But no.”
Her voice cracks on the last word and her eyes glint with something dangerous as she takes a step towards us. “You survived that too.”
Lex’s body is rock hard against me, pain, anger, and fear keeping him tense. The thundering of his pulse presses against my closed palm. The sound of his breath comes out shallow and ragged, but I can’t tear my eyes away from Roquel.
All this time. The attempted rape. Murder. My fucking apartment—the one I thought the guys had burned down. Everything had been her. I know one thing for certain. One of us won’t walk away tonight.