Chapter 20 #2
My mother choose freedom. Gave the Dynasty full control of me. To this day I’m only dragged to her events if ordered.
Perhaps if our mothers had cared more about us, than the Dynasty, we might not be micro-dosing lip balms .
Charlotte softened the moment by holding up a balm. “Here. Consider it a party favor.”
“From my own party,” Vivienne said. “You’re giving away inventory.”
“Add it to your ledger,” Charlotte said sweetly.
Vivienne pretended to scowl, then tucked an extra into my palm. “Just don’t actually use it unless you mean it. You’d be surprised what a kissed wrist can do if someone’s blood sugar is low and their ego is high.”
“Which is to say,” Charlotte murmured, “everyone we know.”
I weighed the tube in my hand. It looked like any other gloss—chic, minimal, no hint of danger beyond the people holding it.
Vivienne smirked, snapping the case closed with a sharp click. “Heirs will pay triple for something that makes them float and still lets them walk back into a gala without anyone noticing.”
“Gets them high,” Charlotte added, stacking the tubes neat. “Not dead. Too much mess in that. Don’t underestimate cosmetics, Emilia. Dynasty boys will lick anything off your mouth if you let them.”
Luxury disguised as innocence.
Charlotte watched me watch it. “We could have been normal,”
“Normal never invited us,” Vivienne said.
“Normal didn’t send you a Crow,” Charlotte added, and there it was: the truth they were dying to pull into the light.
I gave them a look. “Don’t.”
“You don’t have to pretend with us,” Vivienne touched my arm gently. “We saw your face when you said his name or should we say their names.”
“I didn’t make a face. ”
“You made a face,” Charlotte nodded. “It was small and full of ruin.”
I wanted to deny it again. “He—he put his hand on my cheek in the car,” I heard myself say. “He told me not to close my eyes. Neither of them left the hospital until I was discharged.”
Vivienne reached for another case just to have something to do with her hands. “And did you close your eyes?”
“I did. But only after he let me.”
We all sat with that for a moment. Both of them remembered how they broke me. It was around the same time we started micro dosing lip balms.
“Here is what I know,” Charlotte said, leaning back, looking like a judge in a trial.
“If a Crow wants you, if he chooses you, if he decides you are under his jurisdiction, the rest of the city can fall into the ocean and he will still be there, holding your jaw, telling you to look at him. It’s not romantic. It’s insane. It’s also?—”
“Useful,” Vivienne said practically.
“—terrifying,” Charlotte finished, but she smiled when she said it.
“How is Rome terrifying?” I asked, because if I had to think about the twins any longer I would start shaking.
“He knows where every exit is,” she said. “He doesn’t brag about it. He just always stands with his back to the correct wall. That’s a man who lived without permission long enough to make it policy.”
“And Nikolai?” I asked.
Vivienne’s eyes went distant for half a second. “He makes you feel like your heartbeat is a secret only he can hear.”
“Gross,” Charlotte said. “I like it.”
“Are you two warning me,” I asked, “or advertising? ”
“Yes,” they said together, and we laughed in a way that felt like breathing.
When the cases were full, Vivienne locked them with her thumb, then pressed a secondary key sequence only she knew. She stacked them like treasure and slid the whole thing into a matte travel trunk.
“Delivery?” I asked.
“Dispersal,” she corrected. “One to the south warehouse. One to the docks.”
“Now as for the yacht. You don’t have to go,” Charlotte said.
“Yes, she does. If she doesn’t, the story writes itself without her.”
“I hate when you’re right,” Charlotte told Vivienne.
“You love it,”
I moved my hand over the travel trunk’s lid. “It’s just a reunion.”
“It’s never just a reunion,” Vivienne said. “Not on that boat.”
“Stop being ominous,” Charlotte told her. “She knows.”
“She doesn’t know everything,” Vivienne said, and the way she said it made me lift my eyes.
“What?”
Vivienne weighed the moment. “They’ll be there,” she said that as if she hadn’t warned me about that a few moments ago. “Luca. Bastion.”
“Translation: don’t be alone on any balcony.”
“Or do,” Vivienne corrected, “if you can live with what happens after.”
“You think I can’t?” I asked. Because a part of me needed them to tell me if I could.
“I think you already decided to drown once,” Vivienne touched my hand, “And you survived. That makes you dangerous.”
And perhaps it made me stupid to go back knowing how this ends.
We stood there a long moment, three dynasty daughters, surrounded by lip balm that could kiss a man into compliance.
“I have to go back to the penthouse after this,” I reached for my phone to check if Alexander had messaged. My car accident had been an inconvenience.
“Take a case,” Vivienne said.
“Leave a case,” Charlotte countered. “At my place. Or his.” She said his in a way that could have meant the twins or my brother; that was the problem with girls like us—we knew too many pronouns and not enough safe nouns.
I slipped the extra balm into my pocket and pretended not to feel its weight.
“Text us from the elevator,” Charlotte said. “Lie and say you’re fine.”
“Send a picture,” Vivienne already tucking her hair behind one ear. Most likely planning which dress she was going to wear to the yacht.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of you,” Vivienne said. “Alive.”
I looked at them—Charlotte with her ridiculous brush, Vivienne with her cases.
My girls. My proof that something of me still existed outside hospitals, Dynasty events and two crows that kept me up at night.
“I’ll send a picture,” I said.
“Good,” Charlotte said. “And if you see Rome?—”
“Tell him you said hi?” I offered.
“Tell him I said nothing,” she replied, smug. “He will know what it means. ”
Vivienne set the trunk gently into her car like it was a person. Charlotte locked her door and slid an extra balm into the mailbox for luck.
“We should do face masks,” Charlotte said suddenly, as if she needed to swing the pendulum back to something pretty.
“We literally just weaponized the face,” Vivienne said.
“I meant the hydrating kind.”
“We’ll do masks after the reunion,” I said. “If we still have skin.”
Charlotte laughed, relieved by the joke she hadn’t been able to make herself.
Vivienne started the car. Charlotte hummed a song that had lived on the radio when we were ten, the year our mothers still believed the world would shape itself around us instead of the other way around.
We hadn’t become our mothers.
We hadn’t become normal.
We had become girls who knew how to build a thing that could pass for either salvation or sin, depending on who opened it.
Which, as Charlotte liked to say, is a kind of art.