Chapter 54
Free fall into nothing—
But I was dangling. Caught, my scream cut in half. Quin had me by the wrist. Above, his shoulder was braced against the plaster.
I scrabbled with my other hand, looking for purchase, but there was nothing. Then my toe kicked something, and I stretched, touching tiptoes to a flat surface.
“Got it?”
I found solid ground, and he released me.
That had not been easy, Pascal. And now my strumming arm was sore.
“Go,” Quin said.
I couldn’t move, though. Something primal within me hated this subterranean space, this darkness.
It was like every horror movie I had ever seen, every nightmare I’d ever had, where the ground beneath me opened up, sending me tumbling through the nothingness that I’d known was there all along.
The air, dusty, reeking of mold, coating my lungs. I was cold, shaking.
I had to get out of here. I felt my way with my foot, down a step blindly, then another, hands out, reaching for anything at all. How had Pascal done this? Where had they all gone?
My fingers scraped brick. I pressed my hand against a rough wall, grateful for something solid. At the same time, I realized I could see vague outlines, shapes coming out of the darkness as my eyes adjusted. The straight edge of a table, a wooden chair tipped to the floor. A glimmer of light.
I lurched across the room for it, but tripped and reached—
I collapsed against something steady. Glass clinked against glass somewhere nearby.
When I had my balance again, I was holding the edge of a chest-high structure, soft with dust.
A … bar?
I was surprised but also, somehow, reassured. The bar was bedrock. The void beneath me was replaced by the slats of a dirty wooden floor.
The light I had reached for was a reflection in a mirror behind the bar, bottles lined up against it on a shelf.
My eyes had grown even more accustomed now.
I could see that the bar stretched away from me, hooking into an L, and past that sat a high-backed booth.
Three booths, no four, lined the wall. Red upholstery, I thought.
The leather cracked, ripped, and losing dark, hairy stuffing.
Pendant lamps hung low over the tables, turning each stall into a little world of its own.
This must be where it happened. Shady deals, illicit woo.
I was still shivering when I spotted, across the room, an arched opening in brick. Through it, a dime of light that shouldn’t be there.
In the vast dark of this underworld, it was such a small thing, hope.
I picked my way across rough floorboards toward the light, a north star that widened as I got closer.
At the arch, I spotted words. A sheet of paper pegged to the wall, its corners rolled with age. It had women with dour faces looking out, scolding eyebrows. The caption read: Lips that touch alcohol shall never touch ours.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
A temperance poster in a bar. Somebody had had a sense of humor. Even with the cracked floors, inch-thick dust, and peeling paint, this place was a kick. A time capsule. A gold mine.
The laugh caught in my throat.
I’d caught sight of a face in the dark.
She gazed out from the back wall, chin held high and eyes blazing. I stepped closer.
Red, flowing hair, forthright expression, take it or leave it. She was defiant but also tweaked to please an audience: rosy cheeks, full lips. Lips that surely tasted whatever they wanted.
Jolene d’Arc.
All these years I’d been assigning these features to Marisa, they’d belonged to a blowsy beer girl on a speakeasy wall. How had I conflated this vintage cupcake with my mother?
I must have known this place at some point. Played here. Played … in some dark corner of this pub I loved so much? The darkness pressed at my bare skin as time and memory shifted to include Marisa’s version of my childhood injury.
When I got out of here, when I could ask Alex—
I turned my face to the opening in the ceiling, the daylight painfully bright, a spotlight. I stood looking up through the patch of ruined floor. I was suddenly a solo act, no one left to boost me or pull me up.
No one should have been. This was the plan. Pascal would run for help, and Oona would make sure everyone got up and away.
Marisa would get the hell away from this place and never look back. She had what she wanted: her freedom, the chance at safety for her family. Her real family. And Sicily had what she’d come for.
The band—they couldn’t hold it against me if they hadn’t taken the first opportunity to get out of here, forever. Every woman for herself, and who would blame them?
In the light from above, I could see the broad smear of Quin’s blood across my wrist, my red fingers, and remembered, keenly, how much blood, how bright.
I crouched down on my boot heels, dizzy suddenly. When I closed my eyes, I saw the gray of Joey’s flesh on the ice.
This moving sidewalk, propelling me forward. But into what?