CHAPTER 15 GIGI
GIGI
Gigi couldn’t sleep. She could, however, fake sleep like a champ—much more convincingly than Knox had on the plane.
So convincingly, in fact, that eventually, Savannah bought it and crept down from the loft bed.
Victory! Gigi gave it another few seconds, then peeked down over the railing.
In the glow of a flickering electric lantern, she could make out Brady’s form below.
He appeared to be asleep, but appearances—and recovering physicists—could be deceiving.
Regardless, Gigi quietly staged her escape from the loft and tiptoed toward the door her sister had just exited, pushing down a stab of guilt as she pressed her ear to the door.
It wasn’t really spying if a person had good intentions, and it didn’t count as eavesdropping if you and your target had ever shared a womb.
The first voice Gigi heard was Rohan’s. “Can’t sleep, love?”
“Not tired,” Savannah replied. “What’s your excuse?”
“As it happens, life has trained me to survive on very little sleep.”
“Life,” Savannah repeated, “at the Mercy.”
The Mercy? Gigi thought. What’s that?
“Life before the Mercy, actually,” Rohan clarified. “I woke up underwater on more than one occasion as a child—the river, most often, but holding me under in the bathtub did in a pinch.”
What kind of monster would do something like that to a child? Gigi was horrified.
“And then there’s the fact, Savannah, that the last time I allowed myself to fall fully asleep, I woke up to find you’d left me all by my lonesome in your bed.”
They slept? Together? Gigi tried to make that compute. Like, just slept-slept or…
“It is not as if you expected me to stay,” Savannah said haughtily, “any more than I expect you to tell me what your real endgame is here.”
Gigi was pretty sure Rohan’s endgames had endgames, but to her surprise, Code Name Vex-Buddy didn’t deflect the question.
“Leadership of the Mercy passes, at most, once every generation or two. Should I fail to win the crown, it will default to the duchess instead.” Rohan paused ever-so-slightly. “So now you know, love. What I’m playing for. What my endgame has been from the start.”
“And you’ll use my sister to get what you want without a second thought.”
Gigi had been expecting that. It was the reason she was eavesdropping. Rohan had clearly been amenable to the Gigi-as-bait plan, and Savannah had just as clearly been strongly opposed.
Go ahead and say it, Savannah. Gigi braced herself. Tell him I’m weak. Tell him I am in constant, dire need of supervision.
“I know you,” Savannah told Rohan instead. “I know that you’re incapable of trusting anyone, incapable of truly working with anyone. You don’t know how to want anything but the win.”
“There is one other thing that I want.”
It couldn’t have been clearer to Gigi: He wants you, Savannah. Gigi wanted to stop there, but her brain wouldn’t let her. He wants you in a way that no one has ever wanted me.
“Make me an offer,” Savannah told Rohan.
“And what precisely is it that you want, love?”
Just hearing the question, Gigi wanted. Not Rohan. Not even what the two of them had—whatever it was. Gigi just… wanted.
“Promise me that you won’t use my sister as bait,” Savannah demanded. “I want Gigi out of this altogether as soon as that is an option. I want her safe and out of the way.”
Like a doll on a shelf. Gigi’s throat tightened. What about what I want? Don’t I get a vote?
“Give me your word, Rohan.”
“And what will you give me in return, love?”
“The opportunity to prove that your word is worth something, to prove that you are capable of seeing a deal through to the end.”
“In exchange for doing what you want me to do,” Rohan summarized, “you will give me the opportunity to prove… that I can do what you want me to do?”
“That sums it up. Yes.”
If Gigi hadn’t been trying to avoid getting caught, she would have laughed. Or maybe cried. Or maybe both. It was the most Savannah thing Gigi had ever heard.
“It’s rarely a good idea to put your biggest weakness on display so brazenly, love,” Rohan advised Savannah, his voice going silky and low.
Her biggest weakness. Gigi flinched. Me.
“Nonetheless,” Rohan continued, “you have my word.”
Gigi wanted to fling the door open and object, but she didn’t.
She couldn’t. She’d only just gotten Savannah back, and she didn’t want to fight with her, especially when no amount of fighting would change the fact that Gigi wasn’t the formidable one, the strong one.
She wasn’t the one that anyone wanted, ever.
Gigi was smiley and endearing and good at loving people and believing that everything would be okay, and that was all.
But hey, it wasn’t nothing.
No moping, Gigi told herself as she retreated to the loft bed. Not even a little bit. She pulled the covers up around her and rolled over, staring through a crack in the boards out into the darkness of night. This is me, not moping.
“I know you’re out there,” she whispered instead. She’d said those words many times before. As she said them, Gigi pictured Mattias Slater’s dark eyes, the scar through his eyebrow. She knew now that some of the times she’d called into darkness, he had been out there.
Do you want to play a game? The memory of his voice washed away everything else. It’s called You Don’t Need to Prove a Damn Thing. To anyone. It’s called You’re Already Strong.
Gigi tried to believe that. She steeled herself and thought about calla lilies and warnings and Calla’s fleur-de-lis necklace.
I know you’re out there, she thought, and this time, Gigi wasn’t just silently addressing those words to Slate. She imagined herself throwing down a gauntlet—for the universe, for the Watcher.
One that said: I’m already strong.
One that said: And I don’t need anyone’s permission to prove it.