CHAPTER 85 GIGI
GIGI
Savannah was fine. Gigi still hadn’t wrapped her mind around that.
Savannah was fine, and she was in Arizona, and now so was Gigi, because she’d needed to see her sister for herself.
Their mother had been the one to call—from Savannah’s Alisa-Ortega-issued phone, when she’d seen all the missed calls.
“Where is she?” Gigi asked her mom. It was late, but Gigi didn’t care. Savannah was fine.
“Your room. I’m not going to ask why you both have new phones.” Acacia Grayson wasn’t the world’s best mom for nothing. She dropped a kiss on Gigi’s forehead. “Yet.”
Gigi took that to mean there were a lot of things that her mom wasn’t going to ask yet.
“Why is she in my room?” Gigi said.
“Do you remember when the two of you were little, and we decided to let you share a room for a few years, because you two ended up in the same bed every night regardless?”
Gigi nodded. “I crawled into her bed every time I had a nightmare.”
“Is that how you remember it?” Her mom smiled slightly. “Because I remember you crawling into Savannah’s bed every time she had a nightmare.”
Gigi found Savannah exactly where their mom had said she’d be: in Gigi’s room, sitting on Gigi’s bed, which wasn’t really a bed per se. Technically, it was a mattress on the floor.
Technically, Gigi had sold the bed.
“I take it Mom called you.” Savannah was wearing a little black dress, her face fully made up, four-inch heels on her feet. She looked like a supermodel. A supermodel who was staring blankly ahead, a small ball of fur in her lap.
“On a scale of one to forty-seven,” Gigi said, “how pissed is Katara that you brought home a kitten?” Gigi’s Bengal cat was used to being the undisputed queen of her domain.
“Very,” Savannah replied.
You’re not fine-fine, Gigi thought. You’re alive-fine. Hurting-fine. Possibly-plotting-something fine. Crawling into bed with her sister was still second nature for Gigi, after all these years, even when the bed in question wasn’t really a bed per se.
“What happened?” Gigi asked. “I thought they had you. The Gilded Blade. I called you forty-seven times.”
Savannah shook her head. “You and the number forty-seven.”
“What happened?” Gigi could be a broken record when she needed to be. “Because we were all under the impression that you said yes.”
“No one ever asked.” Savannah was quiet for a moment, and Gigi resisted the urge to fill the silence, to ask where Savannah had been, to say a single damn thing.
If the silence got awkward, so be it. If Savannah wanted to talk, she could talk.
And eventually, she did. “What happened in here?” Savannah gestured toward Gigi’s room, her very bare room.
“Where’s your furniture? Why is your closet practically empty? ”
Gigi looked down. “It is an epic story kind of like Robin Hood, except I’m both Robin Hood and the people he steals from, and it’s all roughly two hundred percent more chaotic.” It felt like an eternity ago now.
“When did it start?”
Gigi met Savannah’s gaze. “You know when.”
“When you found out about Dad—what he did and what was done to him.” That was the first time Savannah had ever referred to what their father had done. Gigi wondered what the duchess had told her. Savannah looked down—not at the kitten in her lap but at an object in her right hand.
A ring.
Dad’s wedding ring.
“He’s ashes.” Savannah stared at that ring. “There is no body. There’s nothing left. Just this. I don’t know how the duchess and her lot obtained this, but they did.”
Now it was Gigi’s turn to stare at the ring.
She knew what kind of man her father had been.
She knew what he’d done, what he’d been capable of.
And even setting that aside, Gigi knew her dad hadn’t been the kind of husband her mom deserved.
He definitely hadn’t been the perfect father, but he had been her dad, and despite everything, looking at the ring had the good times flashing through Gigi’s head, because there had been good times.
Hating the man wouldn’t have hurt if she’d never loved him at all.
Gigi took a deep breath. The natural follow-up to what she’d just been told probably would have been asking Savannah what she was going to do with that ring, but Gigi didn’t, because sometimes, faith was a simple thing.
And sometimes, when it felt like the whole damn world was on the verge of ending, all you could do was decide who you wanted to spend the apocalypse with.
If bad news came in, if the worst happened—Gigi had chosen to hear about it here. With Savannah.
“Why aren’t you asking me what I’m going to do with this ring?”
Gigi shook her head and managed the tiniest, crooked smile. “You know why.”
“Because I’m your Savannah.” Her twin’s voice almost broke.
“And you’re an optimist.” The next thing Gigi knew, her sister was pressing their father’s wedding ring into her palm.
“I don’t want it.” Savannah was not the type to whisper anything, but her voice was faint.
“The ring. Revenge. I don’t want any of it.
I don’t want to want anything ever again. ”
The kitten stirred on Savannah’s lap.
“You decide.” Savannah closed Gigi’s fingers around the ring. “You decide, Gigi. Not me.”
I can’t, Gigi thought, but she didn’t say it, because it wasn’t true. She could. “I make no promises,” Gigi warned her sister.
“You make all the promises.” Savannah stroked the kitten. “I can’t believe you thought I said yes. You really thought I would do that to you? That I would leave you after I made you promise not to leave me?”
“You did leave me,” Gigi blurted out. “You left me in the bayou and went to London without me. I’m not helpless, Savannah. You should have taken me with you or at least had the guts to tell me to my face that you didn’t want to.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Savannah said nothing else for the longest time. “But the best part of me,” she said finally, her voice actually breaking this time, “has always been the part that loves you. Sometimes, I think it’s the only part of me that isn’t defective—or broken.”
Gigi’s heart hurt, just hearing her sister say the words. “Is this about Rohan?” Gigi knew that was an emotional landmine, but the question had to be asked, because Savannah didn’t know where Rohan was right now.
She didn’t know that he’d gone after her.
“Do not say that name to me. Not now. Not ever again, Gigi.”
That was going to be a problem, but fortunately, Gigi was a problem solver. “I shall call him… Consuelo.”
“Please don’t.”
“Consuelo thought the Gilded Blade had you. He went after you.” Gigi wished she could stop there. “No one’s heard from him since.”
Savannah’s expression shifted bit by bit until her face could have doubled as a work of art: A Study in Abject, Ball-Kicking Fury. “That bastard,” Savannah swore. “I am done. I could not have been clearer that I was done.”
“I’m sure you were very clear,” Gigi assured her sister. “But apparently, he isn’t done. Antiheroes, am I right?”
“I hate him,” Savannah said, the words equal parts curse and vow.
“Clearly and very much.”
“I hate him.” The kitten in Savannah’s lap nipped at her fingers.
Gigi laid her head on her sister’s shoulder. “You like him. A lot.”
“I hate his smirk. I hate his smile. I despise the way he touched me and the way he made me feel. I loathe his wagers.” Savannah’s voice shook. “I hate the way he wouldn’t stop calling me love. So much.”
“I know,” Gigi murmured.
Savannah closed her eyes. “I hate that bastard for making me believe that he liked the parts of me that make me so hard for anyone else to like.”
“I like you,” Gigi said.
“You like everyone.” The kitten nipped at Savannah’s finger again—harder this time. “No biting,” Savannah told the cat, her voice breaking. “Unless the person really deserves it.”
Gigi laid her head on her sister’s shoulder.
“I was done,” Savannah said. Past tense. “I hated him, and I was done. And now—”
Savannah cut off, and all Gigi could think was: And now…
And now…
And now…