Chapter 50
Hiromi’s face took up the entire wall.
This was the guilty secret she’d kept covered in her studio—a self-portrait. Her eyes, luminous, wet with tears, stared straight into mine.
Garrett had found it and wasted no time putting it up for sale. One of the cult had wanted this strange memorial to Lyon. But more, it was a testament to all the future art Hiromi would never make, because of me.
Drawn closer to the portrait, I breathed two words:
“I’m sorry.”
Her face dissolved into pixels, each mote of color a single candy wrapper stuck to the canvas. I remembered Hiromi sifting through the bins, holding candies up to the light, the wrappers crinkling.
The taste of bitter lemon filled my mouth. The flavors of bubblegum, of absinthe and fancy soap. Ginseng and mushrooms on my tongue, wet earth and gnarled old pieces of ginger. The savor of olive brine and warm gin, salt and sex. The smell of rusted iron.
A tear slid down my cheek. I dropped to my knees.
How had Hiromi known that this was how she looked to me? Glowing with color, jammed with flavors. Crowding my senses with her scent, the texture of her skin. My nerve endings, ten feet across.
Suddenly I knew: She’d made this portrait for me.
Sebastian knelt beside me, his arms around my shoulders. “It’s true. You cared about her.”
He’d brought me all this way to give me one last chance. My final test, and I was failing, weeping, tears on tears.
“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. People who loved me: I killed them. Sebastian should kill me in turn.
“The best of all of us.” His voice was full of awe. “And they pushed you too hard.”
“How it happened doesn’t matter. I’m a danger to the family. Look at me—you can’t trust me in an interrogation room.”
“Jess.” His hands on mine.
“What good am I, anyway? Broken like this?”
“You are perfection,” he said and kissed me.
My eyes opened. He kissed me again, on the salt of my cheeks, on my lips.
I waited for steel at my throat. For it sliding into my stomach, echoing how Lyon had died. But Sebastian’s hands, holding mine, were empty.
A strange goodbye, to do the thing we always hadn’t.
We can’t but we should. We are but we haven’t.
But we were.
I leaned into him, opening my mouth to his, lip to lip, tongue to tongue. Nothing in the world but our breathing, our hands entwined. My heart beating in my ears, in my fingertips, heat spreading over me, over us.
I remembered holding him in that bed eight years ago in Connecticut, wondering if this would ever happen. Knowing that it could and shouldn’t. Knowing it would mark that empty house in a way that the owners would always feel.
To kiss him was to fail a test—but this was a beautiful failure. It was every skipped class, every drink on a lazy afternoon, every arrow that flew past the target, free. All the times I’d touched myself, thinking of him, were part of him touching me here, now.
Surrender. Consent.
Something became clear then, the first certainty I’d felt since the crash, and I pulled away, full of wonder. “You aren’t going to kill me.”
He unfurled his laugh. Large and raucous, contagious. I laughed too.
“What are we laughing at?” I asked.
“I’m not killing you.” He kissed me again. “I’m recruiting you.”
My laughter faltered. “Into what?”
“Care,” he said, looking up at the portrait of Hiromi.
My eyes followed his, and after our kissing, our laughing, the sight of her face cut a hundred times deeper.
A gasp of fresh agony came from me.
Sebastian held me tighter. “She shouldn’t be dead. That’s why we can’t be their instruments anymore.”
I shook my head, but didn’t pull away. “What are you talking about?”
“The world is run by fools,” he said. “People we would’ve culled when they were ten years old, except we put them in charge. Without us, the Belmonts and Wilbert-Lees would all be swept away. Our families prop them up, when they deserve to die. That’s why the world keeps getting worse.”
As I gazed at him, Sebastian’s words began to spill and tumble.
“He must have realized. He just picked the wrong targets—the kids are the ones who get it. Even you can see it now, Jess. He wasn’t mad. He figured out that we are the root of the problem!”
“Who did?” I pleaded.
Sebastian took a deep breath against me, gathering himself.
“Uncle Max,” he said. “We built this system. We have to be the ones to burn it down.”