Killing November

by Adriana Mather

  He looks at me questioningly. “Both leave? And where are you going?”

  I swallow. “To find Matteo,” I say, fighting to keep my voice calm.

  He looks at me for a long moment like he’s trying to decide something, or maybe he’s registering my fear and that I’m doing it despite that.

  “Be careful,” he says so genuinely that my stomach flutters.

  There’s a beat of silence and I nod.

  I turn around, grab my cloak from the armoire, and exit into the hallway. The cold air and the idea of confronting Matteo send a shiver down my back.

  * * *

  Minutes later, I’m standing in front of Matteo’s room, my hand hovering to knock on the door and my heart racing. The only problem is, if I knock and he slams the door in my face, I’m screwed.

  From down the corridor comes the sound of boots on stairs and I don’t hesitate—I lift the latch and walk right into his room.

  Matteo’s on his couch, staring at his fireplace. “Get out,” he says without even turning toward me. The sight of him makes my nervousness soar. I take two more steps but don’t dare move far from the door.

  “I’ll get out if you tell me what you know about me.” My voice sounds louder and my tone more forceful than I thought it would.

  He turns to me and for a brief second he looks surprised. “I’m sick of playing games with you, November. Save us both the energy of getting angry and turn around and leave,” he says, and the disgust I usually detect when he’s speaking to me isn’t there. He almost seems worn out.

  I’ve only got one shot at this. “You don’t trust me. But consider this: Layla does. And you know better than I do how much Layla cared about Stefano. Do you really think she would trust someone who killed her boyfriend? Of course she wouldn’t.”

  I watch as Matteo clenches his hands and then releases them again. It seems like he’s trying to keep himself from getting worked up.

  “Ever since Stefano’s murder we’ve been trying to figure out why Charles attacked your friend. Layla, Ash, me—we’ve been sneaking around this creepy castle, putting ourselves at risk trying to help.” My voice becomes more insistent. “The least you could do is stop making things harder!”

  Matteo gets up off the couch so fast that I take a step backward. He crosses the room in a few long strides.

  “How dare you come into my room and tell me what I’m doing or not doing? If this whole situation is anyone’s fault, it’s yours,” he says, and his broad chest rises and falls quickly. “What made you think you could just walk into this school, an exact replica of your mother? You can’t be stupid enough to think no one would notice. Anyone who knew her recognized you immediately. This is your mess!”

  I look at him closely, trying to make sense of his words. “This is exactly what I mean. You’re assuming I know something I don’t. How do people here know my mother?”

  A warning flashes in his eyes, telling me to back off. “I’m doing my best not to kill you right now. But you’re not making it easy. You should have stayed in whatever hideout you came from.”

  “Are you kidding?” I say, matching his tone. “Gladly! Fire up the goddamn plane. I don’t want to be at this insane school any more than you want me here. Blackwood refused to send me home. So you can mistrust me until the end of time, but it won’t change the fact that both of us are stuck here together. Only one of us knows anything about my family’s history. And it’s not me.”

  He takes a step backward, getting a good look at me. “Bullshit.”

  “No, not bullshit. I wish it were like you all thought. I would love to be playing a game right now, masterfully manipulating people and scheming about my next move. But instead I’ve been kept in the dark my entire life and am trying desperately to learn my way around this place and to avoid getting murdered at every turn, all because of something to do with my parents that I know nothing about. In fact, as far as I can tell”—I point at him—“you are the one person who reliably knows who I am. But the moment you saw me, you punched me in the face. So I’ve been left on my own here. Some Family you are.”

  Something in his expression shifts, only I can’t quite read his emotions.

  I hold eye contact with him so that he knows I’m completely serious. “Stefano is dead,” I say in a calmer voice. “And without Layla and Ash, I would have been dead by now, too. So, yes, I’m in your room yelling at you to explain what I’m missing here. Because as far as I can tell, this whole mess circles around me and my parents and very possibly you. I’m over not having answers. The only way I’m leaving this room without an explanation is if I’m dead.”

  He scowls and stays silent for so long that I wonder if he’s coming around or deciding to in fact kill me.

  “When you attacked me in the dining hall…,” he says, and his voice is less angry than it was before. “Somebody died that day. Who died?”

  “My aunt,” I say, and my voice deflates as I picture Jo’s face. “My mom’s sister.”

  His eyes widen and he runs a hand through his hair. “Magdalene?”

  The sound of my aunt’s name coming out of his mouth all but freezes me. “She, well, she went by Jo, actually. Sh-she—” I’m stuttering, unable to make sense of his personal knowledge of one of my most important people.

  “—gave the name to herself after she read an American novel called Little Women,” he says, finishing my sentence.

  My eyes tear up and I will them to stop. The last thing I want is to cry in front of him. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “My mom used to tell that story,” he says.

  I look at him sideways. “Your mom knew my aunt Jo?” I say, trying to grasp what that could mean.

  “Knew her? My mom is Jo’s sister—the youngest of the three,” he says, and it feels like someone sucked all the air out of the room.

  “You’re lying,” I say, pressing my hand into my chest in a desperate attempt to get control of my heart and the crack I feel forming there.

  He shakes his head.

  My mom and Aunt Jo had another sister. They had a younger sister, and Matteo…“You’re my cousin?” I say, and my confusion and anger surge anew. I shake my head to blink away the tears, but they’re only getting heavier. “When did you know? How could you not tell me this!” I’m stamping toward him, fuming. “My god, you punched me!”

  I swing at him and he leans out of the way.

  “You made me a target!” I yell, and swing at him again.

  He catches my wrist. “You made us a target!” he yells right back at me, and releases my hand. “Stefano is dead because you came here. So don’t tell me what I did to you.”

  The more I look at him, the more I realize how much his features remind me of my mom and Aunt Jo. How could I not have seen that before? “Why were my parents in America?”

  He looks at me with caution.

  “I’m serious. Tell me why my parents were hiding in the country. Tell me why I didn’t know I was Strategia.”

  He frowns. “You didn’t know you were—”

  “No. And spare me the endless ‘That doesn’t make sense’ responses,” I say. “I know better than anyone that it doesn’t make sense. But I have a right to know who I am and why I grew up the way I did. And don’t tell me you don’t know, because I can see on your face right now that you do.”

  “I’m not telling you Family secrets,” he says.

  “These are my secrets! I have more of a right to them than you do and you know that,” I say.

  Matteo looks at me like he’s not sure.

  I exhale. “Look, my mom died when I was six, and although I was always told it was an accident, Aunt Jo was vehemently convinced it wasn’t. Now my aunt gets murdered—our aunt. And I’m guessing that whoever is trying to destroy my family will go after my father next
. If they haven’t already. And if what’s going on in this school is related to their deaths, and I’m nearly positive it is, then I damn well need to know. All I have to go on right now is that the Lions hate us because we’re trying to stop them from taking over all of Strategia.”

  Matteo scoffs. “You are a Lion,” he says, and I open my mouth and close it again. His comment, while confirming my suspicion about my dad, throws me. How can I have all these identities that mean so much to everyone here that I’ve never known anything about?

  “I’m also a Bear,” I say, and raise my chin. “Just like my mom and aunt. And even if my dad was born a Lion, in his heart, he wasn’t one of them.”

  Matteo steps away from me and for a split second I’m terrified that he’ll go into his bedroom and lock me out. But instead he heads for the fireplace, staring at the logs for so long that I take a few steps toward him.

  He nods to himself like he’s made a decision. “Twenty-five years ago there was a group of students here who were the best this school ever had.”

  “I’ve heard the teachers talk about them,” I say.

  “Right,” he says. “Your mom, my mom, Aunt Jo, Blackwood, your father, and a couple of others were part of that group. But there were two who were better than all the rest—your parents.”

  “What?” It takes me a second to wrap my mind around what he’s saying. “Not the…the scroll in the library?” I ask, remembering my visit there with Ash. “That was them?”

  He nods, and the look he gives me tells me to shut up and let him finish. “Your parents—the firstborn of the Lion Family and the firstborn of the Bear Family—started at Academy Absconditi the same year. My mother says everyone anticipated fighting, considering it’s what our Families do. And they did at first, but over time they also fell in love.”

  My stomach twists uncomfortably. Not only were my parents the best, but they were also both firstborns? The magnitude of information my dad kept from me is staggering.

  “My mother said your parents thought they could change Strategia politics for the better,” Matteo says. “But they soon found that the decades of fighting between the Lions and the Bears, and the centuries of the power imbalance, were going to make things nearly impossible. Initially your grandparents refused to come to an agreement about what the terms would be if they were to get married. Jag demanded that your father and mother stay with them and that she give up her standing as a Bear, and your mom’s parents wanted the opposite. They fought viciously among themselves for months, but to everyone’s surprise, they did eventually agree to sit down and try to compromise.”

  Jag is my grandfather. Oh, holy hell. “And what happened?” I ask quickly, with some amazement that my parents were actually doing something to fix things. “Did they get their Families to agree?”

  Matteo sighs, like he understands the larger question I’m asking. “At the time, some people thought that your parents would restore order and put an end to the Lions picking off members of other Families.”

  “By your tone I’m guessing that I’m about to find out how they went from uniting their Families to hiding,” I say.

  “Your mother killed Jag’s brother—”

  “Wait, what?”

  Matteo puts up his hand. “Patience really isn’t your strong suit, is it?” He pauses, daring me to interrupt him again. I swallow and shake my head. “What I was saying was that your mother killed Jag’s brother and any shadow of an agreement that our Families had fell apart.”

  My mother. A killer?

  As if he can sense my shock, he continues, speaking quickly, almost reassuringly. “My mother always said the reasons were complicated. And if she knows more, she’s never told me exactly what happened. But needless to say, the Lions put out a hit on your mother.”

  Even as Matteo is talking, I’m wrestling with the impossibility that this is my mother, my family.

  “As for your father, he fought back against Jag and the Lions, and it earned him a contract on his head as well. So they ran.” Matteo shrugs, as if running from trained assassins is what everyone does when things get bad. “As for our Family, well, the Bears felt betrayed that your mom left instead of coming home to them. And they…they refused to protect them.”

  My eyes widen. That’s why Aunt Jo blamed her family for Mom’s death.

  “The way I heard it, the Lion assassins came back one by one without finding either of your parents. Or they didn’t come back at all. So to save face, the Lions convinced the rest of the Families that your parents were tragically murdered. But meanwhile the hunt went on,” Matteo finishes.

  “But they did kill my mother eventually,” I say quietly.

  “Yes,” he says, and there’s some regret in his voice. “But none of the other Families know that except us and the Lions. And since then, the animosity between the Lions and Bears has only gotten worse. When I hit you that day outside the dining hall, I…” He falls silent then and returns his gaze to the fire.

  “It’s okay,” I say, and my voice is heavy. “Thanks for telling me the truth.”

  “You are…welcome,” he says, but doesn’t look at me. Under all his anger and bravado, there’s such a deep sadness.

  “You should know,” I begin slowly, trying to find some way to match his honesty with another truth, “that Charles wasn’t trying to kill Stefano. He was trying to kill you and make me take the fall for it. After your explanation just now, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that the Lions would want to divide us. I also think you should know that the guard who was killed outside my door had his neck slashed with a piece of glass. As far as we can tell, the weapon is still out there somewhere. So I guess what I’m saying is…be careful.”

  Matteo looks up and his sadness intensifies. “They were trying to kill me?”

  I nod slowly. I feel awful for telling him. I know how I would feel if something happened to Emily, especially if it had something to do with me. But after what he’s just confided in me, I can’t not tell him. There is every chance someone will try again.

  “How do you know this about Stefano?” Matteo asks, and I can almost hear his heart breaking.

  I explain the blood under Stefano’s bed, the guard’s tattoo, and all the strange details we’ve uncovered. He listens to everything I have to say, and by the time I’m done speaking, his jaw is tight and his forehead is creased in concentration.

  “I was going to come back here that day after class,” he says. “But Blackwood had given me a third mark for punching you and sent me to the outer perimeter.”

  “That’s what Layla figured,” I say.

  Matteo rubs his neck and looks at me like he’s trying to decide something. Finally he sighs and drops his arm. “And I wouldn’t assume I’m the only one who knows who your parents are. Blackwood has to know. Probably Conner. Brendan and Nyx were Charles’s best friends, so they definitely know. Felix. And I’m sure there are others.”

  “Felix?” I repeat, suddenly remembering the creepy “I know” that he hissed in my ear at my first lunch.

  “Yes,” Matteo affirms, and rubs his neck again. “The thing is…” He pauses for a moment, like he’s debating whether he should keep going, and I sit very still, hoping he will. “Felix’s father was one of the assassins sent to kill your parents. One of the ones that didn’t come back. There are likely other Lions here, too, who have lost a relative trying to take out your parents. No one knew you even existed, though, until you showed up,” he says.

  My mouth is suddenly dry and it’s hard to swallow. My parents killed Felix’s father? No wonder he hates me. Not that his father wasn’t trying to kill them, but still. I should feel excited about getting another piece of the puzzle, but the entire conversation fills me with dread. Coming to this school was like starting a wildfire that immediately raged out of control. Not to mention that I remind people of the past in the
worst possible ways.

  “November?” Matteo says.

  “Yeah?” I look up, snapping out of my thoughts.

  “You should know that I didn’t punch you because I was angry,” he says. “What happened with your mom…You’re still a Bear. I punched you because I was told to.”

  “Who told you to punch me?” I say, my brain starting to whirl once again. “Was it Felix?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Matteo says, and I can see by his face that he’s not going to. “But I just thought you should know.”

  I open my mouth to argue, but he looks so lost in his thoughts that I suspect he’s thinking about Stefano again.

  “Now it’s time for you to go,” he says, and I do.

  As I close the door behind me, I can’t help but wish things were different. I finally have another family member who’s more like me than I want to admit, and he also wants nothing to do with me. I can’t really blame him, though. He’s right. If I’d never come to this school, Stefano would still be alive.

  “ASH?” I SAY, when I’m back in my room. I wait a beat, but there’s no response.

  I check the window and under the beds and return to the empty common room. On the floor in front of the fireplace, written in ash, are the words Be back soon. I smile at the cleverness and rub out the message with the bottom of my boot.

  My conversation with Matteo cycles through my thoughts. My parents were next in line to lead their Families. They were the best in this school. I can’t even imagine what their lives were like before they had me and before they became the Romeo and Juliet of the Strategia world. I need to talk to my dad. I have so many questions, so many missing details from Matteo’s story to fill in.

  Sending me to the Academy makes no sense at all. My family was in hiding—why put me in the one place where I’d be exposed to the very people who are a threat? Matteo was right that I resemble my mom: if he could pick me out, surely others can, too. I keep thinking about what Blackwood said, that strange things happen on purpose. Matteo said Blackwood knows who I am, which she must if she attended the Academy at the same time as my parents. But why let me in? She must have known that the shit would hit the fan as soon as the Lions and the Bears recognized me.