by Iris RIvers
She pulled Ana’s hands away from her face and said, “As much as I’d like to do this”—she took a step back—“I asked you to come here for a different reason.”
Ana laughed drunkenly, saying, “Are we not going to hook up?”
“Not tonight.” She raised a brow. Ana frowned like a young child.
It was hot, the air around them filling the room uncomfortably. Rain began pattering on the large window behind the queen-sized bed, the sky thundering in cadence with the beat of Ana’s heart.
“You’re Ana Powell,” Bella said fervently, her eyes glowing with the look a person gives a pipe dream—something unattainable yet fascinating all at once.
“How do you know my name?” She took a step back, all at once aware of their closeness.
“A man has hurt you before—done horrid things to you that you’d like to forget, but you can’t,” she said, and then after a slight pause: “I can help.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ana couldn’t tell if the stranger before her was insane or if the alcohol was starting to distort her senses. She felt herself swaying, her limbs losing all sense of balance, and placed her sweaty palms onto the white-painted wall behind her to support herself.
Bella, oblivious to the perplexity and denial upon Ana’s face, stuck her hand into a white handbag, clutching a beige card and handing it over to Ana’s innocent hands. It read:
Refuge may be found within the bell tower, Wednesday at midnight.
Bring no one.
Miserere oblivione delebitur.
It wasn’t signed. Ana stared at it, too intoxicated to fully comprehend what she’d read. She looked up at Bella expectantly, waiting for clarification, yet she only shook her head, saying nothing but, “I expect you’ll be there,” and walked out, leaving Ana utterly and completely alone.
Ana had chosen to go to the bell tower that Wednesday—the card had spoken to her in an odd, uneasy way, like it was beckoning her to listen.
When the meeting finished, she’d walked out of the bell tower, something inside of her stirring—something so incredibly strong pulling at her gut that she wondered if it had been there all along, if it had been begging all her life to let go—to be free. And as she walked home, feeling the midnight air crisp in her pulsing veins, she understood she was no longer Ana Powell, but Ana Hall. Gone was the girl naïve and sweet, and born was the girl with the entire world at her fingertips—with the ability to liberate not only herself but other women as well.
She was the descendant of Annabelle Hall—not by true blood but by right, by consequence. Even though Annabelle had met her demise long ago, it was up to Ana to revive the legacy she had left behind—to lead a group of women with the tastes of justice and vengeance on their tongues.
Now, as the current leader, Ana understood she had done something foolish that Sunday night: she’d let someone get away after they’d seen. A girl—a dancer probably, with long limbs and a sculpted body—hidden in the shadows for no one to see.
Yet she saw what Ana had done, how Ana had mercilessly killed a man in plain sight.
So, without much of a choice, Ana had followed her home—running to keep up—and slid a note under the girl’s apartment door—the same note she’d received all those years before, only now it was stained and torn after years of mishandling.
She wasn’t sure if the girl would come—she’d looked afraid when she’d met Ana’s eyes—but she hoped.
Ana left her door quickly, quietly, walking back to her own apartment and falling asleep—dreaming of growth, of new beginnings. Of girls with hope in their glassy eyes; of boys with fear in their proud eyes.
The bell rung—simultaneously marking the birth of one thing and the end of another.
CHAPTER TWO
"When the enemy is at ease, be able to weary him; when well fed, to starve him; when at rest, to make him move. Appear at places to which he must hasten; move swiftly where he does not expect you." ––Sun Tzu
Sun poured in from the small, two-paned window behind Kai’s twin-sized bed. It was not a yellowed light, more like a dull, grayed blaze from the ominous rain clouds that lined the sky. Kai lay atop his bed—a cheap IKEA one, with white sheets and a white comforter—his back resting against the sheets and his head looking straight to the ceiling, his face covered by a faded Shakespeare play that he had read more times than he could count.
His closest friend—Baker—sat beside him, willfully cramped on the small mattress while holding another novel that Kai owned, pretending to read. Baker glanced down to a line, skimming it. They couldn’t concentrate.
“Did you hear about the boy?” they said.
“I’ve heard plenty of things about boys,” replied Kai, his voice muffled by blurred pages.
Baker threw their book toward Kai’s midsection; it landed perfectly on his stomach as Kai let out an oof. “I mean the boy who jumped from the bell tower.”
“Again?” Kai pulled the book from his face. Baker nodded.
“His name was Dean Campbell.”
Silence stretched between the two, Baker’s words crawling into Kai’s mind as he disagreeably thought of death, of its finality.
“I didn’t know him,” Kai said carefully, tensing at the presence of death in the conversation. Death and its miserable sort of demise had crawled into his life at such a young, testing age and managed to stick around through the years—a kind of parasitic creature with tenacity and commitment and all the things Kai had never learned—keeping a constant heaviness in his mind, a blurring exhaustion never at ease.
“Wish I could say I felt sorry,” Baker said finally, their black hair falling from its braid into their light brown eyes—the brown of earth, of falling leaves. “He roofied a good friend of mine—Diana—and then took her back to his room, doing things to her. He got what he deserved.”
Kai nodded, silently agreeing. “Do you think he killed himself?” he wondered, thinking of the past suicides, of their identical locations.
“That’s what the police said,” they answered, looking over to Kai. Kai looked over too.
“Police are liars,” he said. He thought of the white, middle-aged policeman who had told Kai that the death of his parents was provoked and unavoidable. Kai had heard about the police from his parents—about how he must stay quiet around them; about how they lied constantly—so he ignored every word. He’d known what he’d seen.
“Agreed. The world is fucked.”
Kai laughed solemnly—its sound filling the bareness of his bedroom, vibrating across his painted walls and wooden bookshelves.
Baker remembered meeting Kai—it was the night of a party, the first of the freshman year. Baker had been talking with new-found friends when an acne-prone buffed frat boy had walked up to them and simply sneered, “You need to leave.” Baker had laughed and then, impulsively, poured their cheap beer down the boy’s reddened face. The rest was fuzzy—they remembered being pushed, not roughly, not enough to fall over, and someone breaking it up. It was Kai. He’d been there, standing near, and came over when he heard the frat boy speak. Kai had shoved him back—this time hard enough to fall over—and told him to get the fuck out. He’d listened.
“What’s your name?” Baker had asked Kai.
“Kai.”
“Nice to meet you, Kai.” Baker had stuck out their beer-covered hand and Kai took it.
The memory danced across Baker’s mind.
“Why’d you go to the party that night?” Baker asked, shifting back to reality. Now that they knew Kai, they were aware of Kai’s contempt for college parties. Each time Baker would beg him to attend one, he’d just laugh, refusing.
“What?”
“The night we met—why were you there?”
“I was looking for my sister. I thought she’d be there.”
“Your sister?” Baker knew little about Kai’s family. He hadn’t shared any details with the people around him—too emotionally inept to handle the intensity of anoth
er person’s gaze as they said, I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.
“Yes,” was all he said. He did not want to expand.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Kai whispered. He reached down for his book, opening to his spot, and read the line at the top of the page.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Kai shut his eyes.
DETECTIVE CLARKE MURPHY sat before his bulletin board, cheap beer in hand, staring at the photos that filled its space—printed photos connected by a bright red string of yarn. Most photos were newspaper clippings and news-article headlines; most read: New York College Student Found Dead at Abandoned Bell Tower.
He hadn’t found a true photograph yet—one of people, of true evidence confirming his suspicions—but he felt close. Something sat in his chest waiting to be released in anxious anticipation.
His dad—Liam Murphy—would have been proud, he hoped. He was doing this all for him—the years of late nights spent searching for his father’s murderer, searching for the reason he had been killed.
A small part of him had always blamed his mother for not finding the cause. She hadn’t seemed to care when he died—not as much as she should’ve; not like a wife should’ve. But the building angst between him and his mother was not important.
Clarke took a long sip of his beer, sighing as he pulled it from his lips. So far, all he had was: bell tower, Juilliard, and girls. Juilliard students had noticed a few girls frequenting the bell tower at night, but the sightings hadn’t risen any suspicion in the police.
Clarke felt different. A sick voice in his mind told him that the murders had to be done by them—that, for some reason, they had been maliciously killing men at the Juilliard bell tower for years. The same spot his father had been found.
He remembered seeing the photos of Liam the first time—lying lifeless on the cold concrete beside the tower. The police had marked in their notes: The bell rang around the same time of death. Clarke didn’t know what it all meant—not yet. The red strings on his board taunted him, begging for more evidence.
Wait, he told them. Just a little longer.
Soon, he would find the murderers—and then he would take revenge.
For his father.
LARA HAD WOKEN TO THE soft patter of last night’s rain on her window. She’d stayed in bed for too long afterward—her eyes swollen and her head pounding—and stared blankly at the ceiling. Her eyes trailed the black line scratched into her ceiling, remembering the time she’d tried to hang a fake potted plant with a metal hook—her only desire for decorating—yet it had fallen minutes after she’d hung it, leaving a scar in its place.
She finally sat up—her body aching with an indescribable pain, a pain that was not physically there but a gnawing force trapped inside of her, an unrelenting ghost—and got out of bed. Her six-month-old black cat, which she’d named Ebony, brushed past her legs, rubbing her face against Lara’s petrichor-smelling jeans, still damp from the night before.
“Hi there,” Lara whispered, kneeling down to pet Ebony’s head. The cat only yawned, moving from Lara’s side and jumping onto the sheer white of her duvet.
With a headache that refused to leave, Lara ambled over to the floor-length mirror she’d set up in her small living room, her bare feet numbing against the cold of the wooden floors. Her dark hair was a knotted mess, frizzed around her face and resting just above the black turtleneck she still wore. Feeling the tight shirt itch against her skin, Lara began to pull it over her head, yet stopped when she noticed a small, stained paper resting on the floor in front of her front door. She watched as the paper tumbled in the air, moving against the air from a fan like a tumbleweed in the dry desert. She walked over to where the paper lay, now motionless, on the floor.
It may have been from her landlord—the fool had hated her since she’d moved in for no reason other than Lara’s utter charm—but he normally sent her long-winded emails, not ominous notecards similar to invitations the Royal family may have sent to their loyal subjects asking them to graciously attend a ball.
The paper felt damp in Lara’s hand and—gruesomely—she remembered it had been raining all night. The sun was now peeking through the dark clouds, Lara noticed, but she couldn’t erase the memory of the blackened sky resting above the pale, blue boy who lay immobile on the concrete.
Lara turned the paper over, first seeing slight script across the center, a gaudy font used only by renowned academics and egotistical adults. She read the words slowly, carefully:
Refuge may be found within the bell tower, Wednesday at midnight.
Bring no one.
Miserere oblivione delebitur.
She wasn’t sure what the card was. She could read it, yes; she could understand it, but the words seemed to fog over as she tried to understand its purpose. Miserere oblivione delebitur, it said.
Lara childishly thought of the girl she’d seen just hours before. The one with dark skin and dark hair and eyes that shone with the same glimmer of the moonlight. Lara corrected herself quickly though—this couldn’t have been sent by her. This was not the very beginning of a tumultuous story told by a fool filled with false hope and misguided aspiration. This was simply a joke; a sick joke that played into Lara’s fears but also her desires—her darkest desires that she’d been shoving down deep into her gut for a long, long time.
So, accepting the false nature of the note, she crumpled it between her delicate hands and tossed it into the full garbage can beside the kitchen counter.
She had class in twenty minutes—and she couldn’t be late.
KAI HADN’T SLEPT THE night before. As he stood outside the door to the dance room, his classmates surrounding him, his eyes burned with exhaustion. He knew Dunne was announcing the recital officially today, but he wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d known his ballet instructor a solid year now, but her nature was still completely unpredictable.
He thought back to his last conversation with Lara—to their heated gazes and clicking tongues. Her voice still played its tune in his mind, a constant melody of everything he despised. Each time she talked, it was like she exploited the most sacred of secrets, and Kai—who bore more secrets than he could count—never wanted to hear a whisper of a word from her rosied lips again.
Above all, however, he hated the smug smile that developed across her face each time hubris clouded her judgment. It was not the smile of a dancer but the smile of a vile, cruel girl who cared for nothing but her own desires.
“You guys can come in!” Dunne interrupted his naïve thoughts—thankfully. He walked into the naturally lit room quickly, decidedly not looking around him to see who had decided to show up. Maybe Lara’s alarm hadn’t gone off. Maybe.
There were photos lining the polished window that lay adjacent to a just-as-polished mirror. Ballet shoes scuffed the black dance floors that had just been put in this year, and, quietly, Kai’s classmates shuffled to lean against the barre lining the back wall.
Kai noticed the photos again—they were all dark, gut-churning. He stared closely at a particular print—it was a painting of a snowy landscape, a man and a woman staring at each other with misery and, oddly, love in their gazes. Kai realized, abruptly, that the woman had stabbed the man beneath her in the stomach—a bright crimson spreading across the cloud-like snow. Both wore faces of complete anguish and shock. It was beautifully horrible.
“I’m sure you have all seen the photos behind me,” Madame Dunne announced, her arms pointing toward the collage like a painter revealing her new piece. “This is where it all started—the recital. I want this one to be huge, better than last year.
Most of the inspiration came from these photos, and, because of them, I’ve decided to play with the season of the recital, and induce us into a wintery landscape. So, naturally, I’ve titled it: A Winter in the Woods.”
Murmurs spread across the room, a buzz filling Kai’s bones as he heard his classmates saying things like S
ounds dumb, but, also, Sounds impressive.
“The recital is a love story, in a way. A tragic, twisted love story. The story begins with a couple—they will already be madly in love, you see—but political intrigue of the kingdom will force them apart. The Queen—another important role—will view one half of the couple as a traitor. He murdered the King, you understand.” Many people were lost. She was rambling.
“So, the Queen tasks the girl—her daughter—with killing her beloved, sadly. And that is how it ends”—Dunne walked quickly to the painting Kai had been observing earlier and pointed to it—“in blood and in betrayal.”
The class went silent—not even the squeaks beneath ballet slippers could be heard. The recital sounded wonderful.
“Now, this is just a simple outline of the play,” Dunne said, “naturally. The rest will be revealed as we go—I work best that way. But as for parts!” She stuck her wrinkled hand into a large bag and pulled out a folded paper that Kai assumed held the assigned parts. “The lead roles were given to the people I believe will play the lovers the absolute best. They are the building blocks of this entire recital—I am trusting the people I chose for the leads to uphold their duties.”
Kai sucked in a sharp breath and, quietly, heard another person taking in a shaky breath. He turned his head to the noise, his gaze connecting with Lara’s side profile. She stared ahead, her hair down, moving against her neck as the room’s fan hit her face. Kai noticed absently that freckles dusted her toned cheeks—he’d never seen them before. He decided he hated freckles. He turned his gaze back to Dunne, but Lara knew he was looking. She always knew.
“So, the roles will go to none other than Lara Blake and Kai Reeves. Lara will play the Queen’s confidante and Kai will play the one to be murdered.” She said it with such joy that no one acknowledged the solemnity of her words.
Lara shouldn’t have been surprised—they were the top of their class, the best dancers at Juilliard—but she couldn’t avoid the stabbing feeling that arose in her stomach as Dunne read their names aloud. The room was clapping, Lara noticed, and as classmates jovially congratulated her and Kai, she looked over to the man she now shared the lead with. He was already looking at her though, and his gaze was sharp, so sharp she could feel the pure anger radiating from it. Lara just stared, and they stood there—Dunne now announcing the other auxiliary parts—painfully staring at each other. They didn’t say a word, their eyes speaking a language made by the antagonist and protagonist of a long-winded, never-ending story, though Lara wasn’t sure who the protagonist was in their situation.
