She could handle anything.
That was what Belladonna thought as she neared the back of the house. The garden was filled with budding roses. They curled out of the ground, tangled and wild, and it was difficult to see movement between them, but… Belle did. She heard voices, and one of them was his. It was gentle and teasing, like the wind caressing the petals of a rose.
The other voice was Poppy’s. Belle recognized it as she stepped closer, and relief flooded through her. Poppy must have wanted to see her best friend. She must’ve wanted to say goodbye to him, before everyone was crowded into Raven’s driveway, hugging him and crying. Belle. Lily. Raven’s dad, who was sending his son to the other side of the country instead of fighting for him.
Belle clenched her fists, stepping closer. Raven was leaning over Poppy, his hand on her shoulder, and Poppy was trembling.
She looked scared.
“What about Belle?” she whispered, and Belle realized that Poppy’s fingers were wrapped around the bottom of Raven’s shirt, like she’d been pulling on it. Or like she was about to pull on it. “If she finds out—”
“She’ll kill us,” Raven said softly, and for the briefest moment, Belle smiled. They knew her so well. Knew her passion. Knew her power. They knew she would do anything to get what she wanted, because that’s what you had to do in a world as wicked as this one.
You had to become a witch in order to survive.
Her black hair swirled around her as she stepped up to the roses and parted them with her hands. It was dark. Her hair would help her blend in with the night, as would her jacket.
They couldn’t see her.
But she could see them. Raven’s hand was resting on Poppy’s neck, and he was gliding his thumb across her skin. Poppy’s shaking worsened. “Belle’s not going to find out,” he promised. “She never wants to speak to me again, because I ended things.”
“You broke up with her?” Poppy swallowed, stepping back. There was light in her eyes, the light of hope. It crushed Belle to see it. She felt like her chest was caving in. Poppy was her dearest friend. Raven, her truest love. How could they talk about her like this?
How could they touch each other in front of her?
Of course, they didn’t know she was watching. And the really sick thing? Belle felt guilty spying on them. She’d come over here, dressed in lingerie and a trench coat, to be with the person she’d been seeing for two years. The person she loved. Who loved her.
Now he was stepping closer to Poppy. His hand, which had been resting on her neck, slid into her hair, and Belle recognized that move. She’d memorized it. Every time his fingers had tangled in her hair, she’d felt a pull deep inside her, drawing her to him.
“I broke things off this afternoon,” he said, and another memory flashed in her mind, of Raven, standing in her bedroom.
Raven, telling her goodbye.
Yes, he’d broken up with her. That much was true. But he’d only done it because he was going away to boarding school! He could be gone for years, and he couldn’t ask her to wait for him. That’s what he’d said, and then he’d kissed her so sweetly.
And Belle had come up with her plan.
She shivered as the wind picked up, slipping under the folds of her jacket. Right now she was supposed to be crawling over him. Teasing him with kisses. Touching him until he gasped. Instead, she watched her best friend whisper, “Why did you break up with her? Is it because you’re leaving? And you don’t know when you’re coming back?”
Yes, Belle thought, but Raven shook his head.
“I told her that was why. But…” He swallowed, looking behind him. It was like he knew she was there. Could he feel her, like she could always feel him, whether she was in his bed or her own? At home or at school? In the orchard or in this garden, where they’d kissed a hundred times? “My feelings changed,” he said finally, and Belle’s gaze shifted to the thorns covering the rosebushes. She could strip naked and walk through those thorns, and they wouldn’t hurt her as badly as these words.
They wouldn’t cut her as deeply as this betrayal.
Raven leaned in and whispered in Poppy’s ear. Poppy shuddered and… sank into him. That was how it looked, as if Raven were the undertow, and she was happily drowning in him.
Belle was drowning too. As Raven brought his lips to someone else’s mouth, Belle’s heart tumbled into the rosebushes. It brushed against crimson petals and sharp thorns, landing in the dirt.
She left it there to wither.
And she turned away from Raven and Poppy, fingers rising to the flowers in her hair. Belladonna, as beautiful as it was poisonous. Once, she’d planned to use those flowers to kill Evelyn Holloway. But that plan was much too small. Too obvious.
Too merciful.
Maybe it would take weeks. Months. Years. But someday, Belle would come up with a plan so brutal, it wouldn’t steal the breath from Raven’s lungs. It wouldn’t poison Poppy’s veins. Oh no, they were going to live through all of it. The pain. The ruination. And by the time Belle was through with them, those two would wish for death.
PART 2 The Truth According to Poppy Jack
I never planned to kiss him. I’d only wanted to see him one last time, before he was taken away from me. And so, the night before Raven left for boarding school, I snuck out of my house and rode my bike across town. I hid it in the bushes behind his back gate. Then I snuck onto the Holloway estate, just like I had every weekend for the past six years.
A voice hit my back as I entered the rose garden. “I thought you might come over. I know you were mad—Poppy?” Raven stepped out of the rosebushes, his brow furrowed. “Sorry, I thought you were Belle.”
“We look so alike,” I said bitterly. I hadn’t meant to sound like that. I hadn’t meant to feel like that. But my chest had swelled at the thought of him waiting for me there, and as soon as I’d realized he was waiting for her, well, my heart did what it always did.
It shrank under the grandeur of Belle’s shadow.
Still, Raven’s face was hopeful as he stepped toward me. Maybe even relieved. I couldn’t make sense of it, but I didn’t want to spend our final moments talking about his girlfriend, so I said, “Are you all packed? How are you feeling?”
“I’m packed. I’m nervous. And I know what you did. Lily told me.”
My heart slammed into my ribs, ricocheted off my breastbone, and fell silent. He knew about our plan to poison his stepmother. Knew we’d almost resorted to murder. “We weren’t going to go through with it,” I stammered. “It was just a story we made up so we could sleep at night. I swear, Raven, I wouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t go to the police department? You didn’t tell some detective about my stepmom and what she was doing to me?”
My throat went dry, but the breath had rushed back into my lungs. My heart had resumed its steady beating, reminding me that I was resilient. I would explain my actions to Raven and he would forgive me.
For this, he would forgive me.
“I’m so sorry,” I started, my tongue stumbling over the words. “I shouldn’t have done that behind your back. I was in a bit of a time crunch, and everything was snowballing behind me, and—”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“You’re not?”
A slight shake of the head. He was wearing a black button-down and jeans, his hair glinting in the moonlight. Raven was darkness and light. Red roses and glittering snow. His teeth shone bright as he flashed a sad, regretful smile. “I’m mad at the police for not helping me. I’m mad at my dad for sending me away. And I’m mad at myself for not telling him what was happening.”
“You didn’t know what was happening.”
“I could’ve told him something. But I didn’t, so you swept in to rescue me, just like always. My knight,” he added softly, and I swear, everything stopped. The whirring of the wind. The rustling of the trees. The entire planet came to a halt.
And I stepped closer, my bottom lip trapped between my te
eth. “I like rescuing you. I’ve always liked—”
“I know, Poppy.”
I cringed, heat rushing to my face. Why was it so hard to tell him my new name? People changed their names all the time, and I wasn’t transforming into someone else so much as… becoming myself.
“Poppy has never felt right,” I admitted, my voice amazingly casual, considering the hammering in my chest. The tightness in my stomach. “I was thinking of going by my middle name from now on.”
“Jacqueline?” He raised his eyebrows, his lips twisted as if he’d sucked on a lemon.
“Sure. Or Jack, for short.” A shrug, as if it had just occurred to me. As if I hadn’t been thinking about this every day for weeks. Months. Years.
“Jack?”
“Uh-huh.” I wasn’t looking at him anymore, so I couldn’t see what his lips were doing. They could’ve been curving into a frown. They could’ve been twisting into a sneer. “I don’t know, maybe it’s—”
“Perfect.”
My head snapped up. My cheeks had been blazing before, but suddenly my whole face was on fire, and my neck. My ears. If I’d been Belle, I would’ve been able to hide my emotions.
Keep the world guessing.
But I was not Belle. I was not Poppy, and I was not Jacqueline. I was Jack, and amazingly enough, it seemed I’d found the only person in the world who understood that.
“I just want to be who I am,” I said, forcing myself to look into Raven’s eyes. To let him see me, now that I’d started to reveal myself. “Sometimes I think I know what that means, and then it slips through my fingers like the wind through branches. But I know what my name is.”
Raven’s fingers brushed my shoulder, and somewhere along the line, he started gripping me tighter. Clutching me, like he didn’t want to let me go. “Your name is Jack,” he said softly, reverently, “and you are a climber of tall vines. A conqueror of giants.”
I hitched in a breath. In that moment, I could see him, and he could see me, but even more important, I could see myself. Who I was. What I wanted. I’d never allowed myself to want anything before.
I’d been too busy keeping everyone alive.
But he was here, his fingers gliding across my shoulder, and even with a layer of fabric between us, his touch sent electricity shooting through me. It jump-started my heart. Filled my lungs with breath and drew my body to him. “Raven, I have to tell you something else. Something about us.”
“I already know.”
I furrowed my brow, trying to ignore the heat in my face. “How could you know? I didn’t know—”
“Maybe I know you better than you know yourself.”
That couldn’t have been true. No one could truly know us better than we knew ourselves, but he’d called me a conqueror of giants. Did he know what I’d done one week earlier, when I’d caught my mother’s boyfriend creeping up to the attic bedroom where my brothers slept? Did he know that he hadn’t just given me a garden the day he’d found me kneeling in the dirt, a handful of seeds clutched in my palm? He’d given me a vine. He’d given me a weapon. And after it was over, when I lay shaking in my bed, I knew the cost of taking a person’s power away. I knew the cost of fighting back. That’s why I’d called off the murder of Evelyn Holloway. Lily and Belle didn’t know how it felt to take someone’s life in your hands, but I did.
I will never forget it.
Still, power flows in two directions. It can be used to destroy or bring people to life. As Raven’s fingers trailed from my shoulder to my neck, I wanted him to know how powerful I was. How brave. I reached out, my fingers curling around the bottom of his shirt. So close to his skin. When he whispered, “Jack,” a thrill went through me at the sound of my name in his mouth. I wanted to hear it slip between his lips like a sigh.
I’d never wanted such things before, even in the quiet of my bedroom. I hadn’t allowed myself to want them, because Raven loved Belle, and Belle loved Raven. When I’d first come into the garden, he’d thought I was his girlfriend. Now his fingers were splayed out on my neck, his thumb gliding over my skin, and I didn’t understand it.
“What about Belle?” I asked, when I should’ve said we can’t do this. “If she finds out—”
“She’ll kill us,” he whispered, confirming my deepest fears. I started to pull away, but his grip on me tightened, his fingers wrapping around the nape of my neck. He drew me near. And he told me a secret, just like I’d told him. Earlier that night he’d ended things with Belle. He’d told her it was because he was going away to boarding school, and he couldn’t ask her to wait for him, but deep down he had a different reason.
“My feelings changed,” he said, his eyes downcast, as if he was ashamed. “I didn’t want them to. I tried to fight it, because I didn’t want to lose her, and I didn’t want to break her heart but—”
“What?”
He leaned in, his lips brushing against my ear. “I want you. I didn’t realize it until I was lying in that glass coffin, and you were supposed to wake me with a kiss, and then…”
“I didn’t.”
He nodded, gaze shifting to my hands. They were still wrapped around the bottom of his shirt. How easily they could slip under it. How easily they could tear the buttons away, leaving him shirtless in this garden of roses. How beautiful that would’ve been.
“I couldn’t kiss you,” I told him. “Not if it meant something. It wouldn’t have been right to Belle, and… you’re my best friend, Raven. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You are losing me. I’m going away, probably for years.”
Thorns slid into my heart. I could feel them piercing the delicate flesh, and yet… it was amazing what a person could live through. It was amazing that you could slide a vine across the top of the stairs and watch a grown man trip and fall, and hear bones cracking and then… just go about your day. Heart still beating. Stomach still growling in hunger and lungs still taking in breath.
I was going to lose Raven. He was going away to boarding school, and he’d probably be there until he was eighteen. If he forgot about me during that time, he might never come back to this place and the father who’d abandoned him so easily.
I might never see him again.
But I couldn’t kiss him. He’d broken up with Belle hours earlier, and I’d never kissed anyone before, so it made sense that I’d guide him down to the ground, so gently, and we’d curl up in each other’s arms between the rows of crimson blossoms. Hold each other tightly. Wait for the dawn.
And that’s exactly what we did. He didn’t lower his lips to mine, ripping a shudder from me. I didn’t wrap my fingers around the edges of his shirt, tearing until buttons tumbled into the dirt. No jacket slid onto the ground, providing a perfect bed for us on the garden floor. His shirt stayed on. So did mine.
I swear to you, Raven and I never kissed.
9
A Whisper from the Grave
The morning after she broke into Evelyn Holloway’s office, Jack slipped out of Raven’s bedroom after the sun came up. She’d lain with him for three hours. Three hours of holding her hand to his heart. Three hours of feeling his body pressed against hers as he slept. When she’d untangled her limbs from his, wincing at the light pouring in through his curtains, he’d sighed and reached for her.
“Stay. Please.”
“I can’t.” Two short words, and then she was climbing over the windowsill, heading for the garden below. For the first time in years, that garden didn’t flood her mind with painful memories. Raven was home. She could sneak onto his estate every night. Pull him into her arms. And then…
Jack froze as she reached the second-floor balcony. She was staring right into Lily’s bedroom, which, unlike Raven’s, did not have thick velvet curtains covering the window. Lily’s curtains were white and fluttery. All it took was the slightest touch of wind to part them, and then Jack was staring into a world of white furniture and painted pink roses.
Just like Evelyn’s office.
Lily was sprawled out on the bed. Through the gauze of a pale canopy, Jack saw her poring over the pages of a file, just like she’d promised. But there was something odd about the scene. Something Jack couldn’t put her finger on until Lily plucked a folder from beside her, tucking pages inside. They had only stolen copies of the files in Evelyn’s office. They hadn’t taken any of the originals. Why, then, was Lily sitting in the privacy of her bedroom, going through a folder marked Andrew Kane?
Jack could see the name clearly as Lily set the file on the bedside table next to the window. She stood from her canopy bed, stretched, and began pulling on a bulky white coat. As she buttoned it, Jack realized she was wearing gloves that matched the color of her hands almost perfectly.
Had she been wearing them all night?
Jack’s stomach clenched at the realization that her fingerprints were all over Evelyn’s office, but Lily’s likely weren’t. Should she sneak back in? Wipe the place clean? If she did, she might destroy actual evidence, and besides, breaking and entering in the daylight was likely to get her arrested.
Now Lily was tucking the Andrew Kane file into a little drawer in her bedside table and covering it with magazines. It wasn’t the greatest hiding place, but the police had already searched her house, and Lily’s family members had no reason to go poking through her things.
But Jack did. Her heart hammered as Lily slipped out of her bedroom and into the hallway. After the door closed, Jack heard the distinct sound of footsteps retreating on the hardwood floor. Two minutes later, the back door opened, and a blond-haired girl in a white coat slipped outside, eyes darting left and right as she veered toward her bike.
Lies Like Poison Page 7
