I shrug. “I don’t need as much sleep as I used to.”
Serge’s thick brows knit together, and he gives me a sharp look as if to say Let’s not pretend we don’t know what’s really going on here. I wonder absently if he’s been following me, if he knows about my visits to Ford’s bedside. Of course, I decide. Serge knows everything.
He walks to my windowed wall and stares out at the city, all searchlights and helicopters at this hour, a few dim fires flickering in the distance. I move to stand next to him, drawn to the man who’s been my friend and protector since I can remember. His quiet presence—so different from my parents, with all their questions and demands—is a comfort. I can feel the muscles in my neck and back relax slightly.
“It must be hard for you to imagine,” he says, speaking so softly that I have to lean in a bit closer to him to hear, even with my enhanced hearing. “But there was a time when Bedlam was an even darker place than it is today.”
I nod. “When the first tube attacks happened, that must have been the worst of it. Because before then, the city must have been so whole. I can’t imagine watching the South Side go from a regular place to . . . to this.” I wave my hand at the window to include the pitch-black decaying neighborhoods, the city of squatters.
“There were riots. Endless riots in the streets. People were so angry. So many dead each night from the criminal element, so much senseless violence, you cannot imagine it,” Serge says. “But then the Hope appeared, and people believed again. People who had given up on Bedlam entirely began to think the city could be rebuilt. That all the scars would one day heal.”
“But then he died,” I say tightly, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. Scars don’t heal, I want to say. Maybe on the outside, but inside, they’re indelible.
“And yet now, seventeen years later, people are starting to believe again.” Serge’s eyes light up and bore into mine.
I frown. Seventeen. The same number of years I’ve been alive.
I open my mouth to reply, but Serge puts a finger to my lips for a second, then turns and walks to the door and puts his hand on the knob. “It would be a shame to fall back into darkness,” he says, “before you finish what you’ve started.”
Before I can respond, he’s gone. I’m alone in my room again, standing openmouthed, a hundred questions forming, my throat plugged with the weight of what Serge has intimated.
I didn’t start any of this, I want to say. Gavin did it all. He took everything from me: my virginity, my love, my mother’s necklace, my human heart.
The only thing he hasn’t taken from me is my life. Suddenly I feel certain that it’s only a matter of time before Gavin surprises me somewhere, that there’s a target on my back. And even if he doesn’t, how many more girls will he take advantage of in some new city? How many more lives will he wreck? I think of the anonymous soul who snuck backstage to point me toward the Boss. Someone who believed I could topple a major Syndicate player, stop him from destroying what’s left of our city.
Then I think of Ford lying in the hospital bed.
Maybe Serge is right. Maybe the only thing to do is to fight.
My stomach churns as I stare at the spot Serge just vacated. It’s hard to argue with a man of so few words.
“You’re right,” I say as I slide into the front seat of the Seraph the next day. Serge is driving me to school, and we’re lucky enough not to have my parents with us this morning. I slam the door shut and Serge starts the car, pulling it out of the circular, hedge-lined drive of Fleet Tower without saying a word or even acknowledging my presence. “I want to finish what I started.”
Serge nods. “Very well.”
“So? What do we do now? How will we find him?”
Serge turns onto Church Row from Foxglove Court, and I spot Olive Ann and Clementine walking to school, their plaid skirts shorter than ever and fluttering as they hoof it down the sidewalk. “I have friends who keep tabs on these things.”
I sit back in the seat and shake my head. “Serge, how come you’re letting me do all this?”
“Because I know what you are capable of. I know you are ready to do what cannot be done by anyone else.”
“What’s that?” I joke. “Be a freak of nature?”
“Make the city whole again,” Serge says simply.
I nod, staring straight ahead of us at the crosswalk, where a group of ragged protesters are marching with signs that say SOUTH SIDE PRIDE and SCHOOLS NOT STADIUMS. A teenaged girl—my age, or maybe younger—wears a pair of homemade wings on her back and moves silently through the crosswalk, holding a heart-shaped sign that says RISE. A shiver runs through me when I realize they’re probably headed to my parents’ office, where the police will surely fire water cannons or feargas them until they give up.
“What do you think about the stadium?” I ask Serge.
But then we pull up to the school and Serge reaches over to open my door. “I’ll be in touch,” he says. “Be careful.”
And then he grabs my hand and squeezes, and for a while after that, I feel less alone.
CHAPTER 45
My footsteps crunch on the long gravel driveway leading up to one of the houses in Morass Bluffs, a luxury housing development on the cliffs above the lake that my father’s company has been working on forever. The project has been stalled for a while, the houses half-constructed while my father raises more money. He’s been complaining about it for two years straight.
The driveway is steep, and I skirt the edge of it, moving alongside a scrim of birch trees. I make sure to put my phone away for fear that the screen might be bright enough to spot from above.
This is where Serge says Gavin is hiding out. This silent hillside hitting up against Lake Morass. It’s a great place to hide. Very private. So private, I realize with a shiver, that if Gavin sees me coming, nobody will hear the gunshot.
Don’t freeze up, I tell myself as the hill evens out and the trees open up to a circular driveway with a garage on one side and the skeleton of a house—the drywall installed but no windows or doors yet—on the other. The garage is open just a foot, enough for me to spot a familiar motorcycle inside. I grimace when I think of the twelve other girls he charmed with that stupid bike. I used to think I was the kind of girl who didn’t fall for clichés, who wanted something more unique than a boy on a motorcycle. Now I know I was exactly like every other girl Gavin fooled—looking for a fantasy, not a real person.
I move away from the garage and head toward the house.
He will have his gun. You have to be faster than whatever he throws at you, I tell myself. My body humming with nerves, I move along the outside of the house, keeping my steps as light as possible, terrified to snap a twig or rustle a bush and give him the advantage of knowing I’m here.
I spot a side door with a half-built deck coming off it, the planks uneven and jagged, no railing to protect people from falling straight off the bluff. I peer over the edge of the bluff—spiky black rocks divide the cliffs from the lake.
I inhale hard and jump up onto the deck, then walk through the house’s archway into the area that will someday be the kitchen. There’s a metal pipe sticking out of the wall where an oven should be, another pipe meant for a sink. The kitchen doesn’t have cabinets yet, or counters, but there is a cardboard box in it with several beer bottles and some takeout containers inside.
I move silently through the archway connecting what will someday be the dining room to what will someday be the living room, and then I’m face-to-face with him.
“Hello, Anthem,” Gavin says dully, his face twisted into a smile I once longed to see again and now recognize as fake. He’s in tuxedo pants and a white V-neck undershirt with his leather jacket on top of it, sitting on a folding chair in the very center of the empty room, a row of beer bottles at his feet. “How nice of you to visit. Beer?”
“Better not,” I say, taking a tiny step closer to him, fury swelling in my chest. “It’ll slow me down.”
And
then I launch myself straight at him, pulling him up by the collar of his jacket and sending the folding chair flying out behind him, smashing against the wall. My face is a half-inch away from his, and we’re both breathing hard.
“Still in love with me, huh?” he pants. “You’re much more aggressive than I remember.”
“You’re not the only one with a secret identity, Gavin,” I say just before I knee him in the groin. “That was for the other twelve.”
He’s moaning on the ground, huddled in a ball. My eyes travel the room in search of something I can use to tie him up. I’ve come straight from school and have nothing with me.
But he recovers faster than I expect.
Suddenly he’s up again, staggering toward the far wall that divides the kitchen from the deck. He puts his hand inside a wide metal pipe in the wall, and just as I reach him he whirls around. In his hands is the same gun he used on Ford.
The static of rage filling my ears, I launch myself into the air, my foot raised. Gavin’s mouth drops open, and he is momentarily frozen with shock. A quarter-second later and I’m landing the jump. My foot slams into his chest, sending him crashing through the windowless square cut into the wall. He lands on his back on the planks of the deck, the gun bouncing out of his hand. It slides across the deck and stops a few inches from the edge, which hangs over the cliff, high above the lake.
“You shooting BodMods into your veins or something?” He is breathing hard but undaunted, shifting position so he’s a few feet closer to the edge of the deck. “Is that how you killed Rosie, all pumped up on Pharms?”
“Stop moving,” I order him, widening my stance as I stand looking down at him. Seeing this new “real” persona—the South Side accent, the sneering way he looks at me—doesn’t bother me this time. No part of me still loves him. “She came after me with a gun. Kind of like you just did.”
“Well, she learned from the best.”
“I just have one question,” I say, against my better judgment. “Who painted the mural?”
He smiles pityingly up at me, still half-sprawled on the deck. “She did. All that talent, and still killed by a little girl in a pleated plaid skirt. Tragic.”
“You’re disgusting,” I growl. “All of you.” Though the image of Rosie painting—slaving over that mural, copying my face from a photograph they’d secretly taken, working for hours—fills me with remorse. I swallow it down. “Now is when it ends.”
“Oh, really?” he asks, still on his back, sprawled out on the deck. “We’ll see.”
He springs up and forward until he’s close enough for me to smell the nicotine and sweat coming off him, his right hand fisted, swinging.
I duck his blows. Avoiding his fists is a lot easier than dodging bullets. I let him take a few more swipes before I land a punch, a right hook to the side of his head. But even though I hit him hard, he manages to grab a fistful of my skirt and take me down with him. We’re close to the jagged edge of the deck now, less than three feet away, when he squeezes my arms behind me and rolls me over him so that I’m hanging halfway off the deck, my legs swinging.
Below me, the jagged rocks swirl with whitecaps and litter. The drop is at least ten stories. A sharp edge of one of the boards bites into my thigh, and I feel blood dripping down my leg.
I manage to wrench my arms free and grab on to the collar of his jacket. As I do, I swing my leg up and kick the gun. It sails off the deck. The drop is so far down that I don’t hear it when it falls into the lake.
“How about we both fall off?” he mutters, his teeth gritted.
My face is so close to his that our noses practically touch. “There is no we.”
He’s stronger than I would have expected. With the leverage he has from being on top of me, he shoves me closer to where the deck meets the sky.
In the silence of the struggle, my body beneath his, I look him in the eyes. I make my expression soft, like it was when I loved him. I move my lips forward a centimeter until they brush his, and then my tongue is in his mouth long enough to taste the beer he’s been drinking. I feel him stiffen with surprise, but just like Will before, he lets me kiss him. Sex and violence are so intertwined in the minds of men like him. Pathetic.
I bite his lip, hard enough to draw blood. He screams and lets go of my arms to grab his mouth, an instinctive need to touch where the pain is. It’s enough time for me to get out from under him.
Furious, his mouth filling with blood, he hurls himself at me again, his arms splayed wide. Just before he reaches me, I spring up, leaping out of his reach at the last second.
Gavin tries to stop. He almost grabs on to the planks of the deck.
But it’s too late. He’s going too fast.
My breath catches in my throat as he sails—screaming, flailing—over the edge.
I race to the edge of the deck, my whole body shaking at the moment of impact, the instant his bones crack against the rocks far below. He lands flat on his back, his scream silent now, his limbs splayed in unnatural angles. Everything broken, smashed against the black rocks, the blue-black lake lapping at his limbs. His eyes and mouth remain open in a permanent scream.
I feel the bile rising up from my stomach, the taste of Gavin’s blood still in my mouth. I turn to retch, the acid taste of my insides bitter and foul. After a few minutes where I can’t look, can’t move, can’t think, I force myself to peek over the deck again.
He’s still on the rocks, his eyes unblinking, his arms spread as if in greeting to the sky. His lower half is already covered in water—green scum and white foam move across his legs and torso. I search the lakeshore for beachcombers, homeless people camping out, and any signs of life. It is completely deserted. No boats out on the water.
Soon he will be washed away, eventually found by someone. Maybe buried in the paupers cemetery in a stoneless grave. I’ll never learn his real identity. But as I turn away from the lake, I realize I know exactly who he was. He was a liar and a thief and a con artist. He lived off his looks and his charm and his ability to do terrible things and still live with himself. I reach up and grope at my throat. I’m still wearing the necklace he gave me. I yank the heart pendant hard enough to snap the thin gold chain and throw it as far as I can, out toward the lake. I watch as it gets carried by the breeze a moment, twisting in midair before it drops, a tiny glint of gold flashing before it falls out of sight.
CHAPTER 46
Still shaking with adrenaline and shock, I walk past the rows of beer bottles, the folding chair in the living room. I stop and stare at the duffel bag a moment longer, until I can’t keep myself from seeing what’s inside.
I dump out the bag and dig through the pile with shaking hands. A few pairs of neatly folded designer jeans, two T-shirts, his leather rollie pouch. Three stacks of hundreds, each with paper wrappers around them. All that remains of his life on the run. I sit back on my heels and try to calm my shaky, panicked breathing. That’s when I notice the edge of a book sticking out from a pair of folded jeans. I yank it free and study the title: Collusion: The Secret History of Law Enforcement and the Mob. The cover features a revolver resting on a pile of money.
I turn it over in my hands and start to flip through it. On the borders of most of the pages there are tiny notes made in pencil.
Numbers, figures. Names.
My stomach jumps when I turn to the end.
There’s a chart on a blank page toward the back of the book, in tiny, careful print, with lines connecting each name from the top down. At the top, underlined and in darker pencil than the rest: The Money.
Farther down the line, I spot Rose T., Smitty M., Jessa S., M. & A. Luz, Karl S., Emmett C., among many other names—at least thirty altogether. My veins turn to ice when I spot a section marked BPD. Bedlam Police Department. It’s a whole column, with at least forty names. One of which is Marlowe. Next to Marlowe is a dash. At the end of the dash is a number. 50,000.
My head spinning, I carefully refold Gavin’s clothes and put
everything back in the duffel bag. Everything except the book, which I shove into my back pocket.
My hands are shaking worse than ever when I step out over the threshold of the house. I walk down the driveway and suck air deeply into my lungs, holding my breath as long as I can, hoping it will quiet the scream inside my head.
I’m alone in the alleyway, watching a rat dart in and out of a drainpipe as I pound frantically on Jax’s door. I’ve tried to type in the code, but my hands are still shaking, and I can’t seem to keep the numbers in order in my head.
After a few minutes, I finally hear the click of the bolts in the lock. Jax pulls me inside, embracing me, squeezing me so hard I can barely breathe. I sink into her arms, grateful for her warmth against my ice-cold skin.
“Anthem, did you hear me?” She steps away from me and grabs my shoulders, shaking me slightly.
I shake my head, too wrapped up in what I’ve done to have listened properly.
She’s grinning. “He’s awake.”
“Ford?”
Jax nods, her eyes swimming with tears. “About a half hour ago. Vitals are great. Appears to have no brain injury—”
I race down the hall to the back room and find Ford sitting up, smiling broadly, wearing Jax’s Bedlam U sweatshirt and eating a Styrofoam bowl-o-noodles. His lips are still cracked, but his color is restored, his skin no longer the color of an unwatered houseplant.
“Heeeey.” He waves, a tangle of noodles dangling from his mouth. He sounds like the slightly drunk host of a party.
“Hi, you.” I smile, approaching the gurney slowly, suddenly shy.
He slurps the rest of the noodles into his mouth and puts down the bowl, grinning. “Jax said you carried me here.”
I nod.
There’s an awkward silence, and I rush to fill it, to tell him how much I missed him, how wrong it was that he was the one to get hurt.
“I’m so sorry about everything, Ford. I should have been able—”
The Brokenhearted Page 27
