by Hannah Capin
Until I set the knife back on my nightstand.
My father doesn’t try to take it away.
He kisses the top of my head the way he did when I was five years old with eyes too big for my face and tiny gold hoops in my ears. He turns off the light. He rolls the desk chair out behind him and pulls the door almost closed.
And he sits outside my room until dawn.
Hit List
Piper is the one who finds my coven’s work.
It’s lunchtime and we’re sitting at the long table along the leaded glass. Midday sunlight shines down on Duncan and his wolves and Lilia and her starlings. We’re all together still, but not for long. Not with the way Duncan never looks at his queen and Piper isn’t next to Duffy and Banks’s grin is hungrier than it should be.
Not with the way they all look at Mack and me, strong instead of breaking.
The doors on the far side of the room fling open so hard they crack against the stone like thunder.
Piper flies in clutching a paper close to her chest. Her sabre cuts her path straight to our table. She snaps the page taut between her hands.
It’s Connor’s team portrait, blown up so it fills almost the whole page. Where his eyes should be, there are two ragged holes. Where his name should be, thick red letters say
WHO’S NEXT?
Piper straightens up so everyone can lean in and see the page. Then she drops it. It slices a zigzag down to the table and slides up to rest against Duncan’s drink.
They face off. Their eyes sling suspicion. Both of them measuring the other. Both of them without one bit of trust left even though both of them know the other one wouldn’t be stupid enough to dig their own grave like this.
Duncan’s eyes say, Stay quiet.
Piper’s whole face says, Fuck you.
She says, loud, “Whoever did this, you better talk.”
The silence ripples out so it isn’t just Duncan’s table; it’s half-circles spreading wide away from the wall. Lilia’s girls are frozen still.
I look up at Piper and smile. “Or what?” I murmur so quiet she’ll be the only one who can know for sure that I said it at all. “We’re next?”
She grabs the paper and rips it in half, straight down Connor’s crooked face. “Fuck you, new girl. You should know better by now.”
I say, “So should you.”
She rips the portrait again. “All of you should know better.” Her eyes skim from Lilia to the lowliest freshman flock-girl and back. “Don’t you think so, Lili?”
Lilia looks past her. Her gaze doesn’t find its focus. “Were you the only one?”
“What?”
“Were you the only one,” Lilia says again, dragging each word out of her throat. She doesn’t have the breath to turn it into a question. “Who got a note.”
Piper flares. “How should I know? I didn’t do a fucking census.” Duffy pulls at her hand so she’ll sit down and shut up, but she shakes him off. “I saw this shit on my car and I ripped it off and came in here to see who felt like confessing—”
Duncan stands up. “That’s enough,” he says. Impossibly even. “Let’s find out.”
His wolves fall into formation: Duffy and Banks and Mack flanking him and the rest of them falling in behind. The girls flutter alongside. A few not-it girls from the next table try to slip in but Piper sends them a glare that knocks them back into their seats. It holds, but only barely.
Duncan leads the pack through the halls and out the front doors. He stops at the top of the steps, and everyone else stops with him, and everyone looks down together at the parking lot.
I already know where every note is. So I watch their faces and see it sink in—
to each of them on their own when they see they’re on the list—
—and then to all of them, together, when they realize what it means.
Duncan.
Duffy.
Banks.
Malcolm, the boy who mixed the drink.
Porter, the boy who guarded the door.
Piper, the girl who knew and smirked and left.
And—
“Mack,” says Porter, and he checks his pocket for his knife. “Why did you get one when you didn’t—”
Banks claps a hard hand down on Porter’s shoulder. “Doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “None of it means anything.”
Duncan spins and faces the crowd. “Go back inside,” he says.
Some of them stir. Some of them stay.
“You heard him,” says Banks. “Shitty prank anyway.”
They go, finally, grumbling and staring too long.
“Probably those damn girls in the masks,” Banks says when the doors slam.
Duffy sways, gray and anxious. “I thought you said Connor sent those girls.”
“Connor didn’t do this.” Duncan’s voice cuts deep. He turns to Duffy: “Take care of it.”
Duffy hurries double-time down the stairs. He crosses the lane to the parking lot without looking.
“We don’t talk about this,” says Duncan. “Not until we’re alone.”
He looks at Mack—golden-boy Mack, noble Mack, one of them now but all mine.
“Tomorrow,” says Duncan. “Mack’s house. The party’s still on. Nobody gets in unless I say they get in. Until then—”
He lets the space hang heavy.
He goes back inside and the rest of them follow. Glancing over their shoulders. Watching Duffy pull the last note out from against the last windshield.
Afraid.
“Jade,” says Mack from the door, “are you coming?”
For a second Duffy flounders, all alone in the dead-still parking lot, staring down at Connor’s empty eyes and the smearing red threat.
“Yes,” I say. Another hiss even though I don’t mean to. But I don’t move until Duffy looks up and sees me watching.
I smile bright and fearless. He shudders hard enough that I can see it from the top of the stairs.
I text the coven: Perfect. I turn on my heel and let my skirt flip a little.
No one trusts anyone anymore.
Tangled
We meet late, at Mads’s house. We sit knee-to-knee in a circle on the fencing strip. When Summer comes in she tries to turn on a light but I don’t let her.
We don’t need light.
“Tomorrow,” I say, the same as Duncan said, except he was circling his troops to weather the storm and I’m circling mine to bring it. “Duncan dies.”
Shadows weave in through the branches outside. They don’t ask me if Mack promised. They don’t ask me how. They already know.
“I’ll wait for Porter,” says Mads.
“We’ll wait for Mads,” says Jenny.
“Jade,” says Summer. “Are you sure?”
Jenny laughs her little-girl laugh. “Of course she’s sure.”
“I’m serious.” Summer puts one hand on mine. “This is real. You can’t take it back.”
Mads says, “Neither can they.”
“I know,” says Summer. “But what if you get caught?”
“I won’t,” I say.
And Jenny says, “The shittiest defense attorney in LA could guarantee she’d walk.”
“I know,” says Summer again. Her eyes cut quick to Jenny. “But what if Mack gets caught?”
“Oh fucking well,” says Jenny, and Summer’s lips press together.
“We won’t get caught,” I say. “And I’m glad I can’t take it back. I hope I dream about him dying every night for the rest of my life.”
Jenny says what she said the first time I told them what I was going to do to the boys:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
I take Summer’s hand and Mads’s. They take Jenny’s. We sit still in the rolling shadows. The room whispers Jenny’s words back to us. Outside, the leaves stir.
We’re magic. I can feel it right now in the dark. We’re invisible when we need to be and then so firework-bright no one can look away. We’re patience and brilliance
. We never forget.
We never forgive.
We walk out together. The security fence hums overhead, friendly and warning. The spotlights star our shadows on the lawn.
Jenny stares up at the clear night sky and says, “A storm is coming.”
It’s the last thing we say. We don’t say good-bye—not tonight. Jenny drives out first, and then me, and then Summer. Mads watches from the steps.
Summer follows me home and parks in the street. When I walk down to meet her she’s already out and leaning against the door, looking up into the jacaranda leaves.
“Don’t do it,” she says. The breeze stirs through her hair. She smells like myrrh.
“It’s done,” I say.
“I don’t mean don’t kill him.” Her gaze comes down and locks on me. “I mean don’t fall in love.”
“I’m not one of those boys you throw away.”
She takes my hand and swings it back-and-forth the way she did back in our cul-de-sac days when the nanny dropped her off to play with Jenny and Mads and me, before the nanny tried too hard to take Summer’s first stepmother’s place and got sent back to wherever she came from. “Neither is he,” she says.
“He’s nothing,” I tell her. A lie, because anyone who kills for me stops being no one the second the knife falls—
a lie, because he isn’t nothing if he wants everything enough to twist guilt and fear into whatever he needs it to be so he can pretend he’s noble instead of just ambitious—
—a lie, because my heartbeat shivers faster every time he looks at me with dark resolve hardening his face.
Summer swings our hands higher. “Kill the king,” she says. “Kill his boys. But don’t—”
“Like you have any room to talk.” I shouldn’t say it, but I do.
She sighs and I hear her whole heart in it. “Exactly.”
I come closer. “You know she loves you, too.”
“She doesn’t. Not like I love her.”
“It’s just the way she acts. You know how she is.”
Summer shakes her head. Her hair shimmers on her shoulders like wings. “Even if you’re right—”
“I’m right.”
“Of course you are,” she says with a little laugh, but it isn’t sharp the way Jenny would make it. Summer, the deadliest of all of us, and still the one whose heart beats closest to her skin. “But even if she loves me we could never be together. It would ruin the coven.”
I don’t tell her she’s wrong. The breeze picks up again, warm and thick and wanting.
“Don’t fall in love,” Summer says. She lets go of my hands. “Not with him.”
The Fortress
Mack lives high in the hills, a long winding drive away from the heat and light of the city. Past Lilia’s house and Duncan’s. Up so many twists and turns that when I look back to where we came from, the skyscrapers are small enough to brush away with one hand.
“They’re never home,” says Mack when we pull up to his drive. There’s a gate, but it isn’t like the gate at Mads’s house. It’s a gate that asks you to stay out. At Mads’s house, it’s an order. “They’re always away on business.”
The gate slides open. Sturdy metal letters spell out INVERNESS along the top row of bars. “My dad used to be around. He’d take a whole week off and we’d take the yacht down to Mexico. Then he got his promotion, and you know …” He looks at me and shrugs. Behind him the lawn is green like his eyes. Green with promise.
“Ambition,” I say.
That one word squares his shoulders. “Last summer I took it out myself. The boat, down to San Diego. They never knew. He called while I was out—like, ‘Hey, it’ll be another week, we’re right on the edge of a deal that’ll blow everybody away.’”
“You don’t need him here,” I say, and I kiss him. “More time for us.”
His smile wavers more than it should.
“You’ll be greater than he’ll ever be.”
His shoulders square again.
“Come on,” I say. I bring one hand up to his face and make him look into my eyes. I kiss him again, hard and certain. He takes his hands off the wheel and kisses me back.
I don’t pull away until I feel his fear fire into resolve. When I do, he doesn’t settle back into his seat. He wants more. He wants me.
Not yet.
Not until I know he’s worth me.
“Come on,” I say again. “We have to get ready. We’re not leaving anything to chance.”
Mack pulls into the garage and taps the door shut behind us. For a second we’re alone in the dark. I can feel it—
just a shifting hologram glimpse of it, but there—
—the future, right here in this instant. Our future.
I say, “Promise me you’re not afraid.”
He says, “I promise.”
I say, “Promise me you won’t be afraid tonight.”
He says, “I promise.”
But it isn’t as deadbolt-strong as I want it to be.
I can’t win him with fear—not tonight. I can’t win him with guilt, either, until the knife is in his hands and we’ve come too far to go back.
So I say it, stupid and bold in one quick breath: “Promise me you love me.”
He says, “I promise.”
He says, “I’ve never loved anyone more.”
And I feel my smile blooming bright across my face.
By the time Duncan’s car starts its crawl up the hill to Inverness we’re ready. The liquor decks every counter. Everything is top-shelf and brand-new, so strong Duncan and his wolves won’t realize how drunk they are until the whole world blurs. The man at the store didn’t even look twice when I handed him the license I stole out of my sister’s purse at Christmas. When I need to be, I’m twenty-six, with tastes to match.
I’ve wound through every room. I’ve chosen where each of them will be. Duncan and Lilia are in the master suite, exactly like a king deserves. Tucked away on the very end of the house where no one will hear him if he screams.
If he can.
Mack and I are one door away, in his room, the last stop on the only hall that goes to Duncan’s suite. Porter will sleep on the floor outside Duncan’s door: Duncan ordered it, doubling down and paranoid enough to need a guard-dog, but it won’t keep him safe. Duffy and Piper get the best guest room, downstairs and far away. Banks and Malcolm can fight over whatever rooms are left.
One hour past midnight, they’ll all be happy-drunk and dozing off. Forgetting Connor’s eyeless soulless face staring them down from their windshields. Forgetting that little whore with the jade-green eyes.
Two hours past midnight, Duncan will be dead.
“He’ll be here in five minutes,” says Mack. We’re on a balcony looking down to where the road curls out between the houses and turns back on itself to climb higher. Duncan takes the turns fast and smooth. “Banks is with him.”
A shadow skims across the sun and a huge dark-winged bird glides down to the oleander tree just inside the gate. It’s hideous and beautiful and I’ve never seen anything like it. It lands on an almost-bare branch and its talons wrap tight. The branch bows lower. The bird cries out, harsh and piercing. Duncan’s car disappears behind another row of trees.
“When will they leave?” I ask Mack. Testing him, always, because I need to be sure.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “In the morning. That’s what Duncan said.”
“Tomorrow. Of course.” I keep my voice even. Practice, for Duncan and his boys. “Not that Duncan’s going to be around to see the sunrise.”
I watch Mack when I say it. The guilt writes itself across his face so clear anyone could read it.
“God, look at you,” I say, and I trace my index fingers from his temples down along his jaw. “You’re so obvious, golden boy.”
“How do you do it?” He traces my face, too. “How do you hide it when you’re with him?”
I shrug like I’ve never thought about it. Like I’ve never had to fold up my w
ings and think innocent, innocent, innocent. “It’s a party,” I say, and my smile flashes as bold as it did last week when we spun through the doors into Duncan’s house with the shimmering music and the lights and the wolves. “We’re drinking. We’re celebrating. We’re saying, fuck whoever left those pictures, fuck everyone in the world who isn’t us. So look like it.”
He unburies a smile, but it crawls with secrets.
“Don’t think about anything that comes later,” I tell him. “He trusts you. You’re one of them.”
His smile fades back to guilt.
“No.” I wrap my arms around him and turn so my back presses against the railing and I stand between him and the boy he’ll kill tonight. “When they come in, you’ll take care of them. Give them drinks. Talk about how great Banks was at practice and how impressive it is that Duncan’s going to Dartmouth and how Piper needs to learn how to shut up.”
“It’s a party,” he says. He stares so deep into my eyes I almost think he can see who I really am.
Almost. Not quite.
I give him my very best St Andrew’s smile like the good girl the teachers think I am. Like the bleeding-bright flowers creeping up the stone walls, hiding the cracks and the secrets.
“Look like the innocent flower,” I say, and I kiss him—
so virgin-pure he wouldn’t even know it was me if he closed his eyes—
but then I turn it deep and cruel, and he feels it and he kisses back just as hungry—
—and I catch his lip between my teeth, but he doesn’t pull away.
I let him go. I say, “But be the serpent under it.”
Downstairs, a bell rings. Duncan’s car waits at the gate.
I breathe out my last line: Leave all the rest to me.
Truth or Dare
Midnight comes blindingly fast. The grandfather clock on the landing clangs loud and out of tune. Drowning out Banks’s rap so only the blown-out bass comes through.
When the last chime tolls, all of us—the best and the brightest St Andrew’s has ever had—cheer. A wild loud shout. Raising our glasses: the most expensive crystal in the cabinet, not one red plastic cup in sight, because tonight we’re drinking for the king.
