by Nic Stone
“You just gon have to trust me, okay, babe? No matter how bad shit gets,” he says. “Long story short, this house is . . . well, let’s just say it’s a popular ‘good time’ spot for some rich and powerful dudes.” His face clouds over; then he squeezes his lips shut and shakes his head.
Hazel shuts her eyes.
“Anyway. Some shit happened at that party, and to even be able to stay here with you, I had to . . .” He stops and takes a deep breath to collect himself. “The Grande Dame was gonna take us both out, Hazel. When I caught on to what goes down here, babe, I couldn’t leave you. So I told them I was here to sell you.” He waits until Hazel looks right at him. “I had to think fast, you feel me?”
Hazel blinks.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms, Hazel and Gray did. Right there on the hard ground beside the river.
And by the time they woke, the sun had gone down, and woodland critters had devoured their lunch and eaten a series of holes in Hazel’s discarded tights.
They did fine retracing their steps at first—the Legos were easy enough to spot beneath the beams of their cell phone flashlights.
But then, just five minutes into their return trek, Gray’s phone died. Hazel’s went soon after.
There was no way to keep track of time then. The tree canopy was thick enough to hide the night sky, so they relied solely on the feel of one another’s hands and the sound of detritus beneath their feet to stay calm. Neither was under any illusion about how lost they were. They were just thankful to be together.
They kept moving.
After a while, the trees began to thin, and they saw light. So they rushed toward it.
The house looked inviting enough.
Had Gray listened to his gut and turned them around after their encounter with Garnet on the porch, they would’ve been fine. They could’ve gone back across to the woods and camped out there together. The sun would’ve risen a few hours later, and they could’ve found their way back to Gray’s old neighborhood, caught the bus, and returned to their homes.
What Gray didn’t know: Sapphire spotted them the minute they stepped into the basement. That was the moment his and Hazel’s gooses were cooked. Because they’d entered the Treasure Chest. Outsiders—anyone who wasn’t a client or an employee—could never be permitted to see inside the Treasure Chest and leave. There was too much at stake.
The last time an intruder made it out alive—the head of patronage’s stepson had gotten curious about where his money came from—the Grande Dame had been rewarded with an acid treatment to half of her face. The stepson was swiftly taken care of, but it’d been too close a call.
Gray hadn’t felt Sapphire’s eyes on him and Hazel as they moved through the crowd. The Grande Dame, in her signature black leather suit, stood in the shadows, speaking with a pair of bouncers. Sapphire needed to get to the pair before the woman or her brutes could.
When Hazel disappeared into the bathroom, Sapphire swooped in to hand Gray a cup of gleam. He had no idea that it was a liquid upper that obliterated inhibitions, nor that she’d laced it with a little something extra that in a few hours would render them temporarily paralyzed. That way, she could pass the boy off to the others, have her fun with the girl, and take them both out with no resistance. Quick and painless.
She hadn’t counted on Gray’s not drinking.
Gray had a way of taking in an entire room without moving his head. Which was precisely what he did as Hazel, her limbs loosened, grinded against him. Gray’s eyes roamed, and he noticed that all the girls at the party were scantily clad, each in a single color from neck to toe. He also noticed that he was the youngest guy in the room. And though Gray was missing one piece—he didn’t know the role of the boys they saw counting money in the strange fireplace room they passed upstairs—as the rest of the puzzle came together, he decided to take a shot at the wild idea forming in his head. He figured that if he was off, the worst that could happen is what would happen anyway: he and Hazel wouldn’t make it out of the house alive.
So when a cluster of the jewel-toned girls slid up and tried to pull his Hazel away, Gray stayed close. And when Hazel was handed another golden cup, Gray said, “Nah, she good,” and took it away from her.
When Hazel moved, Gray moved. When she decided to dance on a table, Gray stood beneath her. When she started kissing Sapphire, and then a third girl in shimmering white who joined in, Gray was stung, but he didn’t let go of Hazel’s hand.
And when a girl in a dark-yellow “outfit” that was little more than strategically placed suspender straps got fed up and said to Gray, “What’s your deal, party pooper?” Gray lifted his chin.
“Your boss don’t own her yet,” Gray said. And he looked her right in the eye. “Could, though. For the right price.”
She was clearly unimpressed. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “So I guess I’m the Easter Bunn—”
“Citrine!” Sapphire interrupted. “That’s no way to talk to a dealer.”
Beneath the flashing lights, Gray could see a hungry glint in Sapphire’s eye.
“Apologies for my friend’s rudeness, sir,” she said mysteriously. “Right this way.”
Gray had no idea whether she believed him. But he took a deep breath, and he followed.
Now Hazel is coming out of the paralysis, and Gray has to get her free. If the smirk on Sapphire’s face as she returns with the gleam is any indication, Gray is running out of time.
He has known from the moment the Grande Dame “agreed” to his demands that she didn’t believe he’d come here to sell his girlfriend. He’s also sure he’s only alive because the Grande Dame does believe that Gray’s presence will keep Hazel relaxed enough to make her compliant, and that Gray wouldn’t attempt to leave without Hazel. So she’s playing along. Once the head of patronage has seen Hazel and gauged her value, painfully mediocre Gray’s game will end. And so will he.
But the thing about people who are perceived to be unexceptional is that they are frequently underestimated. Gray’s greatest strength is his grayness—that uncanny ability to be nothing special, to fade into the background, blend into the landscape. So he’s spent most of the thirty-eight hours since he first encountered the Grande Dame moving around and collecting information.
He’s learned that most of the girls who are here don’t necessarily want to be. Sapphire is the exception, but the others miss their families. Topaz—who’s been here the longest—came voluntarily, two years ago, at age fifteen. The Grande Dame still had a whole face then, and was apparently quite beautiful. She had approached Topaz in a shopping mall, playing the owner of a prestigious dance company: in exchange for the girl’s talents, a biweekly deposit would appear in an account the girl’s mother could access.
Diamond got into a car with an older boy after school one day and never returned home. The search was given up after three weeks.
Garnet, plucked from a dance club she used a fake ID to enter, has been working at the Treasure Chest for three months and hasn’t even been reported missing.
Opal was kidnapped by a creepy man in a suspect white van.
Emerald has been messing up with customers, and she turns eighteen in two weeks. Girls tend to disappear from the house around their eighteenth birthday, and all Emerald can think about is what will happen to her then.
Gray wants to free them all.
Another thing Gray has learned: the boys counting money? Gleamweavers. And they not only distribute the liquid drug to a wide network of buyers; they make it here on-site.
Which is the key to Gray’s plan to bring the whole place down.
When Gray takes Hazel her supper the evening after her facial—she’s still too lifted from Sapphire’s drink to be permitted in the dining room—he slips a note beneath her pillow, along with a small baggie of tiny translucent beads he snagged from the gleam lab.
Gamma hydroxybutyrate. GHB.
When she wakes to eat and finds them, Hazel has no clue what to make of the little
beads or the nine-word note—Use in meeting. Minute and half. Then kitchen pantry—but the following morning, during a lavender-and-oat bath with Sapphire (“the Grande Dame told me to help you relax,” Sapphire said with a wink), as she gives Hazel “tips” for impressing the head of patronage, everything clicks.
The room where the head of patronage has his late-afternoon encounters with new recruits is just off the kitchen. And as Gray discovered during the prior night’s scouting, inside the pantry, there’s a door that leads down some stairs to the hallway that passes the gleam lab and dead-ends at an exit the gleamweavers use.
Gray gave Hazel just enough of the magic crystals to knock the head of patronage unconscious. Delivering a meal and beverage is a part of Hazel’s “meeting,” so all she has to do is slip the substance into his drink, wait the ninety seconds or so it takes to kick in, then slip herself out of the room, over to the kitchen, and into the pantry.
Which is where Gray is waiting now as Hazel heads down the hall, trying not to snap an ankle in the ridiculous heels Sapphire delicately slid onto Hazel’s feet. The silver tray in Hazel’s hands shakes dangerously, and the full coffee pot rattles as the wine sloshes around in its goblet.
Thankfully, there’s a cloche over his food that Hazel will have to remove. Her plan is to “prep” his plate with her back to this “head of patronage” so she can slip the little packet into his mug of coffee.
Hazel—Peridot, according to the Grande Dame—is wearing a light-green satin bra top and short skirt, with a garter belt and fishnet thigh highs. The fragrance of the coffee—a sore reminder of the Monster—and the feeling of what amounts to a string up the center of her rear have turned the contents of her stomach to a roiling sludge. It threatens to bubble up out of her just when her nose begins to itch and she remembers she’s wearing a mask. Green and gold, sequined, with feathers, it covers the top half of her face, masquerade style.
“He likes to look at our bodies first,” Sapphire had told her.
The mask turns out to be the sole reason things don’t go more awry the moment Hazel steps into the room and recognizes the head of patronage’s frighteningly blue eyes, broad shoulders, sharp jawline, and thick, dark hair.
It all makes sense. The way he looks at her. The disappearing at night. The seemingly endless flow of money without his ever leaving the apartment.
Her muscles lock up, and her right ankle rolls left. She attempts to correct her balance, but the contents of the tray slide in the opposite direction and crash to the oak floor. The man stares as Hazel scrambles to collect the shards of broken porcelain and glass. And then she spots the baggie. Which draws his attention to it.
She’ll only get one chance.
The man who has spent the past five months making her feel like a stranger in her skin rises from his chair and slowly creeps in Hazel’s direction, his eyes never leaving the packet. Hazel’s stomach does another flip. Her heart roars in her ears as he squats before her, his lips parting to reveal his too-straight, too-white teeth.
When he grabs the packet and holds it up to the light, spots swim in Hazel’s vision, and her muscles go liquid . . .
But then he looks her in the eyes. The only part of her face he can see. And the sight of that unnatural blue she knows all too well gives her the last bit of resolve she needs.
The Monster opens his mouth to speak, and Hazel lunges. She squeezes too hard on the chunk of broken porcelain hidden in her hand, and she sucks in a breath when it slices her palm. But the sharp tip finds its target.
With the sun still in the sky—though setting fast—Hazel and Gray have a much easier time navigating the woods. A few minutes into their escape, they hear the sound of sirens, but they don’t speak until they make it back to the river.
“I should’ve known,” Hazel says to Gray as she scrambles out of the green getup. He is seeing her naked, but she couldn’t care less. She’s desperate to submerge herself in the icy water and wash the sweat and blood from her skin. “I knew something was off about him the moment he stepped foot in our apartment. I just—”
Hazel is rambling. In shock.
She just killed a man, after all.
Gray doesn’t say a word. He’s in shock too. He’d been watching from the kitchen—baseball cap low, face tilted down toward an open book—as the head of patronage made his way to the dining area to meet Hazel. And when Gray recognized his stepfather’s face in profile, he’d almost leaped up from the table.
But then everything came flooding back: his brother’s questions about where the money came from—because there was plenty of it—and his insistence that the white man neither of them really liked was up to something shady. The fear in Gray’s brother’s eyes when he’d come in long past curfew one night. Their stepfather wasn’t home. Gray woke to find his brother gone, and later heard that his body had been found not too far from the townhome. The complete lack of any concern or remorse from his stepfather after Gray’s brother’s remains were positively identified.
When Hazel appeared in the pantry, with blood all over her, Gray had breathed a sigh of relief and pulled her into a hug.
Maybe one day Gray will tell Hazel of their bizarre connection, but for now, he walks to the river’s edge and slides his backpack from his shoulders. He pulls out her top, pleated skirt, ruined tights, and cardigan, and he beckons Hazel over.
Then he holds the bag open and nods his head so she’ll peek in.
“Oh my god!” She covers her mouth with her hand and looks up at him.
In the backpack are at least thirty of the bound, ten-grand stacks of cash.
When Gray had visited the Grande Dame’s office, after leaving Hazel with Sapphire while her paralysis wore off, he told the blond woman that he needed to make sure she was “good for” his payment. She opened the safe right in front of him. And he’d gone back to make the grab while the woman was helping Hazel with her “stretches.”
“This should hold us for a minute,” Gray says.
There’s a rough road ahead for Hazel and Gray, Gray knows.
But for now, they’re just two kids who got lost in the woods.
He strips down and jumps into the river.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2020 Nigel Livingstone
Nic Stone is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin, Clean Getaway, and Jackpot. Born and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Stone graduated from Spelman College, then worked extensively in teen mentoring and lived in Israel for a few years before returning to the US to write full-time.
