All Hail - J. Bree Page 0,50

boss is! No one does, he stays in his fucking castle! All I know is we were told to cross the eyes out, the Jackal is dead and they want the message out that there’s a new player taking over.”

I glance over at Illi and he stalks over to me, crouching over to where the guy is gasping for air under Aodhan’s boot. “Gimme the exact orders. Tell me exactly what you were told.”

The guy hacks out a breath, wheezing out, “That’s it man! Take a black fucking marker and cross the eyes out.”

Aodhan’s eyes collide with mine.

Illi snarls, “They specified a color? Or are you ad-libbing that shit? We want specifics or you’re gonna be sold to cannibals by the pound, they enjoy skinny crackheads. Something about the tenderness of the meat.”

Disgusting but effective, the dealer almost shits himself right there on the ground at our feet. “Yes! Yes, he said black. He was specific about it.”

Chapter Thirteen

Odie is the sweetest woman alive but if she doesn’t give me the secret to her macaron recipe, I might strangle her in her sleep.

I’m wise enough not to say this to her but Illi reads it on my face all the same, smirking at me and popping an entire chocolate macaron in his mouth in one go because he’s a total savage.

I realize my mind is very disordered right now, I know what’s going on, but that doesn’t stop the fixation from happening. Nothing can stop it, not after years of Ash and Harley and Blaise all trying to calm me down, not even Lips’ quiet acceptance of this problem of mine, nothing can stop it except letting it burn out of my system, destroying everything around me.

Ash does the same thing.

The perks of our childhood locked in a mansion with Joseph Beaumont Sr.

So I try to lock it down just enough that Aodhan doesn’t realize I’m crazy and Illi doesn’t call Ash home to me, and it kind of works a little because it doesn’t matter how many times I try to make the macarons, they never turn out right, and that’s a real issue.

The most important issue of the night, one might say… if they’re utterly detached from reality.

“Tell me what goes wrong with them and I will help solve the problem, la Reine.” Odie murmurs, setting a cup of coffee in front of me. It’s too sweet, I can smell it from here, but I don’t have the heart to tell her.

Roxas snickers at me under his breath like it’s hilarious that I’m thumbing through a cookbook muttering in French with her but Aodhan keeps shifting in his chair. I’ve grown up almost exclusively around men and I know exactly what that shifting means.

If Aodhan ever makes a move, I can try whispering some French in his ear and see where that takes us. It would have been handy to know back when—

No.

I’m going to stop thinking about that place.

I’m not going to let it ruin my life or the chance of this relationship with Aodhan and I’m already on the edge of doing that for myself.

I fucked Atticus in a storage room.

What I did to Aodhan in that interrogation room, it doesn’t matter that I was doing it to save his life, I didn’t give him a choice. I was doing it whether he agreed to or not and that’s on me.

I’m the monster.

Illi clears his throat and says, “Queenie, we need to talk about what the dealer said. Stop worrying about the biscuits, you can fuck around with them later.”

Clearly, he knows nothing of how my mind works because I definitely do not want to think about what the dealer said.

Everyone in the Bay knows about the color system.

There’s no way anyone would choose a color that carefully without wanting it to mean something which means the dealer is trying to frame the Crow for something.

Or that the Crow has taken on the drug empire.

“The Crow would never do it. He would never deal drugs,” I say, keeping my eyes on the recipe book but it says all the same things as mine does at home.

Maybe I should come over for a cooking class with Odie? Maybe that would fix the macaron problem? Maybe I should go home and cook twelve dozen batches until they come out right?

Odie’s hand slowly slips into mine on the page in front of us both, stopping the flipping. I glance up at her and she murmurs to me, quiet enough