my thighs and stains the floor red. I can’t stop staring at it for some reason, my mind on Ivy Hightower’s perfect dead body.
Just like Pen’s.
Too perfect to really be dead, too perfect for any of that morbidity to be real. Because dead people—people like Danny Ensbrook—look ugly when they die. They smell, and they bloat, and they crawl.
Penelope just looked … asleep. Like Ivy.
“You stupid fucker,” I growl, closing my eyes under the spray of the water. I strip my clothes off and then stand there with my arms wrapped over my chest, thinking about the Thing. About my sister. About the note on her phone, and the pills on her bed.
But none of that really means she killed herself. Neil could’ve put a gun to her head and forced her to write the note, take the pills. Half of me wonders how I didn’t think of this before, and the other half of me is convinced that I must be a moron to come up with a story that’s so far-fetched.
I hear the door open and peak around the curtain as thick, wet fog swirls around the bathroom. Aaron puts the tampons and menstrual cups on the counter, along with a water bottle and some ibuprofen.
“You’re our first Havoc Girl,” he says, looking down at the items on the counter like he’s happy to see them there. This is getting intimate, and I’m not sure that I like it. “And our first period, so take it easy on us, okay?”
“Don’t act like sexist pricks, and I’ll do my best, okay? And tell Oscar I can still strangle him, bleeding out of the vagina or no.”
“I’ll make sure to deliver that message,” Aaron tells me, watching me for a moment before he steps out of the bathroom and closes the door behind him. My heart flip-flops strangely as I imagine him smiling on the other side of that door, happy to have his girlfriend back, happy to be a part of her life in the most intimate way possible.
Girlfriend … I still need to unpack that word.
After all, can I really be Vic’s fiancée and Aaron’s girlfriend and Hael’s … something, all in the same breath?
Once I get out of the shower and put my cup in—it’s the disposable kind you can still have sex with, so I’m happy about that—I wrap a towel around myself and head back to Aaron’s room to get dressed. I slept alone in there last night, but something about that felt off.
There’s no reason for me to sleep alone, not anymore. Aaron might’ve been in the woods, but Vic was at the house.
I check on the girls and find them immersed in a fierce game of Mario Kart together. I feel a bit like an asshole; I haven’t been giving Heather the attention she deserves. Let’s just get through this, and we can be together, I promise her. But I don’t interrupt their game to tell her that. Children are perceptive as hell. If I start acting weird and hugging her, kissing her forehead, murmuring strange shit, she’s going to know something is wrong.
She knew on that awful day, when I found Pen. Heather knew before she knew, you know what I mean? I remember her starting to scream, throwing her body against my arms, straining for the stairs.
Penelope was already gone by then, loaded into a bag that looks an awful lot like the tarps we’ve been using, transported away to Neil’s friend at the morgue. Buried. Drowning in dirt. Rotting. My stomach clenches with cramps, and I turn away sharply, closing the door to the girls’ bedroom.
Heather and I are staying here enough. Maybe I should get her like, a cot or something? Would that be better than an air mattress?
“Good morning,” Callum says in that husky voice of his, standing by the table when I come downstairs. There’s a heap of chocolate in the center of it, a literal freaking mound. I narrow my eyes, and he grins back at me. “We heard. Congratulations on not being pregnant with Victor’s child.”
“Shut your mouth, you smart-ass,” Vic says as he leans back on the sofa and crosses his ankles on the coffee table. He’s shirtless and wearing only pajama pants. Come to think of it, they’re all shirtless and wearing only pajama pants. Even Cal, in his usual sleeveless hoodie, has left the damn thing unbuttoned and gaping open to the point that I can’t even figure out why he’s still