random faces like mocking clowns at a county fair. Mackenzie says something else, but I can’t hear it. My head spins and the room recedes as I fall backward through a tunnel. The darkness swirls around me, and I welcome it. At least in oblivion, my life makes sense.
The last thing I hear before the abyss swallows me is Noah’s voice calling, “I got you, man.”
Noah and Gabriel must’ve dragged me back to the ballroom, because when I open my eyes again, I’m slumped on the sofa, staring at a pitch-black cat racing around a multi-story castle. I don’t remember the journey – one moment I’m staring at the locket as the floor rushes up to meet me. The next Gabriel, Noah, and I are lined up on the sofa like criminals before the firing squad, facing Not-Mackenzie, who sits upright in a leather armchair, flanked by her two hulking cronies.
My head feels like I slammed it into a wall. I incline it slightly, and my brain bounces off the sides.
Ow. I won’t do that again.
“Right.” Not-Mackenzie clears her throat. “Now that Eli’s done being dramatic… I’ll tell you about the locket. But first, you need to know that I didn’t kill anyone.”
Her voice cracks on the word kill. Her voice and eyes are hard, but there’s something else – a note of pleading. She wants us to believe her. But that’s ridiculous. A sociopath who pretends to be someone else and takes over their life doesn’t give a fuck what we think of her.
Noah tosses the locket on the coffee table so hard the chain scratches the wood.
I look to him and take strength from the dark rage in his eyes. Noah’s spent so long hating Mackenzie Malloy, it’s easy for him to flick that switch to hating this stranger, too. Although… her scent still clings to his body, and I wonder if his hatred has become something else. Has Noah been so consumed by his own fire that he’s collapsed and crumbled into himself and emerged anew?
A phoenix can’t be born of sin and shadow. It would starve without the fire that feeds it.
Not-Mackenzie wrings her hands, and everything wrong about her stands out. She’s always seemed different from the girl I fell in love with all those years ago. She forgot everything about her life, about me, about us. She tried to make me believe she had amnesia, but all my reading about her symptoms never quite matched up.
She broke into my house and wrote those things on my walls.
She expected me to protect her even though she’s nothing to me.
She branded her initials into Alec LeMarque’s forehead.
No. Not her initials. She tried to make Mackenzie guilty of her crime.
She could be a cold-blooded killer.
Killer.
Killer.
She doesn’t deserve to wear Mackenzie’s name like a designer scarf.
Gabriel slouches, a tall drink in his hand. He thinks no one’s noticed that he stopped drinking since he got back to Emerald Beach, that he’s been tossing alcohol into bushes and leaving it out of his own cocktails. He’s wrong – I always notice. But he’s drinking now, gulping back a tall glass of straight rum like his life depends on it.
It figures. When the going gets tough, Gabriel Fallen retreats into a fantasy world and bars the door behind him.
Beside me, Noah’s a coiled spring of rage. But I can feel the edges of it. This rage doesn’t belong to Noah – it’s on my behalf.
Noah rests his hand on my knee and squeezes his fingers – it hurts because the dude does not know his own strength anymore, but I know that squeeze is a promise. I held Noah together when he descended into hell four years ago. He’d take a bullet for me. I can’t count on much in my life, but I can count on that.
“Spit it out,” Noah rasps. “The truth. No more hiding behind your fake trauma. The agreement we had isn’t worth shit now.”
Not-Mackenzie’s mouth opens, shuts, opens again.
“Eli deserves the truth,” Noah snaps. “If you won’t give it to him, we’re going to the police.”
“I’d be careful with my threats if I were you,” Antony says, coming forward to stand beside Not-Mackenzie. He cracks his knuckles, and the amusement in his eyes is menacing. “This is not any ordinary Valley Girl you’re talking to. Gentlemen, meet Claudia August, prodigal daughter and rightful heir of the August crime family.”
2
Claudia
It’s almost worth this entire charade just to see their faces when Antony gives them my real