The wood cracks. The lid is flung away. Dirt rains down on me, but I don’t care. I suck in lungfuls of fresh, crisp air. A circle of light blinds me. I fling my body up, up into the unknown. Warm arms catch me, hold me close.
“I found you, Claws.” Only Antony calls me by that nickname. Of course, it would be my cousin who saves me. Antony drags me over the lip of the grave, my grave, and we fall into crackling leaves and damp grass.
I sob into his shoulder. Antony rolls me over, his fingers pressing all over my body, checking if I’m hurt. He rests my back against cold stone. “I have to take care of this,” he says. I watch through tear-filled eyes as he pushes the dirt back into the hole – into what was supposed to be my grave – and brushes dead leaves on top. When he’s done, it’s impossible to tell the ground’s been disturbed at all.
I tremble all over. I can’t make myself stop shaking. Antony comes back to me and wraps me in his arms. He staggers to his feet, holding me like I’m weightless. He’s only just turned eighteen, but already he’s built like a tank.
I let out a terrified sob. Antony glances over his shoulder, and there’s panic in his eyes. “You’ve got to be quiet, Claws,” he whispers. “They might be nearby. I’m going to get you out of here.”
I can’t speak. My voice is gone, left in the coffin with my screams. Antony hoists me up and darts into the shadows. He runs with ease, ducking between rows of crumbling gravestones and beneath bent and gnarled trees. Dimly, I recognize this place – the old Emerald Beach cemetery, on the edge of Beaumont Hills overlooking the bay, where the original families of Emerald Beach buried their dead.
Where someone tried to bury me.
Antony bursts from the trees onto a narrow road. His car is parked in the shadows. He opens the passenger door and settles me inside before diving behind the wheel and gunning the engine.
We tear off down the road. Antony rips around the deadly corners like he’s on a racetrack. Steep cliffs and crumbling old mansions pass by in a blur.
“My parents…” I gasp out. “Where are my parents?”
“I’m sorry, Claws. I didn’t get to them in time. I only found you.”
I wait for this to sink in, for the fact I’m now an orphan to hit me in a rush of grief. But I’m numb. My body won’t stop shaking, and I left my brain and my heart buried in the silence of that coffin.
“Who?” I ask, and I fancy I catch a hint of my dad’s cold savagery in my voice. “Who did this?”
“I don’t know yet, but if I had to guess, it was Brutus. I warned your dad that he was making alliances and building up to a challenge. I think he’s just made his move.”
I try to digest this information. Brutus – who was once my father’s trusted friend, who’d eaten dinner at our house and played Chutes and Ladders with me – killed my parents and buried me alive. But it bounces off the edge of my skull and doesn’t stick. The life I had before, my old life, it’s gone, and as I twist and grasp for memories, all I grab is stale coffin air.
“What now?” I ask.
Antony tosses his phone into my lap. “Look at the headlines.”
I read the news app he’s got open, but the words and images blur together. “This… this doesn’t make any sense…”
“They think you’re dead, Claws,” Antony says. “That means you have to stay dead until we’re strong enough to move against him. Until then, you have to be a ghost. But don’t worry, I’ll protect you. I’ve got a plan. We’ll hide you where they’ll never think to look.”
Mackenzie
(Four Years Later)
The thrumming bassline that rattles my bones and heats my veins with pure sex cuts off mid-riff, replaced by a tinny rendition of Für Elise blasting through the speakers.
Deedle-deedle-deedle-duh-dum-dum, duh-dum-dum…
The doorbell.
Shit.
I freeze mid-skank, one hand clutching my phone so tight my knuckles burn white, the other still gripping my ass like I’m a backup dancer in a Rhianna video. My eardrums shriek in protest at the piercing volume as the bell rings throughout the house’s built-in speakers.
I listen hard. The jingle continues, and now it’s accompanied by a loud thumping I can hear