I was fucking weak for her.
I’ve always been weak for her. The dirty, ugly truth was tattooed on my chest. I sold drugs, but I didn’t fuck with them, because I already had one addiction fucking up my life.
Gemma Crowne.
“Agreed.” I clicked off, focusing on the man bleeding at my feet.
One bullet, through the temple. Another body added to my Gemma Crowne collection.
SEVEN
GEMMA
I felt like my sister, Abigail, sneaking back into Crowne Hall. She was always the one coming home at all times of night. It was hours after the party ended. I’d stayed outside, stuck, watching the body disappear into the water.
Now I paused before a floor-length mirror, some gilded monstrosity my family had had for centuries. In my bloody dress, I felt like some ravaged princess of an older time.
Gemma Crowne, forever marked by the Reaper.
“Gemma?”
For a moment I froze at my mother’s soft voice. She’d see the blood on my clothes. She’dknow. But then I saw her glassy eyes, her droopy shoulders, and the way she clutched the wingback for support. She wasn’t going to notice a railroad spike coming from my eye.
“You disappeared from the party,” my mother said. “Where did you go?”
My gaze traveled to a floor-to-ceilingwindow. Outside, stars suffocated under the storm, and I touched the bruises disguised as hickeys.
Where were you, Gemma?
“I was with a boy,” I said. “I don’t know, someone from the party.”
My mom gestured for me again, and I went to her, wrapping my arm in her silk-clad one.
“What time is it?” she murmured.
“Late.”
We walked to her wing, and I slid out of my ruined dress, tossing it in the trash so she wouldn’t question it tomorrow. I put on a pair of her silk pajamas and sidled up into bed with her.
“Who was it?”
My mother’s eyes were glassy, her face soft. Tansy Crowne was not known for chatting. She was hard. Elegant. But this was a side I knew well. A side I thinkonlyI knew.
I didn’t have to wonder what my mother had taken tonight. She loved her benzos just as much as I did.
Like mother, like daughter, right?
“Hmm?”
“The boy.” She patted my hand. “Who was he?”
“Oh, uh…” I thought to the boy who’d haunted me for years, a shadow at my back for a decade. The night replayed like a puppet show in my mind. Me, Grim, the body between us. “No one worth mentioning.”
The first death between Grim and me was a mistake.
I was always taught never to give away my location, but I was in a club in the meatpacking district, something I’d been paid to promote, andeveryoneknew where I was that night. I’d done so many drugs, the memory was all a watercolor. The mirror dripped pearls into the quilted red satin walls. I’d bent over the sink, doing another line, whensuddenly a shadow appeared behind me like smoke, engulfing the room.
Engulfing me.
