Lock drove me home after tea. To my surprise and delight, he didn’t follow me inside. Once again, I tried to lie to myself that it was just a fluke, until all three reappeared just a few hours later.
Now I sat in bed, staring at their three shadows. I’d since changed into a comfortable white nightshirt that said:
I FEEL GREAT.
PLEASE DIE.
And tried not to think about what Lock had said, instead scouring the internet for anything about me, Nathan, and Lock. There was nothing—well, nothing beyond the savage glee that Gemma Crowne was addicted to pills.
This was the worst press I’d received in…well, ever. Abigail always took the brunt of shitty tabloids. People said there was no such thing as bad press. Tansy Crowne said if you couldn’t control the press, you didn’t deserve to be in it.
I glanced back at the Horsemen’s bodies shadowing my frosted double doors.
You should know what it means to wear that title.
I thought back to what HSOG had said. If I was marked, even the wrong look can be considered a declaration of war.
That shouldn’t give me goose bumps, but it was a twisted fantasy I couldn’t help but want to drown in.
“Don’t you have people to enslave?” I yelled through the door. “You know, lives to destroy. Better things to do than babysit me?”
Silence.
I groaned, falling against my bed. That was how it had been for hours. It was almost twelve and any nightlife was just beginning. I wondered about Grim. Wondered if he was at the club, wondered if he was still sad, and why.
I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him. Tostillbe thinking about him.
The space he occupied inside me grew and grew. He was smoke. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t touch him. But he was there inside me, taking over. Until I couldn’t breathe or move from it.
I was so goddamnweak.
Looking for a distraction, I pulled out my phone, to the last photo “I” posted. It was this morning, some scheduled post with a photo I’d taken over a year ago. I was in a bikini, because of course I was. I stared so long at the photo my face became unrecognizable. This Gemma was happy, whole—and never existed.
How could I compete with a version of myself that was so perfect everyone loved her?
Everything would be so much easier if I was just gone.
I will never be the Gemma Crowne in those photos.
All it would take is?—
I chucked my phone at my mirror, hoping it would shatter to pieces. My phone slammed against the corner, and only a small, triangular piece of the glass fractured and fell to the ground.
Awesome.
A moment later, my doors flew open. Raze and Lock looked left and right, guns drawn. I had a half second to marvel at that—no way were they worried about me, right?—when my brother’s voice sounded from behind them.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
Raze and Lock blocked my complete view. Behind them, I saw the outline of Wraith’s feet perched on my coffee table. My brother stared at that, at Wraith sprawled out on my couch, before finding Raze and Lock, their weapons drawn.
After a half second, where they scanned every corner of my room, Raze and Lock put away their weapons, turning to my brother.
“What does it look like?” There was a suggestive tease in Lock’s voice. My brother glared at Lock, before looking to me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Raze and Lock stepped together, closing the window where he could see me.
