Gabriel wraps me in his arms, pulling me back against the Egyptian linens while Antony and Tiberius get to work.
Noah helps Antony, pouring the boiling kettle over Brentwood’s body as Antony mixes the chemicals and uses the plunger to move the slurry forming in the bathtub down the drain. I’m too lost in my pain to pay too much attention, but the fact Noah is so calm and so willing to throw himself into this is… perturbing. He doesn’t throw up once, even as Antony asks him to hold Brentwood’s limbs while he chops him into pieces so the chemicals will work faster. Gabriel won’t even look inside the bathroom, but the smell has him heaving into the pillowcase at least three times.
Gabriel holds me, stroking my hair. He whispers song lyrics into my ears, filling my chest with warmth. But he can’t kiss away that cold as I clutch that ribbon between my fingers.
All these years, and the man who hurt me finally has a name.
Brutus.
The accursed man.
Thebetrayer.
He killed my parents.
He broke my spirit.
He will die.
14
Claudia
It takes nearly five hours for the last of Brentwood’s remains to flush down the bathtub. Gabriel and I spent most of that time cradled together on the bed, clinging to each other as though every slurp and swirl of the drain washed away the lies that cloaked us.
I’ll never be able to scrub the smell out of my skin, nor forget the sludge at the bottom of the bathtub as the potassium hydroxide transformed Brentwood’s considerable bulk into a human slurry. Antony picks out the remaining bones that hadn’t dissolved and threw them in the pillowcase while Noah and Tiberius use bleach to scrub the blood off every surface, until the bathroom shone like new. Tiberius even repairs the broken tiles.
After it’s done, Antony drops us back at Malloy Manor, but he won’t come inside. “I still have work to do,” he says as he starts to wind his window up.
“Wait.” I grab the window. “Is it safe for us to go to school tomorrow?”
“Fuck knows, but what’s the alternative? Like it or not, you’re Mackenzie Malloy now. You need to act as normal as possible until we’ve got Brutus under control.” Antony grins. “Pull up those thigh-high white socks and those garters that drive the Pretty Boy so wild, cousin. You’re going back to class.”
I give Antony the finger as he laughs and takes off, a pillowcase filled with our bloody shoes and clothes, and the remains of Brentwood that wouldn’t fit down the drain.
I know he needs to check in at the club, that our best chance of figuring out who’s behind the shooting is to lean into his role in the family and his underground connections. I know that my continued existence is down, in part, to the fact he’s been diligently careful to not let anyone in Tartarus Oaks knows that he occasionally disappears into Harrington Hills to watch horror films with his not-so-dead cousin in a mansion that’s only months away from being hers.
I know all this, and still I pace around the ballroom and stare at my broken phone screen every few minutes. I was raised to be a queen. I don’t like being helpless, feeling like a monkey in a cage watching the world falling into chaos outside my prison. I especially don’t like Antony being out on the front lines in Tartarus Oaks when there’s clearly a price on my head.
My agitation only feeds Noah’s disquiet. He spends all day poring over the paperwork from Malloy’s safe, organizing it into piles and marking certain damming passages with sticky notes. Gabriel and I play music in the ballroom, play with Queen Boudica, and kiss until my lips feel like they’re going to fall off. When it gets dark outside and Noah still hasn’t left the office, I heat up some soup for dinner and bring it into him. He’s still staring at that pile of papers, trying to force it to offer up the answers he craves.
“There’s so much more here than just my brother’s case,” he says as he shoves aside the bowl without touching it. “Howard Malloy’s been using this deer antler velvet in supplements for years – not in his commercially-available products, but in specialized performance enhancers for a select range of clients, many of whom have suffered horrific side-effects. There’s enough evidence here that if Howard Malloy ever showed his face in Emerald Beach again, we could put him away in prison for life for gross negligence and manslaughter, not to mention what the sports boards will say if they knew just how many star athletes are taking this stuff…”
“I wonder if that’s why he disappeared?” I peer over Noah’s shoulder at the piles of paper spread out across the desk. It’s weird to think that just a few weeks ago nothing in those files had any relevance to me, and now they might hold the key to neutralizing the person who wants me dead.
If John Marlowe even is responsible for the gunshots. I know Noah believes it, but I’m not certain I do.
Noah fists his hands at his sides. Hopelessness slides into his eyes – a sense that this is too big for him to tackle. For the first time, the spoiled prince must face the fact that wealth can’t buy him answers. “We’ll never know what happened to the Malloys. I don’t believe for a moment that they’re dead, but Howard would cover his tracks too perfectly for us to trace.”
“I think there’s one person who can give us a clue.” I toss his leather jacket into his arms. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To have a chat with your father.”
“Wait, Claudia—” Noah bolts out of the chair and races after me as I head back to the ballroom. I grab my own jacket from the back of the couch – it has Gucci emblazoned across the back in rainbow sequins because that’s how Mackenzie’s mother rolls – and kick Gabriel in the shoulder. My rock god is lying on the floor, staring into nothing, with Queen Boudica curled up in a ball of happiness in his hair.
“Noah and I are heading out for a bit.”
