Kane and I chose each other after that. A quiet, often violent, but safe collaboration. Buyers started purchasing us together, and I don’t know if I would’ve made it through it all without him. I’d promised myself to never give in again to a blond boy with big dreams, but hell, I think if Kane had the ability to smash the world into his favor, it would do so happily. I grew to love him as a brother, a safety net, and while I didn’t know Thorne as wellas I did Kane, I grew to appreciate him too. I liked that Thorne helped Arden burn brighter and brighter. It was…addicting…to see how bright she could become, but none of us ever expected her to step into that courtyard that day or for her to look at me like that.
Creed, I thought as she stood there with that rusted pocket knife, and I suddenly knew what it was like to have your heart heal and break and heal, over and over, just from looking at someone else. Because she saw me. She saw me like Alex had, like Kane did, and eventually, how Thorne did, too. She saw howcalmhad ruined me, howrememberingwas putting me in an early grave. She knew I wasenduring. Silently. Desperately. And I think some part of her felt the same thing looking at me—escape.
Butdestructionwas always our fate.
?Arden?
I thought of the next phase of existence as the purge. I didn’t speak on the flight back to the townhouse, and the silence scraped at the inside of my skull until I wanted to claw my way out of my own skin. The second my bedroom door shut behind me and the lock clicked, the darkness I’d been holding at bay finally rushed in, filling every hollow place in me that still carried Rafe’s heat. Leaving him had felt like splitting myself in half and walking away with the worst portion, the part that had to keep moving while the other stayed behind, bleeding out. Sleep became another kind of violence. Every time I closed my eyes, the nightmares found me. I woke up shaking, my throat raw from screaming.
One night I tore apart the closet. All the dresses and their ridiculous price tags. The heels. It was like looking at a shrine to Buyers every time I opened my fucking eyes. I dumped everything into the tub with a grunt and lit it on fire, flicking on the bathroom vent and running the faucet if the flames got too high. It helped me to watch them burn, but once they were ashand I didn’t have anything else to throw into my pyre, I found myself caving in to the darkness again.
Food arrived outside my door in neat little offerings nightly, as if nourishment could be a peace treaty. I tried to force it down at first, but by the twelfth night it all came back up anyway. The only thing that steadied me was work, because work had rules, and rules were something I could cling to when everything else in me was falling apart. I knew I still had a job to do. I knew Alexander would want to move on the compound soon. Books towered in the corner of my room, cracked spines and dog-eared pages stacked into a leaning monument, their margins scarred by my notes. My own papers littered the bed in messy, frantic scrawl, diagrams and lists and calculations written in a hand that grew sharper the angrier I became. I stopped trying to sleep. I stopped trying to be anything other than useful. Every ounce of me went into building the bomb, into learning the language of wires and casings and pressure and timing, into turning my trauma into something that could detonate. I focused purely on the device, because if I could blow Halden to pieces, maybe the purge would finally feel like it had an ending point.
By the end of the second week locked away, Alexander finally lost his patience waiting for me to emerge from my room. At least, I thought it was Alexander who barged in, my door cracking against the wall, until I looked up from my perchedplace next to the toilet and found a green-faced, leopard-printed Monty glaring at me.
“For fuck’s sake, pyro,” she growled around a cigarette in a haughty British accent. “I can’t take any more of your wallowing. Do you not realize my room is on the other side of yours? If I hear you vomit one more time, I’m going to tape your mouth shut and make you swallow it down.” She wore a fluffy, hot pink leopard robe. Her short dark hair was pinned up, some kind of green goop spread all over her face, a book tucked under one arm, and a half-empty glass in her other hand. “Thursday nights are Monty nights,” she explained with narrowed eyes. “Meaning the rest of you peasants bow to me for the three hours I take my goddamn bath and read my shitty, smutty little book. Got it?”
I opened my mouth, but she mimed zipping her own closed.
“Silence,” she hissed. Then she turned in her fuzzy socks and ran straight into the wall that was Alexander. When he’d snuck up behind her, I wasn’t sure, but he was peering over her now, surveying me with concern.
“Monty,” he grumbled. “You’re on Arden duty.”
“Hell no. She’s a disaster.”
I scowled and trembled as I lifted from beside the toilet. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”
“You’re not fine.” He gripped the door frame. “Monty, you remember what it was first like being out of the syndicate. She needs to get out of her head.”
“It’s Monty night,” Monty complained. She went to shove past Alexander, but he blocked her again. “Don’t be a twat, Alex.”
“What if I give you something in return?” he tried.
She took a swig of her drink as I leaned into the bathroom counter, watching them curiously. They bickered like siblings. Part of me had wondered if maybe they were together, but I didn’t see any chemistry between them. “If it doesn’t have at least four zeroes at the end, then you’re underbidding.” She blewout her cigarette smoke into his face and he swatted it away with an annoyed look.
“Mickey’s for dinner, then we go wherever Heath wants to shop,” he bargained. “It’s time Arden meets them, anyway.”
Monty lit up. She turned to me, putting out her cig in the sink and draining the last of her wine. “Come along, disaster.” She grabbed me by the wrist before I could say anything and dragged me past Alexander. I glanced over my shoulder with wide eyes only to find him suppressing a smile and shaking his head as he walked off to his office. “We leave in thirty, Monty,” he called.
“Ew. That’s definitely not enough time to fix you,” Monty said and kicked open one of the panels of the hall wall that I hadn’t realized was a hidden door. I always wondered where her room was, and now it made sense why I could never find it. Itwasright next door to mine that whole time, and I had no idea.
It also was a fucking mess.
The room was likely beautiful underneath the mountains of sequins and furs. A canopy bed was in the center, romance books stacked at its side haphazardly. An entire wall of what looked like utterly random objects stared at me through it all—dolls missing eyes, broken bottles, strange abstract art, postcards, and jewelry.
Monty danced around the chaos expertly, heading to a lit alcove I imagined was the bathroom but had no way of repeating the steps she took to get there. “Thisisyour room?” I asked.
“Yeah, don’t you love it?” she called out from the bathroom. Then she poked her head out of the alcove. “Don’t be scared. It’s just clothes. You can step on them.”
Carefully, I attempted to maneuver toward the bathroom without kicking over any mounds, but I deeply,deeplyfailed. An entire stack of purses toppled, and I gasped in alarm. Monty didn’t seem to care though. Music turned on and blasted from the bathroom as I finally made it. It was…just as messy but huge.There was a massive claw foot tub and a two person shower. The counter was covered in cosmetics and skin care, Monty peeling off the green goop that seemed to have hardened. She wrenched on the faucet, giving up on peeling, and scrubbed it away.
“You have a lot of stuff,” I managed.
She dried her face and gave me a serious look. “I don’t share any of it. You can look, but don’t even think about borrowing.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not really into fashion and all that.”
“Yeah. I can tell.” She unpinned her hair, letting it fall just past her chin. “But tell me, is that because you truly aren’t or because you’ve never had access?”
