Nadine shoved Safa aside as she raced up the steps. The baby wiggled as Nadine’s mother gently deposited the bundle on the ground. “Mama!” Nadine shouted. “Stop!”
At the door, Nadine’s mother turned, the beginnings of a disapproving frown on her face.
Without a second of hesitation, Nadine plunged the scissors into her mother’s heart.
The moment stretched for eternity. And as Nadine watched blood soak into her mother’s robe, a chilling thought struck her. Evil was built into the bones of the Haikal villa. Like toxic dust motes floating on the stagnant air, it settled on the nearest breathing surface andcorroded.Layers of tragedy and pain and loss. How long had Nadine been buried beneath them?
Bamba’s deal didn’t give Haikals roots or a legacy. It gave them chains.
Her mother stumbled into the banister, staring at Nadine with disbelief. Safa screamed. More tragedy to whet the house’s appetite.
Nadine had ruined countless lives at the threshold of this door. She wouldn’t let her child be next.
Nadine scooped up the baby and yanked the scissors from her mother’s chest. Blood spurted onto the tile, a growing pool that dripped down the top step.
A macabre grin split Nadine’s mother face as she collapsed. Her tongue flicked over red-stained teeth. “My favorite daughter. So cold, so compassionless.” A laugh gurgled wetly in her chest. “You are an artist of cruelty, Nadine. Your child will be the worst of us. Worse than Bamba herself.”
As much as Nadine wanted to bolt down the stairs, heedful of herdangerous proximity to the door, she couldn’t help herself. “I’ll raise her to be kind. Gentle, like her father. She won’t be anything like us.”
Twin rivers of blood streamed from her mother’s nose. “Oh, you foolish girl. A beast cannot raise a butterfly.”
Safa rushed to their mother. Nadine pointed the scissors at Safa, and her sister glared at Nadine with unmitigated hatred. A shiver of unease traveled down Nadine’s spine. Safa was savage. Shallow and eagerly violent. Nadine had done her a grievous wrong tonight, and it would not be forgiven.
She and Safa would find one another again. Their story would not die here today.
“You and me,” Safa whispered. “We will end in blood.”
Nadine gripped her whimpering child against her chest. A hollow smile sprang to her lips. “A Haikal can only end in blood.”
Her feet trailing red tracks on the steps, Nadine left a dead woman in front of the third-floor door.
If she had known what would happen to her daughter in seventeen years’ time, Nadine would have turned around. She would have gone back upstairs and shoved the scissors into Safa’s neck, over and over until the blades snapped against bone.
But Nadine didn’t remember the girl in the slippers. Not for nine long years.
“How do you know it wasn’t a dream?” Jesse asks, drawing his boot up onto the seat. He balances on the back of the bench, his boots landing next to my thighs. The morning breeze batters us, coiling around my puffy pink sweater and seeping through the seams. Brown leaves shake loose from the trees whispering above.
“I could feel it. It was like I was in the house with them.” I draw my sleeves over my knuckles. My cheeks redden from the cold, and it isn’t lost on me how completely out of place I must seem next to the harshly gorgeous, leather-clad Jesse. Neither of us bothered to attend class today (“Maybe miraclesarereal,” Jesse said when I announced I was ditching, proceeding to dramatically fall to his knees in the middle of the sidewalk), but Rainie had threatened to show up at my house if I didn’t show proof of life. Meeting them for lunch in the school quad was our diplomatic middle ground.
There was no question of whether or not Jesse would join me. The incident in the mortuary had clearly spooked him more than he was letting on, because he hadn’t left my side since this morning.
Teta—Nadine’s mother—was wrong, I think bitterly. Mama raised a butterfly after all. Iridescent and empty-headed, fluttering desperately after others. I foolishly landed on Jesse’s shoulder, and he’s borne the weight of my problems ever since.
“So you’re saying your mother killed your grandmother at the same door that opened during your visit? And you still don’t remember what you saw behind the door?”
“You think I wouldn’t tell you if I remembered what was behind the door?” I snap. The bandage on my head shifts, and I smooth the sticky edges back down. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jesse’s knee knocks into my shoulder, and I glance back to find him frowning. “You know this isn’t forever.”
I almost laugh. In what world would anyone think Jesse Talbot would be the one encouragingmeto be more positive?
Nadine Haikal was a completely different person than Nadine Mansour. When my mother left my grandmother to die in front of that accursed door, she’d left her old self behind, too. Two dead women, but only one kept going to start a new life here in Ward.
“I was born the same night my grandmother died.” I’ll never forget the seething hatred in Khalto Safa’s eyes as she stared at my mother. But she didn’t stand a chance against Mama, not then. Not until Nadine Mansour flew to Masr nine years later.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” I ask. Toneless. “My mom didn’t die in a car accident in Tanta. Someone hurt her.”
A Haikal can only end in blood.
