For what end, I do not know.
“Let me go,” she whispers. “What are you doing?” She turns to look up at him, and their lips are a breath away, only apart from his height.
I dig my nails into her wrist as much as I can with leather between us.
She knows how I feel, how I am breaking, in the way she jerks her head away from him to keep distance, but still stares into his eyes. “What are you doing?” she asks again, as if she cannot believe it. Him.
The gun is along her cheekbone.
It feels as if I am already dead.
“Cosmo, what thefuckare you doing?” There she is. Angry. Wrathful.Mine.
Cosmo grins at her. He traces the contour of her face with the barrel of the gun.
I am shaking. Trembling. I find I can barely move as he keeps stepping them both back, and I keep following. Hell. I would follow her there.
He doesn’t stop.
He is walking us deeper into the room, the house, and I remember then, a moment before it is too late.
I remember Isadora questioning Karia about every inch of this house, and she knew enough, with all of our plans—none of which wasthis.But I remember the second before Cosmo glances up at me, and that smug cockiness is gone.
All at once, the floor falls in the space between us.
Karia vanishes.
There one moment, gone the next, a scream tearing free from her lips.
My heart catches.
Cosmo squats down, lifts the trap door back into place, where it clicks.
No one is near us.
No one saw.
Cosmo tilts his head and I hear Karia scream again. It feels as if I will break in half.
“Do you really want her in this?” he asks me quietly, still crouched in a squat. “Because I know you weren’t brave enough to tell her no, but I am.”
I want to kill him.
The gun he had to her head dangles from his fingers.
Mine is tight in my hand.
I want to blow his fucking brains out.
Rage is what makes me shake now.
“And she has a weapon, and they will not go down there. Didn’t you say it yourself? They never did.”
When we went over this house, I told them this was the only trapdoor I was aware of, but I was sure there were others. I told them Stein and Klein were too frightened of betrayal to step foot in the darkness below themselves. And I told all of this first to the breathing dead man in front of me, when we had a truce in the kitchen.
“I won’t have her die for you.” Cosmo doesn’t look away from me, even as he is at my feet. “I won’t have her die for me, either.”
Karia has stopped screaming.
