I let out a snort, and his eyes bulge. “I’ll carve my name into the Echelon Order myself, damn it.”
If there’s any DuPont who should be in the seat, it’s me. But … access through my grandfatherwouldbe a step closer. Though the Severing—I’m not sure I have the mental fortitude tobreak what the guard demands, or who they demand. Does my grandfather? Who would they choose as his Offering?
My thoughts flash to Thea, her in the kitchen at the island with Stefan—because I, unlike Bishop,dohave cameras there. He’d made her breakfast. An omelet, from the looks of it behind my precision capture security. Unfortunately, it had to be one with long molten cheese that strung gooey and dripping as it clung to her fork, then to her lips. She rubbed them together, as if it were the best thing she’d tasted all week, and I walked into the elevator doors as they were closing.
It shouldn’t get to me. It’s breakfast. But something about watching her on my phone during my commute to work, about the way she eats inmykitchen, legs bare and knotted at the knees—it burns. What’s worse: the worn shirt hanging off her too-thin frame. One of mine.
The comic panel printed across the front, half-cracked, was a favorite of mine, and I forgot I even had it. I used to wear it to school all the time in the sixth grade when apparently it was no longer “cool.” “Comic Boy,” they’d call me. I went home and stuffed it in the bottom of my drawer, only to bring it out on the nights I locked myself in my room to block out my grandfather’s world. Of course, Edmond pulled it out and gave it to her.
My grandfather drones on about how he’s ready for the scripted rite, but my focus has vanished. I reach for my phone and pull it out to scroll for the screenshot I took of her. It was supposed to be nothing, just a quick tap of the screen, a still frame of the feed to … prove the feed was running? Yeah. But the image that landed … The pad of her thumb had just slid across her bottom lip, smearing a bit of the cheese she didn’t realize was there, as if she didn’t know she’d just branded herself into my memory with that one damn motion. The screenshot froze there: her eyes down, lips caught in a half-smooshed pucker. Unintentionally devastating.
I shouldn’t have kept it. But here it is, and I can’t bring myself to delete it.
I shouldn’t be imagining what it’d take to make her look at me like that—expression half lidded, mouth parted, but … there’s something about her. Unrefined and wild, yet delicate all the same.
My grandfather always called them divine. Elegant. Polished. Desired by men like them. He wanted the women weighed down by crystals and jewels or luxury fabric on display.
But I—in the quiet recesses of my mind—didn’t want sculpted or sexy.
Real, I’d thought. Beautiful in a messy, barefoot, tangled hair, cheese-stuck-to-her-chin way.
The image wrecks me, and I swipe away thinking about how she’ll be a picture of desire for my grandfather this Friday. Trying to dance for her life. Sickening.
My grip tightens, fingers digging into the screen of the phone, pressing hard enough liquid-like ripples bloom beneath the glass. Part of me wishes it would break, so the temptation to look at her, knowing how she looks in my house, my room, wouldn’t be there.
But it doesn’t.
It only warps underneath my thumb, reflecting my own aching expression back at me in the dark glass.
“—need your support with Graves. Slade? Damn it! Are you listening to me?”
I blink, turn over my phone, and lift my head. Huh?
“With Graves, Slade. Kenji listens to you. Hell if we know where Vaughan is, but I need your support, and I need you to garner it from them.”
Yeah, as if I haven’t already handed over every damn piece of myself he asked for. As if I didn’t walk straight into his oldcongressional seat with my hands tied behind my back and his personal agenda pinned between my shoulder blades.
I’ve given him my aspirations to a make true change in my city. My silence. My face for the cameras. I’ve sold my soul, marred my body, voted the way he told me to, and now he wants more. It’s never enough, and it never will be. I’m stuck carrying the torch forhisdebased legacy, not mine. All the while he watches in waiting, dictating it all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEA
Screams shred through my poor sleep, and I shoot upright, inhaling thick air. I choke, my lungs seizing in … wrongness. It’s almost sweet, but the chemicals sear the back of my throat and burn my eyes. I can’t?—
I can’t breathe.
Another scream echoes through the dark room, and I scramble to get off the bed, away from the unbearable squeeze on my chest. My legs tangle in the sheets, twisted and wrapped around them, and I tumble to the floor with the fabric still hung around my ankles. Panic surges in my chest as an eeriethump,thump,thump, thumpsounds around me. Next to me, Beth stands clutching her neck, eyes wide, and when she topples over, she lands with athump.
Bodies.
The girls are dropping like dominoes.
The thought yanks the rest of the sleep from me like a dunk in cold water.
A sickening, dull red glow pulses from somewhere near the ceiling, and I swear a faint voice, perhaps outside the room, rhythmically repeats something. Words I can’t make out. What is happening?
I can’t breathe. Coughing, I stumble forward, tripping over the foot of my bed and using all my strength to pull myself up along the iron frame. Smoke—gas, I don’t know—rolls in, coiling along the floor. I blink hard. I can’t see. Blurry shadows dart across my field of vision, flailing in contrary directions. They’re followed by more shouted pleas andthump,thump,thumps to the floor.
