“Do you like someone, Chanel?”
I lower my phone and glance up at my mother in surprise. “What?”
She doesn’t look back at me. She’s too focused on her reflection as she carefully twists another lock of sleek black hair around the curling iron, the fumes of her heat-protectant spray wafting out through the open bathroom door. “I said, is there a boy you like?”
“Oh my god, Mom. No,” I say quickly. I’m not lying, I shouldn’tneedto lie, but my stomach does a funny little twist as Ares’s name flashes through my mind. “Why would you think that?”
“You’ve been acting a bit... odd this past week,” my mother says, letting the curl fall over her ear, perfectly framing her cheekbones for whatever party or gala is happening later tonight. “You changed your makeup, you keep zoning out, and you’ve been glued to your phone all morning.”
Heat rushes up my skin in a guilty flush, as if I’ve been caught doing something unseemly. “I was only texting a friend,” I say, but I’m fully lying this time. I’d been checking—in futile, embarrassing hope—to see if Ares had messaged me. Ever since he took off from our brief math tutoring session yesterday afternoon, he hasn’t bothered acknowledging my existence again. Not even to like the new, carefully curated series of photos I’d posted on WeChat before breakfast.
“As long as it’s actually just a friend,” my mother says, setting the curling iron down on the counter to fluff out her curls.
I’ve watched her get ready like this so many times—in awe every single time, wishing I could be half as beautiful—that I can predict what her next step is. Before she reaches for her perfume, I hurry over and fetch it from the cabinet for her, hoping to cut the conversation short. “This one smells really nice,” I tell her. “Very floral.”
“Sometimes I think it’s a little toofloral,” she remarks, then continues without missing a beat. “If itisn’tjust a friend, then you need to be very careful not to get attached, Chanel. The worst thing you can do is waste your heart and time and youth on some boy.”
Another funny twist, low in my belly. “I know.”
Don’t get attached.It’s just one of my mom’s many rules for men, rules she’s laid out for me over the years.
You get a man by attracting him, not by being good to him. If you’re good to him, he’ll only take you for granted.
You can praise the things a man does, but you shouldn’t praisehim. Praising the services he offers will encourage himto keep doing nice things for you. Praising himwill only make him cocky.
He has tothinkthat you like him, but you can’t let himknowyou like him. If he’s already confident about how you feel, he’ll see no point in trying to win you over.
The most fundamental rule of them all is simply:Don’t fall in love. Because once you do, you might as well be handing over a knife and turning around, defenseless, exposing all the soft, vulnerable flesh of your body for them to draw blood.
“I really don’t like anyone,” I emphasize, maybe a little too loudly, as if I’m trying to convince myself as much as my mother.
But her warning blares like sirens inside my head all throughout the day as I find myself looking for Ares.
He doesn’t show up until the very last period, where he walks in with a pronounced limp and a cut on his lower lip. He was already injured after the weekend, but these injuries are new.Which is deeply concerning. Not that I’m concerned about his well-being or anything, but it’s concerning because it’s suspicious. There’s still so much about Ares I don’t know—how he’s acquiring these injuries, where he goes after school, what he wants from the vision. And if he’s not going to tell me himself, I have to find out another way.
So after the bell rings, when everyone’s waiting for their driver to pick them up, I stop Ares outside the classroom.
“Hey, Ares, can I borrow your phone for a second?”
He lifts a brow. “Why?”
“I really need to call my driver, but my phone’s dead,” I tell him, holding my phone up to show him the black screenas proof. I actually have a backup phone that’s fully charged in my bag, and two power banks always at the ready for filming content, but he doesn’t need to know that.
Ares hesitates, then shrugs and hands his phone over. “Sure.”
I have to be quick. While I pretend to enter my driver’s phone number, angling the screen so he can’t see it from where he’s standing, I pull up his maps. My eyes flick through his location searches, and my pulse quickens as I land on the most recent one. Club Sixty-Eight Hours.
Finally, a bit of luck. Because if there’s one place where I might actually have an advantage over Ares, it’s my father’s nightclub.
13
Ares
Ares has never been inside a nightclub before.
He’s sure that if he ever volunteered this information, people would treat it with suspicion or even just straight-up disbelief. Helookslike the kind of person who’d frequent this kind of place, proven by the other late-teen to early-twenties guys trickling through the neon-lit doors, into the pounding heart of Club Sixty-Eight Hours.
They’re all dressed the same, with their double piercings and expensive undercuts and the glint of silver jewelry hanging from their necks, their arms around giggling girls in strapless tops and thigh-high boots. He need only hover at the periphery of any group, and he’ll blend right in with them. So it’s easy to follow them inside, made easier by the fact that the bouncers here clearly don’t give a shit. They offer him the most cursory of glances before waving him forward. They haven’t stopped anyone to check for ID, and from the bored, nearly stoned expressions on their faces, he doubts they would, unless someonewere to waltz in wearing a middle school uniform. Maybe not even then—he’s just spotted two women in tight white tops and plaid schoolgirl skirts, and he can’t tell if they’re actually that young or trying to look it, but nobody else appears worried about their legal ages.
