So. She knows. They must all know.
Sam stays silent, quivering.
Diamond sighs. “Why would you work with the police, Mozart? Do you think they are on your side? What were you hoping to accomplish?” Her voice dips, bitter with disapproval. “Was this about your mother?”
Her mother. The words on Diamond’s lips are enough to make Sam turn her eyes up at the woman, hate burning hot in her heart. Her mother. How dare she mention her mother.
Diamond sees the anger in her gaze and tightens her lips. “Of course it was,” she says. “Did they reach out to you first?”
“You—killed her,” Sam whispers.
“I asked you a question.”
Will bends down, and a moment later Sam feels his familiar hand on her neck, then screams, trembling, as pain explodes up and down her body again, fire and venom and teeth, her skin feeling as if it’s being peeled from her flesh.
It wanes again, and Sam shakes against the pavement. She grits her teeth. “You—killed her,” she repeats hoarsely. “Why did you kill her?”
Diamond looks away, then back to her. “You don’t know,” she finally says. “Your mother had booked passage on a ship meant to take you both to Shanghai. We believe that the meeting she had meant for you both was, in actuality, a plan to put you on that ship the same night. We’d watched the deteriorating relationship between you and your mother for quite some time, and we had opted to stay out of it, but, as you can imagine, her latest move was unacceptable to us.”
Sam recoils against the street, shriveling into her pain. All this time, they had been paying close attention to her and her mother’s fraying threads. Was her mother always doomed to die, then? How long have they been considering removing her from the picture? Were they just waiting for an opportune time?
Diamond’s gaze is steady and cool. “It was not done without regrets. Our apologies.”
The woman gives her a near-imperceptible nod, and Sam feels an overwhelming desire to kill her. She tries to ignore the agony in her damaged wrist and moves her other hand instead. A gun starts to form in her palm out of the sidewalk, the pavement cracking and crumbling.
Sebastian steps on her good wrist, then bends down and transmutes the skin of her hand into the pavement. Sam lets out a hoarse shriek. He walks behind her to her ankles, then does the same to them, pinning them down by melting her skin into the ground.
She has been bolted down. She can barely see. Her body trembles uncontrollably.
Diamond stares at her. Sam wants to push away from the intensity of it, but her body feels paralyzed. There is a ringing in her ears. She struggles to hear.
“You killed my mother,” she whispers again. It’s all she can say.
Diamond shakes her head at her in disapproval, and to Sam’s disgust, she feels shame bloom in her heart. “What did you think was going to happen, Sam? How did you think it would all end? You think speaking to the police will somehow help you feel better about what happened to your mother? You think they can do anything to Will?”
Through her haze of pain, Sam realizes something. Diamond knows that Sam has been speaking to someone at the station about her mother’s death, that Sam got the footage of Will committing the murder. But based on what Diamond is saying, the woman doesn’t seem to know that Sam gaveEdward details about the rest of Grand Central’s dealings. That Sam is aiming for Diamond’s arrest. She doesn’t even sound like she knows Edward is the one responsible.
Then Sebastian’s boot slams into her stomach. Her insides clench in agony. All the air rushes from her lungs. Another kick comes. A rib snaps. Another kick. Another rib. Then she stops counting the blows. Sam can’t see anything anymore—her body breaks out in a sweat from the pain. She can feel it dripping down her brow through the assault. The tang of blood fills her mouth.
He finally pauses, and she lies prostrate on the ground, broken and shaking.
Diamond tilts her head and leans closer to her. “Who taught you the art of this trade, Mozart? Educated you, paid you, lifted you out of your poverty? Isn’t that why your mother brought you here? Isn’t that what you’ve been searching for, all your life?” Her voice steels. “Do you remember asking for the world? To become great? To make it? Who handed that to you, for free? What would you have become, without me?”
Sam closes her eyes. In the darkness, she sees herself kneeling as a child before this woman and asking for all of those things. Idolizing her, craving her approval. Hungering for Will, dazzled by his power, wanting to be wanted. To be great. To succeed. To be seen. She sees herself bowing to Diamond, and Diamond lifting her chin up, offering her a smile that made her feel so special. Even then, she’d wondered why she was chosen.
Who handed that to you, for free? What would you have become, without me?
“It wasn’t free.”
The words tear out of her throat in a hoarse cry. Blood seeps out from between her teeth. Sam feels her bracelet still looped around her wrist, the diamond-encrusted rabbit dangling there like a chain. It wasn’t free because something cannot come from nothing. Everything has an equal and opposite cost. The equation must always be balanced. Greatness, in exchange for a soul.
Diamond considers her answer. Purses her lips. Something in her eyes dies then. Perhaps Sam never noticed it there until it was gone. Without that particular glint, Diamond suddenly looks less to her like the figure that makes her tremble, the figure that protected her and listened to her when she grieved. Without it, Sam can see the woman’s hollow cheeks and the dying light in her eyes, the cancer slowly eating her from within that will take her someday soon, in spite of all her success and greatness and power.
Diamond bows her head. When she lifts her eyes, they are dry. She rises to her feet. Her expression stays flat, void of that old light, and she regards Sam like an investment that has failed.
“Finish up here,” Diamond says to Will, then gets back into the car with Sebastian.
Will stays on the street, standing beside Sam’s damaged body. As the car pulls away, he bends down to her. His hand comes to rest against where her broken ribs rattle. She can barely breathe now. There is too much pain. She knows she is dying.
