He hits me with the back of his hand, and my hip hits the vanity on my way down. The world goes white at the edges. I taste copper. I taste my own stupidity, twelve years of it. I was so damn stupid for thinkingthis time is the last timeover and over again.
“Get up.”
I look up, watching as his fists clench and unclench at his sides. He's not done with me.
“Get up, you fucking?—”
He drags me up by my hair, and that's when my hand finds it. The rigging spike—the slim steel one I use to reset the lock board between shows, eight inches of tempered carbon. Like the universe sent me a present.
I drive it up into his gut. It cuts through his clothes and skin with disturbing ease.
He makes a surprised sound, not even pain, just shock that I'd ever do something to hurt him in return. When he lets go of my hair, I stumble back, but the spike stays where I put it, the wooden grip jutting out of his shirt at an angle.
“Nova.”
He looks down at it. Looks up at me. There's blood already at the corner of his mouth, a single dark bead of it, and I watch his face do something I have never once seen it do.
Roman is afraid.
“Nova… pull it out?—”
“No.” I'm against the wall, staring at the blood on my hands. His? Mine? I don't know. “No, you're not supposed to. You're not supposed to pull it out, it'll?—”
“Help me.” He goes down to one knee, almost like he's proposing. It's macabre. “Baby.Baby.Help me.”
“I'll get—I'll get someone…” I stammer.
“You'll get the cops is what you'll get.” His voice changes, fear melting into the fury I'm more used to hearing. “You hear me, Nova? You stabbed me. You stabbed me in our home.”
“You were?—”
“I was talking to my wife,” he interrupts. “I'll tell them. I'll tell every one of them. How hysterical you are.”
I'm shaking my head in disbelief. “Roman?—”
“You did it on purpose.” He's panting with one hand braced on the floor, the other curled around the wooden grip. “You planned it. You'll never get away with it. You hear me?Never.They'll arrest you. And I will sit in that courtroom with my scar and I willweep, Nova, I will weep for what you did to me?—”
I'm moving before I decide to move.
There's a duffel bag under the bed. The one I packed three years ago and never unpacked, because some part of me has been getting ready for this night since the first time he split my lip. I take the cash from the coffee tin. My passport from the false bottom of the lockbox he doesn't know I picked open years ago.
“Nova.” He's quieter now, slumped down like he's struggling to stay conscious. “Nova, sweetheart, come here. Come here and we'll figure it out, we'll—I won't tell, I won't, I swear on my mother?—”
I grab a few more things I can’t live without, pull my duster on over the half-undone corset, and step back into my high-heeled boots.
I should say something. Something sassy, something like the cheesy lines I use during my performances. But I'm fucking done with this hell.
I open the door.
“NOVA—”
And I run.
PROLOGUE – SILAS
The laptop screen casts blue light across my knuckles as I pull up the aerial view of 1247 Sycamore Lane. Malachi Voss. The bastard's name sits in my brain like something rotten but I savor it anyway. Twenty years I've been waiting to see this address, to know exactly where the son of a bitch lays his head at night.
“There.” I spin the screen toward the others gathered in the meeting trailer. “Our dear daddy's humble palace.”
