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“What do you think, Clara?” he asks, his voice low with warning. “A good trick?”
Despite how hard I’ve been trying to keep still, there’s a tremble starting in my core that I can’t suppress. It travels outward, overtaking each one of my limbs, until I’m sure I’ll shake apart. I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I can’t even breathe.
I’ve watched my uncle intimidate and torture men in every way imaginable to get what he wants. But he’s not a clever man. He can’t trick people into betraying themselves, so he bullies them instead.
Thomas, though. Thomas tried to seduce me into a confession last night. He gave a terrified man a tool to hurt him with, except the tool was a bluff. I can’t fathom the cold calculation it takes to interact with people this way, and I never want to.
I want to be far, far away from here.
Thomas waits, the bait gun still held out to me. He wants me to take it with my eyes open, to understand that, like Russo, I am entirely at the mercy of his schemes in this scenario. I don’t care how true that is. I’m not touching a gun, loaded or not. Finally, he accepts this and replaces it in a second holster, a hard little smile on his face.
“Tell me the truth now,” he says, placing a hand beside my plate and looming over me. I expect him to tell me again to confess to arson, but he doesn’t. “Tell me,” he says instead, not a question but an order, “when you believed it was loaded, that you thought about grabbing the gun yourself.”
CHAPTER 8
Thomas
Clara’s glassy eyes widen with horror. True, bottomless horror. Her trembling lips press together. Her body presses back into her chair, but she can’t go through it, and she can’t go through me.
She’s as scared as Russo was a moment ago. Maybe more, because she had a front-row seat to what happens when people lie to me. Now is the time for her to make a confession and pick a side. My side.
A tear falls from the corner of Clara’s eyes and runs, quicksilver down her cheek. Unlike Russo’s blubbering, it’s completely silent.
I’m not prepared for the guilt I feel at the sight of it.
“No,” Clara whispers, so soft I almost don’t hear her. Another tear slips down her face. “I didn’t.”
For the first time, I think I believe her.
I don’t realize I’m lifting a hand to Clara’s face until she flinches away from me. Slowly, I pull away.
We drove in tense silence to the restaurant, but on the drive back to the estate, the quiet between us is a living thing. Clara’s tears are gone now, but I saw them.
I can’t stop seeing them every time I blink.
We don’t exchange words of parting at her door. When I open it for her, she slips inside like an obedient prisoner. I’m about to close it again, but something catches the corner of my eye, and I freeze.
There’s a bouquet of roses drawn in red lipstick on her window, facing my room. I don’t know how I missed it this morning when I barged in on her in the tub. Maybe because I was too caught up in making sure she wasn’t in the middle of escaping, and I’ve been out of my own room all day. Was she trying to send me a message? To say she was willing to cooperate with me? Or is it a desperate plea to be released?
I remember something then that I haven’t thought about for ten years. Before Clara can turn to see me still lingering in her doorway, I step outside and quickly close the door. In this moment, turning the lock doesn’t feel like trapping her inside. It feels like trapping me out here, where whatever is showing on my face can’t be seen.
In my own room, I have a better appreciation for the size of the bouquet. She must’ve stretched up onto her tiptoes to reach the highest rose petals. If she wanted to get my attention, she could have just written something. A simple Hey you, or We need to talk would have summoned me if I’d seen it. But no, she used lipstick to paint roses on her window, because once upon a time, she’d loved art.
Clara was always carrying a sketchbook with her, and it seemed like every time I caught sight of her out my window, she had a new one. She’d sit in the garden for hours, drawing the flowers around her, or sketching the patio furniture, or bringing to life things from her own head. I’d wondered then what it must be like, to create instead of kill, before I made peace with my place in the world, and what was expected of me.
I can’t believe I forgot about it until now. Except, I can. I don’t like thinking about when I was a boy, and everything about the time before the schism in the Warwick family tends to stay buried until I absolutely need to think about it. My world mostly consisted of the walls of my old room, and the words of my father and the tutors he hired for me. He seemed to think that he could grow the perfect heir in a jar. I didn’t learn about people by talking to them, but by reading about them. They were puzzles to solve, and the superfluous ones could be discarded. My mother was a stranger who died without much fanfare or grief. Raleigh was a mysterious other family member who I would someday be responsible for, but who I rarely saw outside of family meals and events.
And Clara… Clara was her constant companion.
Now that I remember, I understand why a girl like Clara would grow up into a woman who still cries at intimidation tactics, despite being raised by men who use them every day. There’s something unbroken inside her, a light that hasn’t been doused. I can see it in the flowers painted on her window.
Her words from last night ring in my head. I don’t want to live like him.
I scrub my hands over my face and look away from the window. Thankfully, Iris chooses that moment to text me.
Iris: just got back. should I give her the goods or you?
I text her back, telling her to come to my room instead, and thirty seconds later she’s hitting the buzzer on the door for me to let her in. She breezes in with a dozen bags hanging from her arms, and I let her dump them on my bed with a little bemusement.
