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“Will you be able to support him?” he asks, his voice tight with worry.
“I’m about to find out.” Noah wraps his legs around the pole and pushes off from the edge.
He grunts as he takes Gabriel’s full weight, but he doesn’t lose his grip. I hold my breath as Noah spins, knocking Gabriel’s knee against the rim as the pair of them disappear into the darkness below.
The temperature in the room rises ten degrees as Eli glares at me from across the fireman’s pole. He’s changed clothes since the dance, and he looks devastating in a deep blue shirt that matches the exact shade of his eyes. Those twin oceans fix on me, swallowing me into their depths.
“Gabriel…” Eli trails off.
“He needs me. I have to go.” I grip the pole between my thighs, wrapping my hands around it and pushing off from the edge. As I spin toward him, Eli leans over and briefly captures my lips on his.
The kiss is a feather brushing against me. It’s almost possible to believe it didn’t happen. But my lips will never forget the taste of Eli Hart. I stole his kiss on the dance floor and he’s returning the favor – only this feels even more illicit, more soaked in shadow and secrets.
You’re nothing like her.
His harsh words sing in the air as I slide away from him. His body disappears from view as the ground swallows me, until he’s a memory, a dream. Until all I can see in the darkness is a pair of ocean swept eyes.
“Thank you,” I whisper. My whole body trembles as I fight to grip the pole. My body wants to float away. What just happened? Eli Hart made it clear that I was dead to him, so why does the ghost of his kiss linger on my lips?
Noah
We drag Gabriel down the road to where Antony waits with the car. He flings the doors open, and Claudia and I roll him into the backseat. “What the fuck happened to him?”
“It’s no big deal.” Claudia meets my eyes, and I’m not sure if she’s just tired or if something else is going on, but I get the message she doesn’t want Antony to know the details of tonight’s party. “He just had a little too much fun.”
“Why does he reek of honey? No, don’t answer that. I don’t care. If he throws up in my car, you’re clearing it up.” Antony drives us back to Gabriel’s house. I sit with Gabriel on the backseat, holding his sticky, mead-soaked body so he doesn’t smash his head into the door every time Antony flies around a corner. My eyes lock on Antony’s hands as they grip the wheel. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve seen those hands soaked in blood.
I wonder if Claudia knows what goes on at Antony’s club.
I guess she does – she’s the queen, after all. She says she’s doing all this to give him a second chance, so he can give up the family life and go back to law school. But I’ve seen Antony throw men into a ring to be torn apart by wild, rabid dogs. How do you go back from that?
Exactly. I swallow. You can’t go back.
I watched a man dissolved in his own bathtub, his body reduced to brown sludge. The smell of it will be a fixture of my nightmares for the rest of my life. I’m supposed to be heading to Harvard next year, and I watched my girlfriend hold a gun to my father’s head.
I can’t go back.
Antony’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. A shiver rolls down my spine. Does he recognize me?
Does he know I’ve been flirting with the edges of his world for a long time?
Antony parks the car outside Gabriel’s place, and Claudia helps me drag him out of the car. He’s still unconscious but breathing normally, which I take as a good sign. I prop Gabriel against the wall and press his thumb against the keypad to open the door. The pair of us stumble inside and throw Gabriel down on the sofa.
“I’m leaving,” Antony yells after us. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Claudia leans out the door and throws him the middle finger, but she’s grinning. I feel this twinge at the bottom of my spine. The way they are together reminds me of me and Felix, but then I remember that she’s Julian August’s daughter and Antony is one of the most dangerous men in the city, and the ache of his loss becomes this weird, creeping monster inside me that I don’t understand.
The door slams shut, muffling the roll of the ocean and the gentle trickle of Gabriel’s fountain.
Once again, I’m alone with Claudia August.
Not Mackenzie Malloy.
The giddy truth of it still lights my veins on fire. All this time I’ve been fighting the way I feel about her, battling the monster inside myself until it made me crazy. But this girl isn’t Mackenzie, and that means I can embrace the monster. I can set him free, because I’m in love with the biggest, baddest monster of them all.
But she’s still a mystery to me, especially after what she told me tonight. I have to untangle the parts of her that are Claudia from the memories and the pretending.
I remember…
