Brooke

I smile wide for the cameras from the Franklin City Herald-Star. The shots that get into the newspaper tomorrow will show a lucky girl surrounded by her friends and her adoring parents, daughter of one of the most powerful families in all of Franklin City, at her sweet-sixteen ball. If you’re looking at them online, you might enlarge them and see the pale pink embroidered roses around the sleeves and bodice of the white cocktail-length Givenchy gown I’m wearing.

What you won’t see is the blood in the water.

My dad always says you can’t let them smell blood. If the world is sharks, this whole party is about swimming past them, around them. Fooling them into believing you’re okay.

The pictures will never show that I’ve eaten two strawberries today because otherwise I won’t fit into the gown my mom bought from a consignment store. It’s a size too small, but it was cheap and this season. I told her it wasn’t a problem. I’d make it fit. People have to think it’s new.

Last year’s gown is blood in the water.

The cameras will never pick up that the smile on my father’s face is pure desperation. People see our family name—Carson—on cranes all over the city. Why would he be anything but happy?

They can never know that the great Carson Development empire is crumbling, little by little, and that this party is a lifeline. Or that I’ve hardly gotten any sleep over the past few nights because I keep having nightmares where I forgot to confirm the flowers or update the RSVP count for the caterers or get the DJ deposit in, and the party is deemed a disaster.

My mom couldn’t do much of the planning—she’s been working double shifts at a bakery in the next town to pay for this. Nobody can know that.

Nobody can know that this party is an elaborate charade.

Every member of Franklin City’s upper-crust elite throws their daughter a sweet-sixteen party. It’s our version of the debutante ball. Not to do it means you’re not one of the group. People do business with their kind.

Tomorrow morning, as people click to the Herald-Star on their phones or tablets and sip their coffee and flip through the pictures, they’ll see my mother smiling proudly, her slender arm draped around my shoulders.

What they won’t see is the tiny, burning little spot on the back of my arm where she pinched me to remind me of my posture. They won’t see how ashamed I felt that I’d forgotten again. Because I’m so tired. Because I’m trying so hard.

The cameras won’t pick up that she just whispered, through her bared teeth, Try to look like you care at least a little, Brooke.

They won’t get that her words are a punch in my chest, because I know I’m not what she needs. I know that I’m letting my parents down in a million little ways.

But I’m trying; I really am. They can’t see how I feel like curling up in a corner and dying. Because I love them, and I know they love me even though I’m not the popular size-two daughter with perfect skin and manners that they need right now.

So yeah.

Nobody can ever know that my glorious smile is actually cracking me in half. I know how to smile like nothing’s wrong. It’s a great talent of mine.

I am one of the lucky ones in Franklin City—I know that. A lot of people south of downtown went to bed hungry tonight, and I’m surrounded by mounds of foie gras and lobster, most of which will be thrown out. Not only do I feel guilty about my sweet-sixteen party, but I feel guilty for feeling guilty.

I suck in a breath through gritted teeth, still smiling for all I’m worth.

Halfway there.

My vision is almost blurring, but I smile and say hello to one of the investors my dad is courting for this big outdoor mall deal he’s putting together. I try to remember the details. He’s been to our house. We let him use our vacation home before we secretly sold it.

The investor asks me about my schoolwork, and we’re having a good conversation—at least I think we are until I look over and see my mother’s ashen face, her mouth a tight line under her powdered nose.

My heart starts pounding like crazy because I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and I’m so hungry and exhausted that I’m suddenly fumbling my words and saying uh and um, and we’ve practiced how many hours on that? He wishes me luck with exams and leaves.

Mom grips my arm tight enough to make the skin white. I hold my breath, wondering where I screwed up. Afraid to know but needing to. “You called him Mr. Kimball,” she hisses.

“But that’s…” I’m about to say that’s his name when I realize it isn’t—Mr. Kimball is one of his rivals. They drilled me on everybody’s names right before the party, but I’m not thinking straight. My throat feels thick. “He didn’t—”

“Correct you?” Her gaze shoots after him. He’s too polite. She doesn’t have to say it.

“Should I—”

“No!” she says. Meaning, don’t go after him, don’t apologize. Meaning, the damage is done.

She wouldn’t say it, though. Not here and not like that. Somehow that makes it worse.

Why are the things parents don’t say the most painful?

Right then the Shaffer twins come up. They’re beautiful and good at everything. They were my friends in tennis camp, but teens smell blood in the water way faster than adults. Enthusiastic greetings turn to frozen smiles and awkward excuses to leave.

Leaving before the dinner—not a good sign.

Slowly but surely, I'm ruining this. There’s so much more at stake here than a party. There’s my dad’s company. My mother’s social standing. I can feel her eyes on me as I smile and thank them for coming.

It’s then that it happens—this feeling like my chest is expanding, filling with stuffed-down sobs that won’t be contained any longer. My eyes are hot, and I’m sure my face is red as a cherry. I mumble something about going to the bathroom.

Mom squeezes my shoulder. “Take your time, honey,” she whispers.

And I know she says this partly because she needs me to calm down and stop ruining things, and partly because she loves me and, really, this is hard on all of us, which gives the sobs even more power. They feel like fists, pounding up from inside my chest and throat. So I’m walking through my party crying, but lucky for me, I know how to smile so brightly that it makes people not notice the shine of my eyes.

I see a trio of neighbors from Mom’s bridge club heading into the bathroom. No going there, then. I pass it by and push through the next door, a swinging door, which leads to the food-staging area.

Some of the caterers look at me funny. I manage a wave. “Looking good out there. Maybe another round of canapés on the far side.” I keep walking, a wild girl in a gorgeous, secondhand dress, cheeks burning, chest feeling like it might explode with undetonated sobs.

I push through another swinging door, heading into the kitchen. Stainless steel counters display the delicious food I can’t eat. Curious pairs of eyes monitor my progress. I keep going, heading for a red exit sign.

I burst out the door. I shut it behind me.

A sob escapes, and then another and another. I stand there, full-on sobbing.

I sound pathetic.

I’m a Givenchy-wrapped crazy person in the lonely service parking lot of the Franklin City Starlight Ballroom.

Even now, even crying, I’m thinking about appearances. About family and duty. I cry strategically, avoiding mascara stains on the dress. I stay standing, because if I sit, I might pop a seam. This isn’t my dress. This doesn’t even feel like my party. Appearances.

A moth flies into my updo, and I bat it out. Then another flies in. Suddenly I’m doing this whole ridiculous sobbing dance. It’s the light above the door, attracting bugs. “Shit!” I stumble, sobbing, slapping my hair, into the shadows between catering vans.

No more strategy, no more duty.

My hair is utterly ruined and maybe even has dead moths in it. At least it matches my mascara-smeared eyes. I have to laugh-sob at that. I’m a mess.

It actually makes me feel a little better. So stupid.

I have to get back. Fix my face. Retwist my hair into a simple bun. Just one more minute, I tell myself.

It’s bad that I’m gone, but it would be even worse to go back like this. I open the bejeweled clutch that hangs from my wrist and check my phone through bleary eyes. Twenty minutes until seating for dinner.

I start to pull myself together, and that’s when I hear the footsteps. They’re loud—somebody running from far off, way down the alley, maybe, running toward where I’m standing. My pulse pounds.

I’m not even supposed to be back here.

I swipe at my cheeks, determined to stay silent as a mouse until they pass.

Another set of footsteps sounds out. The first is drawing nearer.

Being chased? I pull deeper into the shadows to the sound of gravel churning, crunching. They’re close now—just a few feet away, behind the van.

Close enough that I hear loud breathing. A grunt of surprise. I stiffen. Suddenly there are loud thwaps and thwocks and guttural groans of pain. Hair rises on the back of my neck.

I’ve never heard these kinds of sounds before, but the animal instinct in me recognizes them as deep and real and serious. Life-and-death serious. There was figurative blood in the water inside that party, but out here, the blood is real.

More thwaps. I’m holding my breath, shocked and horrified. Can this be happening? Someone is being hurt, really hurt. This isn’t about canapés. It’s not about appearances.

A man—the attacker, I think—is gritting out questions. Something about a cop— “You fucking tell me…gimme a name…” Something else—foreman or Dorman. “…working for Dorman…frame my friend…gonna pay…”

The man is crying and begging. “I don’t know…don’t know…please.”

A crunch of gravel. The voices get more distinct: “That’s right, you beg me. You beg me for your fucking life.”

Oh God. I have to do something. I have to.

I clutch my bag, creeping to the van window, and I catch sight of them—it’s one guy hitting the other one. Beating him. The one being hit is older—gray hair. He looks faintly familiar. Was he at the party? Or in the kitchen? Is he being robbed?

Maybe I should help. I could go out there. I could…

Then I see the attacker’s face, wild with fury.

I freeze.

He’s a savage god with green eyes and a shaggy black crown. He’s so far gone in anger, he seems more animal than human. He kneels on top of the older man, smashing his face over and over.

With shaking hands, I punch in my phone unlock code. I need to call somebody. I need to save this man. Except I keep getting the code wrong, and the hitting goes on, and I know deep down that he’s dying, that he doesn’t have the twenty or ten or even five minutes it would take for help to arrive.

It’s him or me. It’s stand here and let a man die, or do something—for once in my life, do something that’s not wearing a dress and smiling and getting it all wrong.

So I run out there. I watch myself do it, like a movie almost. “Stop it,” I yell.

The attacker just keeps on, a dark storm, all fists and fury. My presence means nothing to him. My words don’t touch him. It’s as if I’m yelling at thunder.

My heart beats out of my chest. I’ve risked everything, come out in the open, but it’s not enough. I stamp my foot to get his attention, crushing gravel beneath my mother’s Louboutins.

“The cops are coming,” I say.

The man stills and looks up. It’s a shock when it happens, even though I’ve been trying to get him to see me. His eyes seem to blaze into my chest, hot and bright.

Breathless, I back away.

He stands, leaving the man in a groaning, whimpering heap.

I retreat slowly, showing him my phone, as though that might protect me. “Cops are coming,” I say again. A lie. I couldn’t punch in the code.

He’s coming at me, expression unreadable. He’s a few years older than I am—late twenties, maybe.

My back hits something hard. The van.

He keeps coming. I try to spin and run, but he grabs my arm and slams me back into the van. “Where do you think you’re going, little girl?”

I stare up at him, panting.

His warm breath is a feather on my nose; the heat in his eyes invades me. He grabs my hair and tilts my head back, forcing me to stare into his face, as if he’s trying to read my eyes.

A moment later, he looks up at the night sky. He seems almost wolfish, and I’m conscious, suddenly, of my bare neck so close to his snarling mouth. I wonder if he’s staring at the moon. It’s like he’s going to howl or something.

Then I get it. He’s listening for sirens.

“You’re a little fucking liar.”

“No,” I whisper.

He studies my eyes. Can he tell? I don't think so. At least he’s not so sure. “Fuck,” he says. He loops an arm around my neck, and he’s fumbling in his pocket. I gasp when he pulls out something shiny—a knife or piece of metal or something. He jams it against the passenger-side window of the van, down into the door part, jamming and thrusting; then he pulls it up and jerks open the door. The alarm blares into the night.

“Get in there.”

He doesn’t wait for me to move; he shoves me in and shuts the door. Then he goes around and pulls open the hood.

Should I try to run? Could I, in these heels?

The alarm stills. He slams the hood, grabs the half-dead guy, and drags him over behind the van. I hear the door open, feel the thump as he throws the man in.

My throat is tight. Why did I try to help? Why did I leave my party? I put my hand on the door handle.

“Don’t do it if you want to live,” he growls, getting into the driver’s seat. There’s no way he can see my hand. It’s like he knows. “You want to live, you do not move.” He rips something out of the steering column. He works calmly, like a machine. Alarms and witnesses and murders, he doesn’t care. And I can’t help but be amazed, because I was out here crying because I called somebody the wrong name. This guy, he’s cold as ice.

The van starts up. He peels out backward. He rams it into drive, and we’re off.

“Show me your phone.”

I hold it up. My hand is trembling. This feels surreal. Maybe it’s a dream.

He grabs my wrist—hard. No dream. “Fire it up.”

“Ow,” I say.

He lets me go. I hit the button, and the thing lights up. There’s red around my wrist. It’s the other man’s blood.

“You can’t just kill him,” I say, voice shaking.

My iPhone lights his face from below, illuminating the curves of his thick lips. I can see the quiver of the nostrils that form the base of his chunky nose, the thick lashes that line his huge green eyes. He looks like the devil—the devil as a primitive young thug, seething with hate.

And then he smiles. His smile is like nothing I’ve ever seen. As if he has so much hate and anger in him that it flipped over to a kind of evil beauty.

Again he speaks. “Fire. It. Up.”

Again I try to punch in my code. We’re stopped at a light, and he’s watching. I get it this time.

“Recents,” he growls. “And if you even touch that door, I’ll snap your little neck.”

I stare down at my phone. He’ll know I’m lying if I show him. He’ll kill me if I don’t. I hit recents and turn the screen to him. He grabs it and looks at the call history, showing no 911 calls, then up at me, his devil face red in the light. “Thought so.” He shoves it in his pocket. The light turns green, and he speeds off.

I glance back at the unmoving shadow in the back of the van. “You can’t just kill that guy.”

“He’s already dead,” he says.

“I can hear him breathing. Drop him at a hospital. You’ve proved your point.”

He turns to me. His wild fury has mass. Weight. It forces the breath from my lungs. “You think I’ve proved my point?”

There’s this buzzing in my ears. Everything feels unreal, or maybe it’s all too real. I try to say something, but my mouth is dry.

He doesn’t even have tattoos like regular bad guys. He has some sort of design etched into his right forearm—crude scars that seem to form an X. When I dare to look a little more closely, I see that it’s crossed weapons of some kind.

His voice is a rumble, as if it’s surging up from an underworld of pure hate. “I could shove a meat hook in his belly and hoist him up and rip his teeth out one by one with pliers, and then cut off his balls and make him chew them with his toothless bloody mouth, and that wouldn’t even begin to prove my point. Got it?”

I just gape at him.

“He wants to save himself, he’ll give me a name.”

“Whose name?”

“How about you stop worrying about him and start worrying about yourself?” He turns back to the road and keeps driving, staying exactly at the speed limit.

My heart pounds like mad. The man back there is making a horrible sound. The sound of a man crying out of a crushed face.

“Shut up!” he calls back.

I look out the window. A calm comes over me. “Are you going to kill me, too?”

“So far, you haven’t shown you can follow orders very well, have you?”

“I won’t tell on you,” I blurt out.

He snorts.

We’re heading west, out of the city. The party seems like a million years ago. They’ll be sitting down for dinner now. Wondering where I am. Will they think I left?

The man’s face is in shadows. Streetlamps flash over his face as the van moves along, revealing a nose carved out of granite and a strong jaw. I wouldn’t call him handsome. He’s too rough-hewn for that, like someone forgot to sand over the angles.

“Please—”

“Be quiet.” His soft menace is directed at me this time. I shrink in my seat.

We’re going into a run-down suburb, Westdale or Ferndale or something, a place with a lot of little tiny box homes. It’s a place I never go. We wind through the streets, deeper and deeper.

It’s hard to even look at him. That means acknowledging what’s happening to me. This is real. I may never make it out of this alive. That’s what I think when I turn my head to the side, glance at him from beneath low lashes. Which makes his gray Henley and dark-wash jeans seem way too ordinary. If this were the day I was going to die, wouldn’t he be wearing something more dramatic?

But that’s just wishful thinking from my panicked mind. He can hurt me wearing anything. I’m so deep in danger it’s hard to breathe.

He slows on a far block and turns. The van headlights hit overgrown weeds and the charred remains of a house. The place burned at one time, long ago.

He circles around and goes into the alley behind it. He shoves it into park and does something to the wires that make it shut off. He turns to me. “I’m gonna get out and deal with this guy. If you move out of this seat, I’ll kill you. And if, by some miracle, you manage to get away, I’m going to kill everybody you called on this phone in the last month. Can you guess how? I’ll give you a hint. A meat hook is involved.”

I suck in a breath. He doesn’t bother to wait for my answer. He gets out, yanks open the back door, and drags the man out—I can tell by the thuds. More punching sounds come from behind the van. The groans and garbled pleas sound worse and worse.

I huddle in my seat, listening to a man get beaten to death.

Bile rises up in my throat. I have only a few seconds to decide what to do—throw up in the van or throw up outside. He’s told me not to leave. He’s threatened my life, threatened to snap my neck. But I have an entire lifetime of my mother’s voice in my head. I have sixteen years of decorum forcing me to fumble for the door handle and push my way out.

I make it two feet away before dropping to my hands and knees and throwing up in the weeds behind the place. For all I know, he’ll kill me for this. For all I know, he’d have killed me for doing this in the van. He’s insane.

There’s not much that lands on the ground. A bottle of smartwater and some strawberries don’t leave a lot to vomit, but my stomach still heaves again and again until I’m sore, until I’m choking on bile, wrung dry.

I sit back on my feet, wiping my face, panting, one hand on the rough concrete, head down. The sounds back there have changed. There’s this grunting and a grinding sound, then a crack. It makes me want to throw up all over again.

If he’s going to kill me, I’d rather not see it coming. I guess I hope he does it fast. That’s what they always say in movies.

I hear a thump in the back of the van and then the sound of the door shutting. Footsteps coming toward me.

I force my breathing to slow. He’s behind me. I stay still.

“You’ve never seen shit like this, have you?” he asks, his voice almost conversational.

It makes me shiver, how he can sound so normal after killing a man.

My voice is low. “No.”

“You’ve only seen—what? Parties? Fancy shit?”

There’s judgment in his voice and something else. Curiosity? I can use that. I have to use that, because it’s the only tool I have. I sit back on my knees, brushing my hands against each other to wipe off the gravel. My white and pink dress is stained with blood and dirt. My cell phone is in his pocket. If I want to survive this, I need to persuade him to let me go.

“Parties,” I force myself to say in agreement. Make him see you as a person. “Tonight was my birthday party.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I look up at him. His face is cast in shadows by the moon. Demonic. Unforgiving. I wonder how I look to him, down on the ground in a dirty alley.

“Please just let me go back there,” I whisper. “Nobody has to know.”

He lowers to his haunches and brushes a strand of slick hair from my face. His thumb lingers on my cheek, brushing over my skin. “You’re right,” he says, voice musing. “No one saw me take you. No one even knew I was there. No one has to know.”

“What does that mean?” I whisper.

He stands, sucking in a ragged breath. My heart pounds as his eyes move over me.

I’ve never felt so helpless, so alone. I’m a sacrifice, kneeling at the feet of a beautiful, brutal demon.

He tips his head at the van. “Get in.”