RAZOR
EMILY’S SITTING IN Cyrus’s recliner, and her eyes are puffy. She wipes at a tear, but damn if her chin isn’t lifted in that pissed-off way of hers. Not sure what happened, but it could be on the same radiation fallout level as what’s going on with me and Breanna.
Oz is a wall in front of the screen door with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring at Emily in the same angry way she’s glaring at him. “Emily told Breanna about the Riot.”
Fuck me, this night keeps getting better. “Why?”
“Because she needed to know,” Emily spits out. “The same way I deserved to know.”
Emily’s not from our world. She’s Eli’s daughter, but she was raised far away from here and then was dragged into the middle of our worst nightmare earlier this summer.
There’s a reason why we keep our business to ourselves and Emily has a lot to learn about being a club girl. It isn’t lost on me how much Breanna will have to accept if she sticks with me and what I’m about to do will make it tougher for her to understand why I keep secrets.
“Do you remember what happened when Violet told you things she shouldn’t?” Oz says.
“Are you talking about the things that would have been easier to tell me from the beginning? Yes, I do remember. If Breanna’s life is going to be in jeopardy, it should be up to her whether she wants to be in the line of fire.”
Oz morphs into twelve shades of red and I’m out the door. Emily’s right. Oz knows it, but Emily promised Oz and Eli that if she visited, she’d play by their rules, not her own. Oz and Emily are a blowtorch and gasoline together and odds are they’ll be in the horizontal position within the next fifteen minutes.
I head to my motorcycle, slip Breanna’s folder out of my saddlebag and fly back into the house. Emily and Oz aren’t kissing on the couch, but they are in the kitchen and they aren’t screaming. Instead, he’s hugging her, comforting her, and by the way her shoulders shake, she’s crying. The two of them shared a seriously fucked-up summer. Turns out I’m not the only one still capable of crushing fireflies.
Breanna’s watching the party unfold from the window seat. I close the door behind me and it doesn’t cause her to jump or tear her gaze away from the window. It’s like the world that seemed hurried before spiraled into slow motion.
“There’s a lot of drunk people out there.” Her voice is lifeless.
There are. “Lot of drunk people at Shamrock’s, too.”
“Are the girls you had sex with out there?”
Why doesn’t she just put a nail gun to my head and continually shoot one sharp piece of metal into my skull after another? That’d be less painful. “Probably. They love parties.”
She doesn’t respond and my boots sound too heavy on the floor as I walk toward her.
“When I’m eighteen, will you take me to these parties?” she asks.
I sit beside her and lean my back against the wall. Outside a guy from the Lanesville chapter is enjoying a lap dance near the bonfire. If Breanna’s hung up on that, she ought to love the debauchery going on within the clubhouse. “If you want.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“Then you don’t.”
“But you’ll still go, won’t you?”
“Already told you, if you’re with me, then I’m yours. You either trust me or you don’t. But it’s my goal to remain in the club.”
I extend the bylaws and the folder I stole from her. Doing this could buy me a ticket out of the club, it’s putting Breanna in danger, but... “I trust you.”
Her face crumples as her shoulders roll forward. “This is so different from my life.”
“But it doesn’t make it wrong. The party is what you make of it. Stuff goes on that may not be your thing, but it doesn’t mean you won’t have a great time hanging with Emily or Rebecca. Don’t let your fears create walls or define you.”
Breanna accepts the folder and I’m not sure I like the way she studies me. “Have you tried living up to that advice?”
A punch straight to my heart, and the fucked-up thing? I don’t know why her words hurt. “This place doesn’t scare me.”
“I’m not sure about that. I think your demons haunt you wherever you go.”
My mother’s ghost haunts me like a second layer of skin. I strive for numb within the chaos of my emotions, but the emotions win every time. Breanna’s right, it doesn’t matter where I’m at—home, the clubhouse, Olivia’s, even my bike—my mother’s death claws at me like an evil spirit bound to rip through my skin so it can gain possession.
“You really do trust me,” Breanna says in a quiet voice.
“Yeah.”
Breanna opens the folder and I lose her the moment she spots the crossword code. Her eyes narrow and dart and her expression completely smooths out. She lays the bylaws next to the code and her eyes dance between the two pages. Her fingers flitter in the air as if she’s writing on a chalkboard. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess she’s in a trance.
It’s because of those demons she mentioned that I’m permitting her to have a crack at the code again. If she has a chance of finding my answers, then I have a shot at doing what the club is desperate for me to do—to let go of Mom and finally trust them.
“It’s a cipher,” she says to herself. “A cipher. So how does the key go into the lock?”
Her fingers skim over the bylaws and she flinches, reminiscent of the day she solved the puzzle in class. My muscles tighten and nausea spins through my gut. What if this has nothing to do with Mom? What if this is old or new bullshit between the Terror and the Riot and I’m dragging Breanna into a world that will make her a target?