Sever (38 page)

She presses the gun’s safety switch with her thumb just as she was taught, and as she lowers it, I see the fake emeralds studded around the handle. Madame’s gun.

I also see that her bottom lip has started to tremble. She presses her lips together and stares at Vaughn’s motionless form, either to make sure he’s dead or because she can’t bring herself to look away.

“Cecily.” I put my hands on her shoulders, and she looks at me.

She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes. How can she explain? How can words ever be enough? There’s a space in her womb where her unborn child died inside her. There’s a place in the orange grove where her husband is buried. There’s a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise to her.

I understand. It wouldn’t have ever been enough for Vaughn that I bled into tubes. It wouldn’t have been enough that Cecily gave him a grandchild and nearly died to give him another. It wouldn’t have been enough that Jenna was destroyed, or that Rose was in so much pain that she didn’t want to endure his measures to save her.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like
cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

S
HE HAD BEEN
dreaming of this for a long time. But Madame was the one to put the gun into her hands. Madame looked at Cecily, and she saw the latest of Vaughn’s victims. She saw a girl with vengeance in her eyes. And so they whispered and convened in colorful tents. They hugged good-bye at the gate and wished each other well, all the while a gun hiding in that innocuous pink purse.

It takes her a long time to tell me about Madame, and for her to admit that Vaughn’s murder might have only been a daydream of hers if Linden were still alive; she knows it isn’t what he would have wanted. She tells me that as angry as her husband was with his father, he was disgusted by the violence and the deceit. He wouldn’t have wanted another death. But without Linden, she’s certain that Vaughn was going to kill her if she didn’t act soon, and the idea of Bowen being orphaned was too
much for her to stand. She might not have been brave enough to do it at all if she hadn’t used the key card she blackmailed off an attendant and followed me outside. She was only going to join me on my walk; she was too scared to sleep upstairs alone. But then she saw Vaughn and she hid. She heard what he said about Jenna.

We’re sitting on the trampoline, in the darkness, and she finishes with the words “I had to.” She’s shivering now. In the moonlight her eyes are dark and worried.

I think she’s brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

I put my hand over hers.

In the morning the lotus gate is wide open. There’s an emerald-studded gun in the grass, wiped clean of any fingerprints. There’s a prominent doctor lying dead a few feet from the weapon that killed him.

It makes sense. He had become a member of the president’s elite. There would be competition. There would be jealousy. There would be people that he had, in his fervor of research, shorted or stolen from or wronged.

Cecily and I are playing chess in the library; we aren’t supposed to know any of these things yet. We’re supposed to be waiting for breakfast.

Her fingers are shaking as she selects a pawn; she’s far more competent at this game than I am, but neither of us
is paying attention to the board. “I’ve seen your brother on the news,” she says, “but seeing him in person—I wasn’t prepared for how much he looks like you. It’s jarring.”

I watch her set down the pawn on the same square.

“I bet it makes you feel like you belong somewhere,” she says. “I’ve never had brothers or sisters. It must be nice.”

“You’ve had sisters,” I say.

She raises her head to me, and she isn’t quite able to smile, she doesn’t have the strength, but I know my words have reached her.

A nervous attendant bursts into the room, uncertain what to do as he explains the catastrophe with the Housemaster. Without a Housemaster and without a House Governor, there is no order to follow.

We tell him that Vaughn has a living relative. A brother. We tell the attendant where he lives, how he can be reached.

Several floors below us the chemicals are slowly filtering out of Gabriel’s system. His mind is slowly awakening, his eyes blinking. Elle is familiar with the practices of nursing, and she has access to the basement.

When Reed arrives, Cecily and I run from the kitchen door to greet him. And for the first time in well over a decade, he’s invited into the building his father had reconstructed into a home. We don’t have to explain. He can see in Cecily’s eyes that she’s the reason his brother is dead. Maybe he already knew she had it in her when he taught her how to pull a trigger.

When she puts her arms around him, she finally breaks into tears.

“It’s okay, kid,” he says. For an instant her feet are off the ground, she’s holding on so tight. “It’ll be okay.”

“C
AREFUL
,”
I say, setting the tray on the nightstand when Gabriel tries to stand. I tuck my comforter back over his legs. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

“I could say the same for you,” he says, but he accepts the kiss I place on his lips.

“I’m fine,” I say. “I made tea. And you”—I poke his chest, pushing him back against the headboard—“need to drink some of it.”

His eyes are wandering the length of me, and he mouths “Okay” and closes my hand in his. He wants to ask if I’m all right, but he won’t. That will only make it worse. It is taking all I have to keep my eyes dry. Staying busy helps.

“It’s chamomile,” I say. “It’s supposed to make you sleepy. I think it’s only a placebo effect, though.”

His eyes are bright, so bright and blue like the water sparkling around Hawaii as I looked down from
the plane. His cheeks are pink again, and I follow a prominent vein in his wrist that disappears halfway up his forearm. When we’re alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it’s as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

“Rhine—” Gabriel says, at the same time that I blurt out, “I wanted to ask you—”

My fist clenches inside his hands.

“You go,” he says.

“I wanted to ask you what happened the night Vaughn found me at Claire’s,” I say, finally meeting his eyes. “It’s fine if you don’t want to discuss it, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I’ve been all over the place these past few months wondering what happened to you after I left. I thought it would be nice to have at least one chapter I could close.”

“I woke up and you weren’t in bed anymore,” he says. “So I came looking for you.”

With his free hand he takes a sip of tea. Steam swirls about the rim as he exhales.

“And then Vaughn knocked you unconscious,” I say. I think of the syringe that was emptied into my arm, the sick feeling and then the blackness.

“No,” Gabriel says. “Housemaster Vaughn was waiting on the sidewalk. He knew I’d be coming to find you. And there you were in the backseat. You were sick while we were at Claire’s, but that was the worst I’d seen you.
He told me that you would die if he didn’t tend to you.”

“And you believed him,” I say.

“Of course I believed him. It turned out to be true, didn’t it?”

“But did he threaten you?” I say. “You knew a lot of his secrets; that’s what he told me. Did he tell you that you had to come back?”

“Maybe he would have if I’d refused,” Gabriel says. “But I didn’t.”

“You went,” I say, and only when I hear the anger in my voice do I realize how upset this makes me. “Willingly. After all that effort to be rid of him.”

“I wanted to be rid of him,” he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. “But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can’t think I would have left you like that.”

“Look what it got you,” I say.

“Tea in bed and you here in front of me,” he says. “It was a terrible decision, and I confess I’d make it again.”

It’s impossible for me to resist his smile. One day after awakening from the coma, he is doing astoundingly well. Vaughn’s strongest chemicals are no match for the will to live, it seems.

“I’m not through being angry,” I say, my words muffled when he kisses me.

“Stop ruining it,” he says, and kisses me again, and again, until I let go and I move into his waiting arms.

His parted fingers move up my neck and through
my hair, and the rush of nerves is overwhelming, and I freeze, stop breathing.

After all the months without him, my bed somehow kept Linden’s scent, and I’ve just found it in the pillow.

“Rhine?” Gabriel says.

I’m sitting up now. My eyes are aching. “I should make dinner,” I say. “Cecily and Rowan probably haven’t eaten, and you should try something solid. I’m sure your stomach will handle it now.”

He means to say something, but I’m on my feet before he can get the words out. I kiss his forehead and hurry away, to the scent of incense in the hall. Cecily has been lighting the sticks.

The kitchen is empty when I enter it, but the moment I make the slightest noise, the head cook is there, swatting at me with a wooden spoon and telling me to stay away from her ingredients. She’ll make whatever I’d like if I get out of her hair, she says.

No one eats, though. Rowan is out exploring the grounds somewhere, and when I bring dinner to Cecily’s room, she pretends to be asleep. I set the plate on her nightstand, kiss her forehead, and close her door on the way out.

Gabriel doesn’t press me. I tell him about Hawaii and he listens. We don’t discuss the fact that Vaughn was the one to bring me there, or the things that happened to my brother, or the things that happened to me. We talk only about the colors, and the blinking lights, and how
from up high the ocean looks like a giant spill.

We stay away from words like “cure” and “hope.” Hope has been especially cruel.

When I close my eyes, I see the traffic lights changing and the triangular sails moving across the water. Gabriel sweeps the hair from my forehead as I lie with my head on his chest. Here I am telling him about these beautiful things, and I don’t deserve a single one of them.

“It’s my fault that Linden’s dead,” I say. “He was in my seat. I don’t even know why I let him have it; the view terrified him.”

“If he was sitting there, it wasn’t your seat,” Gabriel says. “Rhine. Look at me.”

I open my eyes and tilt my face toward his. My vision is blurred and I realize I’m crying, my throat heavy with the taste of it.

Gabriel tightens his arm around me, gathers me close. And I wrap my arms around him, because I am human and selfish and breathing. I’m still alive and I don’t know for how long, or what for. I shudder and sob, and the guilt and the hurt are so heavy, but not so much that it stops my heart from beating.

A feeling can’t kill you. That’s what I told Cecily. That’s what I’ve told myself so many times before.

“He wouldn’t want you to feel this way,” Gabriel says. “I didn’t know him very well, but I’m sure of that.”