No Peace for the Damned

fault.
    No one spoke when I entered the kitchen. I went straight to the fridge and took down my whiskey. I didn’t look at Thirteen, or Heather, or anyone. Not even Theo at the other end of the table. What had he said during their little “trust Magnolia” debate?
    Marie leaned with her bony ass against the far counter. I poured my drink. Slowly I met her eyes. She gulped. It wasn’t nearly satisfying enough. I wanted to see her shaking. Her face paled as her thoughts finally caught up with what the rest of the room had already figured out.
    That’s right, bitch—I hear everything
.
    Thirteen’s cell phone rang. Several people jumped. Jon cursed under his breath. Thirteen looked at me as he answered, his face set in a dire warning.
    Do not touch her, Magnolia
.
    Gee, was I that obvious?
    I nodded to Thirteen’s thoughts. He turned to finish his call in the great room. Marie’s hand shook as she took a drink. Good. Almost immediately, Thirteen came back.
    “Chang has finished getting the property details. We need to survey them immediately.”
    Chairs scraped the floor, hands grabbed at the food, bodies struggled to exit the tight kitchen. Even though she was farthest from the door, Marie was the first out of the room
. Yeah, you better run
. Thirteen stood across the table from me. The softness was back in his eyes—warm now with genuine concern.
    “I’ll call you soon,” he said. I gave him a small smile.
Go get ’em, Thirteen
. I didn’t say it, but for the first time, I meant it.
    I shook my head and took a long swallow. God, now I was as delusional as the rest of them.

The next couple of nights I hardly slept at all. When I dozed, my color dreams were especially vivid—tinted with that oh-so-fabulous unease and confusion that constantly rode shotgun in my life these days.
    When dawn came after the third sleepless night, I grabbed my whiskey and an apple from the fridge and decided to take back my control: I was going to decorate. After all, curtain therapy was as good a distraction as any from my current emotional landslide.
    I’d
finally
picked up some sun-yellow sheers the day before at a Super Target. The quality was horrible—nothing like the thick silk drapes used at the estate—but they were
mine
, so they were awesome. Shopping still sucked—all those strangers going loopy when they looked my way—but I was getting better at the whole normal thing. I’d even picked up some decent groceries while I was there.
    I was hanging my new sheers in the front window when Thirteen’s car pulled up the drive. He parked in the grass. Heather emerged from the passenger seat of his SUV. Maybe this was more than just the situational update I expected.
    I opened the front door as they approached. Thirteen looked serious as ever, but Heather had a wide smile brightening her face.
    “Nice curtains,” she said as they came through the door. “When did you get those?”
    “I did a little shopping at Target last night. With everyone out scouting buildings and businesses, I had some free time.”
    Her head tilted a little as she eyed me. The question was loud in her mind, but she thought it was rude to ask. She was right, but I answered anyway.
    “I have my own money,” I said deliberately. “An account with my mother’s maiden name. It has money from her family that my father doesn’t know about. So yeah, I paid for the curtains.”
    Her cheeks reddened. “I didn’t think that you stole…”
    “Yeah, you did.”
    Against my will, an image of my mother flashed in my mind.
Aged long past her years, eyes half crazed, she was still beautiful. I had her hair. And her lips. I hadn’t seen her since I was a toddler, but that night she’d left her suite to ambush me in the eastern gardens. She took in my torn and bloody clothes, the quickly healing wounds, and spoke in a fast whisper. Her voice was scratchy, as if she hadn’t spoken for years. There was an account, she said, created in my name, using her grandmother’s maiden name. All her father’s family inheritance had been funneled into it. The account was unknown to my father—she swore she never once thought of it—and supposedly untraceable. Then she disappeared into the shrubbery
.
    Two days later, the newspapers announced her death
.
    A chill ran up my spine.
    I walked Heather and Thirteen into the kitchen. “We found a building,” he said, “a Kelch private holding that we didn’t know existed until now. Chang found it among