Hawthorne sighs and confirms. “It was a Finish like this one.” She levels a look at me, like she’s waiting for me to break down again, so I hold my breath, steeling myself. “Dr. Remington… Leighton, she was a nobody. Her father was the stable master here. Her mother was a homemaker. She lived in town her entire life as nobody. But she had been around the Remingtons her whole life. She knew what they wanted for a Remington wife and she was smart, ambitious, ruthless. Everything Matilda Remington was. So she played their games and she won expertly. And by the end, Third’s younger brother wanted to marry her. She’d made herself into his dream girl.”
I open my mouth and then close it again when I can’t manage any words. Every word from Hawthorne’s mouth shatters the reality I’ve made for myself. Every plan means nothing now. Because the Remingtons have their own plans. I will die. Or I will be a Remington. Every accomplishment I could ever have, any future, even if by some miracle I win, would always be second to being Mrs. Remington. Not Adina Walker. I wouldn’t be regaining what’s mine, because I wouldn’t even be me. Not that that’s even a possibility because—
Every girl would kill to be a Remington.
Except me.
“I can’t be here. I’m leaving.”
“This is why they took our phones,” Saint reminds me, edge creeping into her voice again. Her hands slowly clench into fists. “This is the first real Finish since social media was created. They are in control now and we can’t leave unless they let us.”
“This is illegal,” I say.
“They are the Remingtons,” Hawthorne says. “They own this town. This state. All of New England. Nothing is illegal for them.”
Suddenly, Graham’s words ring true. “I hope you and that soul survive this,” he’d said. He knew. He knew all about this and he didn’t warn me. None of them warned me.
I’m alone here.
“This is a nightmare. I’m going to die,” I realize.
Hawthorne shrugs once. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s different now.”
“What’s so different?”
“There are more girls from outside the usual circle. More variables. There’s you,” Hawthorne says, but that doesn’t reassure me. It just drives in the point again that Pierce didn’t invite me here to save me. He invited me to end me.
“It’s a new era, a new game. Get ready to play.”
CHAPTER 9
I DON’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT.
I lie in the darkness, on my back, head turned toward the door, wondering if Esme will darken it at any moment with her poisoned perfume. Every time I think to close my eyes, I see Margaret’s face as she clawed at her arms and her neck, like the pain would bring her back to life. My stomach turns, but there’s nothing to throw up, not after that first time, when I spewed champagne into the toilet.
Saint called for a meal to be brought to our room. She ate it when I didn’t. I sat against the chaise, knees tucked against my chest, staring straight ahead as Saint talked at me. Then she put me to bed.
With the moon pitched low in the sky, I feel my hackles rise, adrenaline thundering through my veins. I turn in my bed and look over at Saint. She’s buried in the sheets, planted facedown, and finally a soft snore tells me all I need to know. I roll out of the bed without a second thought, gliding across the chilly floors, swinging a sweater around my shoulders and grabbing my Air Forces from my bag. I stuff my feet into them, tying the laces in a stranglehold around each ankle.
I don’t want them to get loose when I start running.
The door hinges whine with age. I still, waiting for Saint to wake up, but she doesn’t budge. I slip out, and leave the door open just a crack, wishing her well, this brilliant girl who figured out what she was walking into, who saved me from falling down the stairs, who washed poison from my skin. She’s safer than I would be. Smarter.
And she has someone who can rain hellfire if she disappears.
I don’t. There’s no one who could fight for me if I disappeared. Not against the Remingtons. So, I have to disappear myself.
The house is so quiet that I don’t dare to even breathe. Each shadow is a ghost of a girl, a warning of a man, all threatening and long, an all-consuming darkness. The silence gets louder and louder, and then I realize that it’s half in my head.
The real world is not so quiet.
I hear them, closer than expected, in a room that I thought was an abandoned office when I explored earlier in the day with Saint but is very much occupied now.
“…yourself together. Enough, Four, enough,” a voice says gruffly. I don’t know it well enough to immediately place it, but it’s familiar in a way that I don’t have to search my brain long for.
Mr. Remington. Third, my brain supplies.
“You want him to get himself together? He just watched a body get loaded into the freezer.” An acerbic voice retorts. Graham.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. I just…” Pierce trails off.
Slowly, I creep closer, watching the thin line of light that beams from under the door. Crossing it feels dangerous, like they’d catch me, so I stay pressed into the shadows, listening to a conversation that I don’t belong in.
“You’re not fine,” Graham says. “This is why we should have canceled it.”
“You want your brother to be a disappointment like you?” Third asks snidely.
“Better a disappointment than making himself sick,” Graham retorts.
“Things are supposed to be different. That’s what you said, Graham,” Pierce says, voice growing stronger with each word. “You said it was going to be less… dire.”
“Your brother is a fool. There is tradition for a reason,” Third snaps with impatience. I hear a shuffle of movement and then Third’s voice rings out, much closer than before. “Why you listen to your brother, I don’t know, but the fault lies in you, Pierce. You wanted women from outside our circle, wanted this to be different, fine, but then you invited that girl here.”
“What girl?”
Me, of course.
“Adina Walker?” Pierce whispers. My name sounds loud in the silence. “She’s just a—”
“She’s not just anything. I don’t know what games you’re playing, but this isn’t the one to experiment with,” Third says, each word careful and measured. “Each of those young women was hand selected, some perfectly bred, even, with the purpose of joining this family, knowing if they didn’t, we could keep them quiet about anything that occurred. And then you bring an outlier. An inadequate choice that—”
“Why?” Pierce barks. “Because she’s not yours? Not Pen?”
“That we have no leverage on to keep quiet.” Third’s snarl rises over Pierce’s voice, effectively silencing him. “You’re the one who wanted the rules to shift, and now you’ve introduced an element that we’ve no idea how to handle other than how we always have.”
It’s veiled, but it’s not hard to glean the meaning.
“May I remind you that a girl died,” Graham interrupts. “A girl has already died and it had nothing to do with Adina.”