Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
“Ready?” I ask, Hoover’s rubber jaw stupid and grave.
“Not remotely,” she says, sliding the mask on.
Merritt’s front door opens, then closes. He moves through his house like a man on rails—hallway, kitchen light, bar cart. He thinks he made it. He thinks seeing Juno was a coincidence he can spend tomorrow forgetting. He doesn’t know that tonight is a different math problem.
We don’t break the door in; there’s a version of us that would, and we’ve decided not to meet them. Knight taps and then does the kind of not-waiting that reads as authority. The door swings back on the latch he didn’t set. We enter like fog, not force.
Merritt is halfway through a pour when he hears us. The bottle clinks glass, and he looks up. He sees four presidents from the discount bin and one ghost with a knife-mouth.
“What the—” He stumbles back, sloshing whiskey on hardwood that cost more than my first car. His eyes go wide. “Is this a… prank? Because I will— I will call—”
“That’s a lot of I wills,” Ozzy says, Arthur grinning idiotically.
Merritt’s gaze bounces from mask to mask and lands on Juno like he just recognized the monster under his bed is real and also arrived in a hoodie. “You,” he says, and the word contains a weather system.
Juno steps forward. No hesitation. Ghostface turns her into something half-mythic. Her voice is her own—steady, sharp. “You were there,” she says. “You killed my sister.”
“I— I don’t— that—that is—” He laughs, high and brittle. “Insane. This is insane.”
“Say her name,” Juno says, and somewhere the house decides it isn’t going to breathe for a second.
He blinks. He tries to be clever. “Which one?”
“Arby,” she says, and the name lands like a blade point-down into a map.
Something inside me strains at its leash. I keep still. Knight takes one step left and blocks the hallway. Render takes one step right and blocks the sliding glass door. Ozzy leans on the edge of the island like a man considering countertops.
Merritt swallows. He sets the tumbler down with a clink that’s fifty percent flourish, fifty percent stall. “You accuse, you break in, and you wear… Herbert Hoover?” He gestures, hands shaking. “What is this? Halloween for the under-informed?”
“Chester A. Arthur is hurt,” Ozzy says in a fake offended tone. It wrings a strangled laugh out of me that shouldn’t exist in this room and yet does.
“We can do banter or we can do names,” I say, voice low enough that Hoover might vibrate. “You choose.”
Merritt tries for dignity, settles for smug. “I choose my lawyer.”
“You can call him when we’re finished,” Knight says, friendly and incorrect.
Juno tilts her head, Ghostface a white oval that knows how to haunt. “Tell me about the Five,” she says. “Coleman. Rook. Beau. Devin. And you. Tell me what you did to my sister. Who hired you? Why?”
“I wasn’t there,” he says, fast enough that I know he came here prepared to say that sentence to himself in the mirror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Too late for that,” I say. “You were there.”
He laughs again, softer this time. “Do you think you can scare me? Because you’re wearing masks? That’s precious.” His eyes flick to Juno. “And tragic.”
Something tilts. I see Juno’s shoulders tighten, her breathing shift three beats into a pattern I know means volcano. I step closer, still careful. “Don’t talk to her,” I tell him. “Talk to me.”
He does, because he’s the kind of man who thinks men make the rules even when women are writing the story. “You don’t know what you’re playing with,” he says. “You don’t know who you’re playing with.”
“We do,” Render says. “We have names now.”
Merritt’s smile flickers. “Then you know whose house you just—”
He doesn’t finish. The whiskey he spilled finally finds the slick edge of the rug. Merritt steps back to reclaim space, heel catches pile, and his body does a surprising, ugly thing—fishtails. Knight moves—too late, wrong angle. Merritt pinwheels. The back of his skull clips the beveled corner of the stone hearth with a sound I will hear in my dreams on the nights I forget to invent new ones.
He drops.
Silence is not actually silence. It’s breath and blood and the house deciding it’s going to keep its lights on because antler chandeliers don’t know what death is. Juno stands perfectly still in a mask shaped like a scream, and for half a second I think she made no sound and then I realize she made all of them at once, inside.
We move the way people who care about living move—fast, urgent, competent. I’m at Merritt’s side in two strides, two fingers at his carotid. The skin is too warm; the pulse is not there. I say his name like that matters. It doesn’t.
“Arrow?” Juno’s voice is small and ninety miles wide.