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“Cassel,” she says, like my name tastes sour on her tongue. She doesn’t slow.
“I know you’re probably furious about Daneca,” I say, walking backward so I can look at her while I’m talking. “And you have every right to be. But let me explain. ”
“Can you?” Lila says, stopping abruptly. “I’m not a toy you can just turn off. ”
“I know that,” I say.
“How could you think that it would be okay to work me? How would it be any different from what your mother did?” She looks like she feels a little bit sorry for me and a little bit disgusted. “The curse is over. We’re over. ”
“Oh. ” Of course. I grit my teeth against the reflexive flinch. All I can hear is my mother’s words in Atlantic City: She wouldn’t have given you the time of day, Cassel.
“It wasn’t enough for you to have your joke, pretending to love me, pretending you weren’t pretending—” She stops herself, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, they’re bright with fury. “I’m not cursed anymore. I’m not going to grovel for your attention. It must have been thrilling to have me sigh over every one of your thoughtless smiles, but that’s never going to happen again. ”
“That’s not what it was like,” I say. I’m stunned, all of my months of pain and panic reduced, in her eyes, to gloating.
“I’m not weak, Cassel. I’m not the kind of girl who cries over you. ” Her voice shakes. “I’m not the girl who does whatever you want whenever you want it. ”
“That’s why I asked Daneca—,” I say, but I can’t finish. It’s not even true. I asked Daneca to work her because I was starting to believe the illusion. Daneca was trying to save me from myself.
“You wanted to make me feel nothing for you?” Lila says. “Well, let me do you one better. I hate you. How about that? I hate you, and you didn’t have to do a thing to make me. ”
“Come on, now,” I say. I can hear the self-loathing in my voice. “I did plenty. ” I lost Lila the moment my mother cursed her. Everything else was just a pathetic game of pretend. None of it real.
Her expression wavers, then smoothes out into a mask of blandness. “Good-bye, Cassel,” she says, and turns to go. Her head is bent and her scarf must have shifted, because I glimpse redness along her throat. From this angle it looks like the edge of a burn.
“What is that?” I say, walking after her, pointing to my own collar.
“Don’t,” she says warningly, holding up her gloved hand. But there is something in her face that wasn’t there a moment ago—fear.
I grab one end of her scarf. It comes unknotted with a single pull.
Her pale throat is cut, one side to the other, newly scabbed and dark with ash. The criminal’s second smile. A glittering choker of dried blood.
“You’re—,” I start. But of course, she always was. A crime boss’s daughter. Mobster royalty.
Talking with someone who just signed up to be a federal agent.
“The ceremony was on Sunday,” she says. “I told you I was going to be the head of the Zacharov family someday. No one starts at the top, though. I have a long way to go. First I have to prove my loyalty. Even me. ”
“Ah. ” Lila has always known who she was and what she wanted. There is something horrifyingly final about her scar, like a shut door. She’s not afraid of her future. “Brave,” I say, and I mean it.
For a moment she looks like she wants to tell me more. Her mouth opens, and then I see her swallow those words, whatever they were. She takes a deep breath and says, “If you don’t stay away from me, I’ll make you sorry you were ever born. ”
There’s nothing to say to that, so I say nothing. I can already feel numbness creeping into my heart.
She continues her walk across the quad.
I watch her go. Watch the shadow of her steps and her straight back and the gleam of her hair.
I remind myself that this is what I wanted. When that doesn’t work, I tell myself that I can survive on memories. The smell of Lila’s skin, the way her eyes shine with mischief, the low rasp of her voice. It hurts to think of her, but I can’t stop. It ought to hurt.
After all, hell is supposed to be hot.
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