“What do you want?” I asked him.
“It’s simple.” He cocked the safety off his pistol. “I want her dead. She spent the night wrecking my livelihood, my reputation. My reputation is everything. Did you see how much she was enjoying herself? Yesterday, she put my bodyguard in the hospital. She crushed his windpipe. She killed you, August. You have no future. You have nothing, now. She’s a child that thinks she can play with adults, and she needs to understand that this isn’t a game.” He dug his fingers into the flesh of her throat, and Holmes gagged. “Lucien and I might disagree on our methods, but our goal is the same. We want her punished. My brother wants to draw this out. I want it over. Now.”
I had no weapon. No plan. I wanted Milo then, desperately—where was he? Why was he in Thailand? Since when had we gone from solving the case ourselves, from our dorm room, to relying on his resources? We were in Europe. In Europe, and alone. How had this happened? And August, gripping that blade like he knew how to use it—that was a lie, too. Even now, he held it up in front of him like it was a candle, or a prayer. So much for geniuses. So much for getting out of this alive.
August put the knife to his own throat.
“Hadrian,” he said calmly. “Drop the gun.”
His brother stared back at him. They looked so much alike—the nose, the square jaw. A pair of mirrors on either side of a black-haired girl. Only the eyes were different. August’s were suffused with such bitter melancholy that, looking at him now, I didn’t doubt his intentions.
“Stop pretending,” Hadrian said, “that you care about what happens to her. What are you even doing?”
With a steady hand, August pressed the knife harder into his skin. A red stitch of blood sprang up on either side of its blade.
Hadrian’s brows furrowed. “What the hell are you—”
“She killed me,” he said. The blood trickled down his neck, a strange echo of what leaked, even now, from my own cuts. Involuntarily, I touched my own throat. “You keep saying it. Lucien screamed it, the night the police came to her house to haul us away. My brother took the fall for me—went to jail for a few months for selling coke, but sure, who’s counting—and because of that I’m in hiding. Forever. I’d worked my ass off for years to get to where I was. I persuaded people to believe in me, despite my name. They expected me to be a monster. They expected me to be like you.
“And now”—August laughed wildly, a high-pitched sound that must’ve moved his throat, because the knife cut in still deeper—“what does it matter? I have nothing. You saved my life and then you cast me out, and I live in Milo Holmes’s gilded tower. I’m in the wreckage of it all. All I have left are my ethics. Do you know how I do it? Live my life? All I think about is, what would Lucien do? And then I do the opposite. Spy on Milo’s mercenary operation? Of course he would. Poison Charlotte’s parents just to watch her agonize? He’d do that, too. Tell this Watson kid to stick around so that I could mess with his head, use him to get to her? No. I warned him. I stole one of Milo’s cars and drove him around and orchestrated a bloody massive scheme to try to convince him to go home. What would Lucien do? Plot this teenage girl’s death because she was a drug addict and lost and confused and no one ever loved her and she lashed out at me when I couldn’t give her what she wanted?” His voice quickened. “Lucien hates her for that. And, despite everything else, despite everything I do, I guess I’m a failure because I hate her for that too. I hate her. I hate her. And I don’t hate her at all.” A deep breath. “I refuse to let myself see her as anything but what she is. She’s a lost girl, and I was a lost boy for all those years too, growing up, and you used to know what you were, Hadrian, you used to go to plays with me and stay up late reading A Wrinkle in Time and you’d make things out of clay and we’d bake them in the oven when Mum wasn’t around to complain about the smell, and some of them cracked, but you make beautiful art—”
“Shut up,” Hadrian said.
“Even those Langenberg paintings—I know your handiwork, Hadrian. They’re beautiful—”
“Stop,” he said, begging. “Just stop—”
“You were my older brother. I looked up to you. I don’t anymore,” August said. “You say you want to kill her for me. But if you do it, if you kill her, I swear to God I’ll end myself, too. It’s all the same to me. You’ve made sure of it.”
I was aware of my body, then, my useless limbs, how heavy and damaged they were, how slow I’d be to stop either of them. Behind the stage, up in the wings, there was shouting, like maybe Tom and Lena and the Greystone mercs had caught Phillipa after all. They’d be bringing her back down, their guns in tow, and with every pistol pointed at everyone else, this could only get more complicated.
Throughout all of this, through August’s confession, the blade to his neck, Holmes’s eyes hadn’t once focused on him. They weren’t focused on me, either. They were shut, as gently as though she was sleeping.
“Charlotte!” Lena called from an upper balcony. “We caught her! We caught her! I think I gave her a black eye!”
In front of me, Holmes took a ragged breath. She opened her eyes. In one smooth motion, she grabbed Hadrian’s arm, the one with the gun, and wrenched it away from her while she slammed the back of her head into his face. Hadrian Moriarty yelled, staggering backward, and she disarmed him, neatly, with a single hand.