“—yes,” she says softly, and I hear her sniff. “God, I wish I could be there.”
“You should have…” I fight the urge to once again scold her for her poor decision.
She clears her throat and tells me what song she wants me to play.
I hit the speaker button and place my phone on top of the sheet stand. “Let me see.”
“Am I on speaker?” she whispers harshly.
“Yes, but it’s fine. They’re out on their hunt, or phase, or whatever it is that they’re doing.”
Madison pauses.
I breathe out through my nostrils while playing the tune over in my head before finally running my fingers over the keys. The keys hit all the notes I intend, and it’s the exact tune to the song.
“Wow.” Her voice is quiet, a notch above a whisper. “That’s perfect.”
I start humming the song with the notes.
“That’s going to sound beautiful. Can you get Tillie to record it?”
I pick up my phone and take her off speaker. “I will.”
She sighs. “Thank you, Saint.”
We hang up and I spend the rest of the next hour practicing both songs that I’ll be playing.
Brantley
The first thing everyone should most definitely know about all of us is that ending someone’s life comes as easy as one, two, three. We were dropping bodies when our friends were dropping alcohol shots in the club. It doesn’t affect any of us, and it never has.
Not when we’d watch the life of someone slowly bleed from their eyes.
Not when we’d know that person had a family to go home to.
I wish I could say that everyone who has met the end of our blade deserved it, but truth is, at least for me, that’s not always the case.
“You know who’s going down?” I ask Bishop, my eyes on his.
He looks up at me from his phone, the dark night setting behind him. The light from his screen bounces off his face. “We could go clean and easy and dip into The List.”
I lean against my car, crossing my ankles in front of me. “Clean and easy will never be clean and easy if they’re from that list, and you know it.”
“Who was next anyway?” Eli asks, biting a cigarette into his mouth and lighting the tip.
I shrug. “Not sure. I never know until the last minute.”
“Who issues them? Do we know? Are we ever going to know?” Cash asks, running his fingers through his bleach-blond hair.
“Yeah, I’m guessing after the ceremony, the wheels are going to start spinning a different direction as we all settle into our new roles.” Trees branch over us as we sit on the outskirts of Riverside. “Can’t believe just next week the schools will be reopened.”
“Personally, can’t fucking wait.” Nate smirks around the end of his smoke. He glances at Cash. “You can’t tell me you’re not ready for the next chapter. This is it. What we’ve been fucking living for.”
“I am.” Cash nods. “That fucking school, though. You remember the legends… it’s fucking—fucked. It’s fucked.”
I curl my lips between my teeth to stop from laughing. “Anything with us around it is fucked.”
“All right, I got our kill.” Bishop flashes his phone on our face.
I still. “What? Nah, fuck that.”
He grins, turning the phone back around while kicking off the car. “Mmmm, smells a lot like death.”
“Why?” I glare at him over the photo of Josiah Dux, aka Dux of The Gentlemen, and Elijah’s pops. “Why that person? And don’t give me bullshit about my shit.”
Nate rubs his face with his hands. “We know it was The Gentlemen who hit us at the parking lot, B. We fucking know. We know it was them who drugged us, too. We just gonna let them walk?”
“They weren’t the ones who drugged us. That wasn’t them. Too—clean.”
Nate shrugs. “Well, shit, our bad if it wasn’t—or not.”
I smirk, my shoulders relaxing. He has a point. Even if it wasn’t them who drugged us, which I’m ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t, The Gentlemen have done enough to fuck with us to take it anyway. The shooting was reckless as all hell and had their stench all over it. “We get the last fucking say.”
The night was quiet. Too fucking quiet. It took an hour to get our hands on three black G-Wagons just to pull this off.
“Execution style. Keep it clean.” Bishop slips leather gloves over his hands.
I clench my jaw. “We do this, we can’t come back from it. Don’t get me wrong, The Gentlemen have always been on my list, but I was waiting for their time to come for a reason.”
Nate is in the passenger seat, tapping his thigh with his thumb along to the rap “Joker” by Dax. “Nah uh, they’ve been on borrowed time.”
“Nate.” I bare my teeth, shoving the back of his chair. “You have shit to lose now. You can’t think recklessly.” Nate is erratic and rogue with his wrath. Complete opposite of me. I like to think it’s because I’m more controlled as a human being, but I know it’s more because I’m conditioned for murder. It’s like sipping tea on a Sunday. “You have Tillie and War.”