by Amelia Wilde
1/2 box of shells, 1/2 cup cheddar
Peanut butter, 2 pieces of bread
1 oatmeal cookie
The food is grouped like this with neat lines dividing the lists. What is this? Tracking what he ate?
Cronos noticed the shells today, switch to rice
It’s such an off-handed note at the bottom of the page, but afterward, he notes down the rice he uses.
D doesn’t want oatmeal this week, find shells
Oh my god.
In one of the margins he’s left an even smaller note.
D up 1:30, set alarm so she doesn’t cry
The last page is torn in half but the top half reads:
Get her out ?
He would have been eleven, maybe twelve, when he was writing these lists. I think they’re lists of the things he would cook for her, at least sometimes in the middle of the night.
A small, folded paper slips out from the spine of the book. It’s older than the journal. The paper is thin and worn and I get the sense it will crumble into dust if I touch it. But I hold my breath and do it anyway. It’s been folded and unfolded so many times that the folds have worn little cracks in the page.
It’s a child’s drawing of two people and a house. One of them is slightly smaller, the other one bigger. One in a long dress with long hair. One with pants. The figure in the dress holds something in one hand—a bowl? Both of them are smiling. A wavy line suggests a hill and on top of the hill is a house drawn with the rough, uneven lines of someone very small.
But it’s the letters that break my heart.
It’s obvious how painstaking she was and they still end up curved. Demeter, it reads above the girl in the dress, with one backward E and an M with a too-long downstroke. Did he have to tell her how to spell it?
Above the boy’s head she wrote Z and a wobbly but obvious heart. She must have asked him to write the date, because in the lower left corner there’s a sprawl of numbers that would make him about eight.
His voice cuts straight through me. “I told you not to come here.”
12
Zeus
Brigit’s eyes are wide and sad, tears glistening across the green but not falling. She doesn’t look particularly surprised to see me. Heartache is written all over her face instead. Heartache, when she’s the one who stomped on all of my ribs to expose the vulnerable organs. The drawing she holds is extraordinarily brittle by now, which is the only reason I don’t snatch it out of her hand and crumple it in my fist. It wouldn’t survive.
I would end it. Why do I care? It should be nothing to me. A useless artifact from a life that no longer exists.
A relic from another time.
“I couldn’t—” She turns slowly to face me, the journal tucked under her arm, and shifts it into her hands. The paper and the journal are the smallest ones, the easiest things to hide, and Brigit smooths the drawing carefully on the journal’s cover. “It can’t be a shopping list. You were too young to go grocery shopping, weren’t you?”
It’s the middle of the night. Sleep still clings to the edges of my brain but it’s getting torn apart like the rest of me. No one was ever supposed to see these things. I thought I punished the urge out of her. And to add stinging insult to injury, it’s too late. Brigit’s side of the bed was cold when I woke and found her missing. She’s been here long enough to ransack the vault that holds all these insidious, aching things. These things I try never to think about. I write them down, I put them away, and fuck. Fuck.
I can’t have this conversation. I won’t have it. I can already feel my face slipping into the expression I have spent years of my life honing to a fine precision. Mild interest. I could kiss you or kill you. That’s what it means.
“Get out of my office.”
Brigit straightens her back. “No.”
“Fine, sweetheart. We can do it this way.” I take a step toward her but she jumps back, shifting the note into both hands. It’s just a note. I try to tell myself that I don’t give a shit about it, about Demeter, about anyone. My fists open and close at my sides and it’s not entirely in my control. I don’t know what’s in my control anymore, now that she’s done this.
“It’s not a shopping list,” she repeats.
“It’s not a fucking shopping list.” Anger, familiar and friendly, bubbles to a boil. Yes. Good. That will make it easier to keep breathing, though I don’t necessarily want to. “What could it be, then? A puzzle for my little bird to figure out.”
It’s so fucking hot in here. My heart and lungs are going to be burned to a crisp.
“Why were you keeping track of the food like this? In such small amounts?”
No—no. Cronos, rifling through cupboards, through the antique refrigerator that was always on the verge of burning his farmhouse down. He had an excellent memory but not a perfect one. That’s why I could get away with doing what I did. That’s why I could create plausible deniability. That’s not what I called it then. Cronos, with his fingers in Demeter’s hair. He made her keep it long and at some point she stopped wishing she could cut it.
“It’s not relevant.” Take another step forward. I can’t take the step. “This is nothing to you. It’s not for you. It was never meant to be read by anyone.”
“Then why did you write it down?” Brigit’s voice is an inch from trembling. “I think this… this list… is important. It’s everything. God, Zeus. I think this is the reason you haven’t taken your people back.”
I laugh at her, putting all the cruelty of a lifetime behind it. “Because I kept lists as a child?”
“Because you loved her.” Christ, it’s like she has her hands in my chest cavity and she’s squeezing the life out of me. “You loved your sister.” Brigit glances down at the journal as if she can see through the cover to the lists and notes I made at incredible risk to myself. If he’d ever found it— Her eyes come back up to mine. “I think you still love her.”
Hot air, fire down my throat, fire licking the walls of my chest. “I hate her.”
“What happened?” She steps forward, into the ring of light from my desk, and as much as I loathe this, as much as it’s killing me, there’s a part of me that wants a painting of her with the warm light in her hair and that awful book in her arms. “You can tell me, you know.”
“You?” Brigit actually flinches at my tone, though I have a death grip on it now. I need her to stop asking questions, to stop burning me from the inside out. I need something to make the pain go away, even if that means hurting her. “You’re nothing but a whore, and a mediocre one at best. Why would I tell you anything?”
A tear slips out from her lashes and she brushes it away, setting her jaw. “You’re only saying that to push me away. You don’t mean it.”
“Oh, sweetheart, but I do.” I put my hands in my pockets so she can’t see that they’re shaking. With rage. With hurt. Hard to say. “I mean it down to my fucking bones. You are nothing to me. You’re worse than nothing.” Brigit closes her eyes. “You’re a waste.”
She opens them again and takes a deep breath. “This isn’t you.”
I smile at her, making a big show of it. “This is all of me.”
“No, see, that’s the thing, it’s not.” The light skims across her eyes and reflects out to me, and suddenly she’s an avenging angel with the sweetest voice. “It’s not you. This is a show. Stop putting on a show, Zeus.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
It’s her turn to laugh, and somehow, some fucking how, it’s soft at the edges, not serrated. “I know everything.” She tosses the journal onto my desk and I don’t care at all but I hold my breath. “I don’t have to read all of these to know who you are. It’s right here. It’s been here the whole time. You’ve been here the whole time.” Her eyes grow darker, bolder, and I’m swept up in them the way an old piece of paper would be swept up in a hurricane. “You would cook for her, wouldn’t you? She liked shells and cheese. That’s something even a little boy
can cook. But you didn’t make it for yourself. You kept a record, the way you keep a record of everything, because he would notice—” Understanding flashes through her eyes and sears through me. “There was someone else to replace the food for you.”
“The nanny,” I hear myself say, “when she could. But it doesn’t matter, Brigit. I hate her. I’ve always hated her. I have always hated my sister.”
“Bullshit.” She works the note down into its original form. “You are so full of shit, Zeus, and you don’t have to be that way. You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to hide. I can see you.” Brigit inches closer, closer and closer until she’s in arm’s reach, but I don’t touch her. If I do, it will be a killing jolt. “I see you.”
Being witnessed in this way chokes off my access to oxygen. I grab for it, a singular panic washing through my gut, and force a breath down. “It means nothing.”
“You don’t want to go after her because to you—” A smile ghosts over her face and disappears. “To you, she’s still that little girl. Shells and cheese were her favorite. And you would make them for her, because—”
“Because she was afraid of the stove.” Memories crowd in, their cage decimated, the bars ruined twists of metal. Demeter, six, her hair a tangled mess and her face red, crying at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night. She couldn’t reach the cupboard where he kept the bread and all she ever wanted were those fucking noodles. I don’t want to burn my hands. Her eyes were a luminous silver then, pleading and innocent, and what else was I supposed to do? “She was hungry, and she was afraid of getting burned.”
Cronos, holding her hand flat above one of the burners, not close enough to scorch her skin but close enough to feel the heat. He let her get close.
“So you made her food.”
“I taught her to read.” Demeter would whisper the words to herself, one of the three children’s books we had propped on knobby knees. I don’t recall learning how to read but I must have because I taught her. “I taught her how to write.”
“You weren’t much older, were you?”
“No, but she needed me to be older, to be stronger and more sure, so—” A spike through the throat, through the heart. “So that’s what I became.”
“Other people need you now. The women need you.”
The walls I’ve so carefully tended bow inward, the pressure intense. I’m dying from it. I’m dying, and at least when I’m dead this will be over. Brigit takes a last, calculated step forward and tucks the note into my pocket. Then she puts her hands flat on my chest and I can’t fucking help it, I can’t help but put my hands over hers. It takes the restraint of a hundred people not to bend her over the desk for this. I laugh in her face instead.
“Sweetheart, you’re out of your mind. You’re out of your fucking mind.” The foundations of the world are falling away. It’s a miracle I can stay upright.
“What happened?” she whispers. “What happened to make her go so wrong?”
“The same thing that happened to all of us.”
“Your dad?”
“Don’t call him that.”
She blinks. “Your father?”
“He corrupted everything he touched, and she—” Her eyes followed him wherever he went. “She idolized him. All she ever wanted was for him to be proud of her. At any cost.”
“She turned on you?”
It hurts and there’s no pat explanation for why it hurts so much. It’s a planet-sized wound, and it aches, it fucking throbs. “Demeter was jealous. She hated the fact that he would take me with him when he left. Hated it. She wanted to be his favorite, and she thought it was a prize worth winning.” It was Demeter in the hall the night Katie died. It was her poison on Katie’s lips. “She killed Katie,” I whisper. “And I hate her for it. I hate her so much.”
“You’ve had lots of chances to take your revenge,” Brigit says softly. “You haven’t yet.”
The last cornerstone in the wall blows apart into a thousand fragments, burrowing into skin and bone. My jaw snaps shut, teeth grinding, and it’s the most wretched moment of my life. “I hate her.” The truth tastes bitter and sweet, like poison. “And I still love her.”
Brigit’s even closer now.
“I don’t want to kill her. I can still see her eyes—” The words twist themselves up and refuse to come out. “A hero would kill her and end this. A hero would shoot her between the eyes. But I’m not a fucking hero, sweetheart, I never have been.”
Her eyes shine. “That’s not true.”
She rises on tiptoe and kisses me, and everything stops. The agony subsides, the wound closes, the bleeding tapers off. My mind clears. Brigit knows all of this and her mouth is still warm and yielding against mine. Her body responds to mine like I’m someone she needs.
I am someone she needs.
I’ve been playing a decades-long chess match against my sister’s worst impulses. And I can’t stop now. I’ll play our old game and bring my sister back from the brink.
“Not until I’m finished with you,” I murmur into Brigit’s mouth. “You still haven’t learned your lesson. You need to be punished, sweetheart.”
13
Zeus
We’re halfway across the living room when someone knocks at the door. Someone—James is the only person who can get in. What the hell is he doing here in the middle of the night? I set Brigit down on her feet with a furious kiss. “Wait in the bedroom. I’ll be right there.”
I try to settle my heart back into its customary place and stop my cock from throbbing and fail at both. I need to fuck Brigit. She’s mine, and I need to remind her of that—need it like I need air.
James is shouting now.
His fist is in midair when I pull the door open with a sharp jerk. I know intellectually that he would never do this unless it was urgent. He shoulders past me into the living room, not seeming to notice or care that he has interrupted me on the way to an essential engagement.
“—go in through the back, but we would need more people. Morris has his in shifts, so that’s a problem, but we can bribe enough of them to make it a non-issue.”
“James.”
“If he’s brought in others, then that becomes more of a mathematical problem. We’ve had decent luck liaising with Hades’ men in the city, so—”
My brother’s people? What the fuck? I put out a hand and stop James in mid-stride. “Care to let me in on this conversation?”
James is a handsome dark-eyed man but right now the whites of his eyes are so large, his pupils so black, that he reminds me of Hades. Not Hades now—he wouldn’t let this sort of fear show on his face. Not even when I toyed with killing him on his own mountain. “We have to go in for them. We can’t wait. Tell me you’ve changed your mind.” His hands fly out and he grabs the front of my shirt. He almost has enough strength to move me. “Tell me you’ve changed your mind, you bastard.”
I brush his hands off and corral him to an armchair near the bookshelves. “What is this?” I gesture vaguely in his direction, old habits dropping into place to keep my posture at ease and my face neutral. “No—wait.”
“Where are you going?”
“You obviously need a drink.” I go back to the kitchen and pour him a glass of the first whiskey to hand. When I return he takes it without meeting my eyes and tosses it back. It’s clear he doesn’t feel the burn. I sit down across from him. James’s fist opens and closes on the glass.
She’s pregnant, a voice whispers. It sounds less like Katie, and that makes me want to dig into the dirt above her grave and demand that her voice come back to me. You shouldn’t leave her alone.
I’m in the next room, I remind the voice, though being one floor down didn’t save Katie. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle.
“The situation—” James turns his head, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and there is something else here, something I’ve neglected to notice in the midst of my own irrelevant feelings. “We have to make a plan, and we have to make i
t tonight.”
“This isn’t like you.” I lean forward in my chair. My entire body howls to be with Brigit but this is a calculated pose, meant to draw him in. “You don’t go to pieces over issues with the women. You don’t go to pieces at all.”
“She’ll kill them.” His eyes are on the floor, gaze stuck near my shoes. “She’ll kill them, Zeus. One by one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made videos, if she—”
“This isn’t about the women.” It’s a sickening guess, a sickening thought, and he thinks he has to keep it from me. “It’s not just about them, is it?”
This is the man who had to sit in a room with me while I watched the footage of Brigit being taken. He does not scare easily. This is personal.
“No.” The word makes no sound.
“James—”
“She has my husband, too.” He stands up abruptly and shoves his hands into his pockets. “You need to come with me. Right now. She’s getting more brazen. You need to see it so you understand.”
I lean back in my chair. “Is she? How do you know?”
James glares with his usual precision turned up a thousand degrees. “Because she sent a photo. To the main brothel email address.”
Christ. “What? A selfie? A picture of her lunch?”
“This isn’t fucking Instagram. This is real life, Zeus.”
That makes me smile, though it isn’t kind. “Let’s see the photo, then.”
He pulls something up on his phone and holds it out. In a way I’m not wrong. There’s my sister grinning her maniacal smile, her hand fisted in another woman’s hair. Savannah. Her mascara runs down her cheeks. It is a selfie, after all. And it’s what she’s having for lunch. The women I used to care for and protect. The women I used to use. My relationship with them has always been complicated. Most of them are afraid of me, but they’d still rather work for me than anyone else. At least I make sure they’re fed and bathed. I reward them well. They’re allowed to choose their clients. No beatings. No scars. It’s a cold comfort for a whore, but a comfort all the same. My sister won’t give them any of that. She’ll hurt them. She’ll kill them, the same way she killed baby birds she found in a nest. It would be so much easier not to care. It would be so much easier to be like my father.