“Hey,” Random said. “Is this going to take long? What am I supposed to do?”
“Bake something,” they said in unison.
“All right. Fine. I get it. A man’s place is in the kitchen, is that it?”
Valkyrie glared at him over her shoulder as she followed Meredith out. He blew her a kiss. She closed the sliding door more firmly than was, strictly speaking, necessary.
“You think he’ll actually cook?” Meredith asked.
“Probably. You hungry or something?” Upon closer inspection, Valkyrie thought Meredith could use a meal or ten. Her curves had all but disappeared, and her designer clothes hung too loose on her frame.
Not that she cared, Valkyrie reminded herself.
“Not really. I have everything I need right here.” Meredith tilted her glass of gin back and forth, the ice cubes clinking against the cut crystal sides. She turned and looked through the glass doors into the kitchen, where Random had indeed pulled an assortment of pans out of a cabinet. “What’s it like?” she whispered.
Valkyrie frowned. “What?”
“Having someone love you like he does.”
The strangest pain tore through Valkyrie’s chest. “He doesn’t love me.”
Meredith laughed. “Goddess, you actually believe that, don’t you?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Want to bet?” Meredith waggled her fingers and Aspect sparked at the tips. “I bet if we call him out here right now and ask him if he’s madly in love with you, he’ll say yes, and it’ll be the truth.”
“No.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun. A lot more fun than skulking around bushes, which seems to be the only thing you contact me for these days. Unless you have a different request today?”
Valkyrie gritted her teeth. Ask. All she had to do was ask. It couldn’t be that bad.
“Please tell me I don’t have to go skulk in the bushes again.”
“No. I need—” Oh, hell. She couldn’t do it. “Never mind.”
“You need to know what to wear to a date at StellaMia’s.”
Valkyrie gaped at her.
“Don’t look so shocked. Gossip is currency in this town. That,” she pointed through the glass doors at Random, “is the favorite rebound candy of every single, straight woman in Seclusion, and he’s been mysteriously unavailable for months.
“So you’d best believe when your stablehand told BettyLou at The Knitting Needle that Random was taking you, of all people, on an actual date, it made the town rounds in under two hours. Twelve people have texted me about it. Word on the street is Lauren Hale had an apoplexy. Bet you a hundred bucks she’s at StellaMia’s tonight.”
Valkyrie closed her eyes. She wouldn’t touch that bet with a ten foot pole, and this was precisely what she hadn’t wanted.
“It doesn’t take a detective to figure out you wouldn’t have a clue what to wear. And with Siren gone, I’m the only female you could possibly ask.” Meredith smiled. “I told you one day you’d wake up and realize not having friends sucks. Just didn’t think it’d be the next morning.”
“Are you going to help me or not?”
“For a price, certainly.”
“What do you want?”
“What I’ve wanted for a damn year. To explain about what happened with Jace.”
Valkyrie’s jaw clenched. Her father had disowned Jace at eighteen, and Meredith had casually broken his heart the same day. Had told him he wasn’t worth her time without his father’s legacy, his father’s money.
What explanation could Meredith give that would possibly make that okay?
“He’s forgiven you,” she pointed out. “Random has, too. Hell, even Siren likes you. Why do you care what I think?”
Meredith threw the hand not holding gin up in exasperation. “Because we were friends.” At Valkyrie’s lack of reaction she deflated a little and added, “Weren’t we?”
Yes, they had been friends. If Valkyrie was honest with herself, which wasn’t a task she ever found easy, that was the real issue here, the real reason she’d avoided this conversation.
Jace could forgive Meredith for what had happened between them if he wanted to. It was his business, his hurt. And everyone else could accept Meredith back into the fold now that the issue that had caused the rift in their friendship had been repaired.
But Jace wasn’t the only person Meredith had hurt. She’d turned her back on Valkyrie, too.
Valkyrie pulled a chair out from the patio table and dropped into it. She rested her right ankle on the opposite knee, leaned back and crossed her arms. “Explain away, then. Give it your best shot.”
Now that she’d been given permission, Meredith didn’t seem to know where to begin. She paced back and forth on the other side of the table, perfectly manicured French nails tapping against the glass in her hand.
“I did love Jace, you know,” she said finally.
Valkyrie snorted. “You threw him away like garbage at the lowest point in his life because he wasn’t useful to you anymore.”
“And you were right there beside him picking up the pieces, were you? You’re pretty fucking hypocritical for someone who didn’t lift a finger to help him because her daddy told her not to.”
Valkyrie’s blood boiled. “I had my reasons.”
“So did I, and I’d wager they weren’t much different from yours.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“I don’t.” The tips of Meredith’s fingernails pressed into the glass, the skin beneath them turning so white Valkyrie thought the nails might actually pop off. That would a bloody mess.
“Do you know why I started dating Jace in Academy? Why I became friends with you?”
“No.”
“Because my mother told me to. Everything I ever did was because she told me to. She had ambitions in Society, and I was going to achieve them for her. She married my father because he had money, and she wanted money, but he didn’t have status. It’s why she made him take the Townsend name. Her family’s name meant something, even if they’d landed themselves in financial ruin.
“Do you know what her Aspect was?”
Valkyrie shook her head. She’d been too busy surviving to give Meredith’s mother much thought in her youth. Her Aspect would have been registered with the Council, of course, but those records weren’t public. If an Aspect user didn’t wish to disclose their abilities to the rest of the Society, they weren’t required to.
“Agonia.” Meredith gave a short bark of laughter. “Funny, how they like to dress up pain with a Latin word, as if it makes it all more civilized.”
Valkyrie felt the first hint of uncertainty. She’d been so sure that nothing Meredith could say would account for anything, but Agonia? If Jace were here, he would likely explain how the various branches of Aspect were a product of evolution, like anything else about people. How Agonia had probably developed as a defensive branch—it was very difficult for an enemy to attack you if they were in so much pain they couldn’t see straight.
“Your health problems?” Valkyrie asked tersely.
When they were kids, Meredith would disappear from Academy for days at a time. When she came back, she always looked as if all the vitality had been drained out of her, but she never had a physical mark on her, nothing to indicate anything was wrong with her other than the vague immune issues she referenced anytime someone asked.
“Mmm,” Meredith agreed. “I never could do anything right, you see. I thought when I finally got Jace it would mean something to her. Your family’s bloodline goes right back to the Council’s founding, to Seclusion’s founding. She wanted to be attached to it. She wanted the status and the influence. Never was my mother as happy as the day yours died. She thought she’d sweep in and comfort Elijah and he would fall into her perfectly augmented breasts.”
Valkyrie blinked. “But your father...” She trailed off. She’d been about to say that Meredith’s father had still been alive, then. Except he’d died a week after Valkyrie’s moth
er.
“Yes. My father.” Meredith’s face softened, and old pain flashed across it. “My father, who was still useful because he was making money, but not as useful as a newly-single Elijah Winters would be. Dad died of a heart attack.” She swallowed and looked Valkyrie in the eyes. “Do you know how much pain it takes, carefully applied to all the right systems of the body, to induce a fatal heart attack?”
Water welled in Meredith’s eyes, but the tears that spilled down her cheeks didn’t affect her voice. Valkyrie didn’t think she even noticed them.
“I don’t know how long I listened to him scream. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t try to stop her. I was too scared. I just sat in my room, hugging my knees and wishing for it to stop. It stopped when he quit breathing.”
“You were just a kid,” Valkyrie said.
“It’s no excuse. My father loved me. He figured out soon enough after their marriage that my mother was petty and vindictive. He would have left her if it wasn’t for me—because he didn’t want to lose me, and he knew if he divorced her she’d never let him see me again.
“He honestly thought I had immune issues, you know? She was so, so careful, and I was too scared to say anything. And then, when his inconvenience outweighed his usefulness, she killed him. And for nothing. I would have laughed at how thoroughly your father rejected her, except she’d killed mine for it and took the failure out on me.”
Meredith smiled. “And then she decided if she couldn’t have Elijah Winters, that when I was old enough, I would have his son.”
“That’s why my father disliked you so much.”
“Undoubtedly. When I finally got Jace my mother was so pleased she almost turned into a normal person. I could go entire weeks without her hurting me. And she never did it badly enough I couldn’t hide it anymore. I would have loved him just for that reprieve, but then it turned out he was a good person, too.” Meredith sighed. “And then Jace had to go and get himself disowned.
“It was all over then. My mother was furious. She expected me to fix it, as if I could make Elijah change his mind. And I think if I’d asked Jace to try and make it work with your father, he probably would have. But I saw how he looked when he told me what happened. He looked free. And I wanted that for him. When he asked me to leave with him...” Meredith smiled. “I’d never been happier.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Meredith turned an all-too-knowing look on her. “The same reason, I suspect, you never left home. She wouldn’t have let me go. I was the only commodity she had left and I wasn’t going to put Jace in the middle of that.”
Valkyrie tried and failed to sort through the tangle of her emotions. She wasn’t used to having so goddess-damned many of them. The overpowering one was guilt. That Meredith had been living through the same hell she had and she’d never noticed.
She’d been so caught up in her own misery, and she’d been quietly, desperately jealous of Meredith. Of how pretty and perfect she’d seemed. How she was allowed to be soft and vulnerable when Valkyrie wasn’t. She’d never held it against her, but she’d coveted it, because she’d seen how Jace had cared about Meredith, and she’d known that no one could ever—would ever—love her like that.
She wasn’t soft or pretty. Maybe once she’d known how to be vulnerable, but that time was long past.
“You could have told Jace the truth,” she said. “Let him make up his own mind.” But she wasn’t really talking to Meredith. She was talking to herself. She could tell Random the truth. Let him make up his own mind.
Meredith made a derisive noise. “Like you told Jace the truth about your father?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And with those words, she knew she would never tell Random anything. Because Meredith understood about her father, and Valkyrie couldn’t even bring herself to admit the truth in front of her.
“Please. My mother never left an outward trace but you had bruises for days. Too many even for a Battle Aspecter. Our parents were both abusive fucks, whether you want to admit it or not.
“You know, I couldn’t figure out why you were so obsessed with finding Elijah after he disappeared, but then I realized, it’s the same reason I didn’t go with Jace. The same reason that, now my blessed mother is dead, gin is my new best friend. You’re afraid that without him, you’ll realize there’s absolutely nothing left of you but what he made you.”
“You’re wrong, there.”
“Am I?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I already know there’s nothing left of me but what he made me.” She couldn’t go back and change that. She could only hope to move forward.
“Then why the bloody hell would you want him back?”
“Earlier, when you said I didn’t lift a finger to help Jace because my daddy told me not to, you were right. Because everything he ever told me to do or not do came with subtext. Do this, don’t do this, or I take it out on Jace.”
Meredith’s lips were a thin line. “Did Jace know?”
“Of course he didn’t know. The idiot’s damn sense of honor would have gotten him killed. He’s my brother, he’s mine to protect. I made sure he never found out what Elijah really was.”
Meredith’s breath left her in a rush. “Good.”
There was something in her old friend’s face, in the tone of her voice, that convinced Valkyrie of what her words alone never could have: she had loved Jace. Maybe she still did. Valkyrie wondered, then, what it had cost her to stand in Siren’s bridal party and watch her new friend marry him.
Valkyrie imagined having to stand a few feet away from Random while he smiled adoringly at some theoretical bride. She could never do it. If Random ever did decide to get married, she’d be halfway across the world and drunk off her ass on the happy occasion, because if she wasn’t she’d be tearing the damn wedding venue apart.
“Jace has Siren now,” she made herself say. “She can protect him. But Random doesn’t have that. And despite my best efforts, it appears half of Seclusion now thinks the two of us are involved. And if my father comes back of his own volition, that won’t end well for Random.
“I don’t want to find my father because I want him back, Meredith. I want to find him because I want him dead.”
Meredith drained the rest of her gin. She stared at Valkyrie, her fingernails drumming against the now-empty glass. “You want help with that?” she said finally. “Because I wish to gods I’d had the guts to put my mother into her grave myself instead of letting cancer do it. Maybe I’d have some fucking closure if I had.”
Of all the reactions Valkyrie had prepared for, full-fledged support had not been on the list. Something tight in her chest, something she hadn’t even realized was there, broke. She started laughing, and she couldn’t stop. Not until the sliding door opened and Random leaned out.
“Oh good,” he said to Meredith, “you’re still alive.”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” Valkyrie demanded.
“I thought I heard you laughing.”
“So you thought I killed her? I don’t laugh when I kill people.”
“You don’t laugh at all.”
“I do.”
“No,” Meredith said, “you really don’t.”
“So what were you two ladies talking about?”
“Nothing,” they said at the same time. There was a reason, Valkyrie thought, that they’d been friends.
“Well, a deal’s a deal,” Meredith told her. “Come with me.”
Valkyrie stared through the door into Meredith’s closet, unwilling to step inside. She was accustomed to large closets—it was part and parcel of living in an excessively large house—but this one exceeded even unreasonable expectations. It was the size of a bedroom in its own right, plushly carpeted in the same china-white scheme as the rest of the house, and so brilliantly lit it hurt Valkyrie’s eyes.
There was a bloody couch in the middle. Who spent so much time in their closet they needed a place to rest within its confin
es?
“I promise the dresses don’t bite.”
“Your clothes aren’t going to work on me.”
Meredith pulled a black dress off the rack, frowned at it and put it back.
“We’re actually a much more similar build than you’d expect. You just turned all of yours to muscle so the presentation is different. If we stick with the stretchy, non-zippered options, it should work.”
“It still won’t work. You’re pretty.”
Meredith raised an eyebrow. “While I always appreciate a compliment, I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”
“I’m not. Pretty,” she added, when Meredith didn’t look like she understood.
“Even if you honestly believe that to be true, which it isn’t, the fact would preclude you from wearing pretty clothes because...?”
Valkyrie opened her mouth, snapped it shut.
“That’s what I thought. Here.” She held out an indigo blue dress. “This is the one. Try it on while I go to the other closet for shoes.”
The woman had another closet? What was wrong with just one?
Valkyrie shrugged out of her clothes and into the dress. As promised, it was stretchy—slinky was the word she would have chosen—the fabric smooth and cool against her skin. It was a one-shoulder affair that fit her like a glove and ended mid-thigh. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she looked pretty in it because it felt comfortable enough. But when she looked in the mirror all she could see was an over-muscled train wreck.
Meredith returned holding a pair of black heels and whistled. “Damn. I knew that was the one.”
“I look like a She-Hulk.”
“You look hot. Random’s going to drool when he sees you in it.”
“If he drools it will be because the horrors have broken his brain. I look ridiculous.”
“Are you serious right now? Many, many women would kill to have your thigh muscles. And that annoying bra-fat thing? You don’t have it. You know what? I’m not even arguing with you over this. The Internet can prove me right.” She lifted her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a picture for Instagram.”
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