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Vivienne was dreaming of a house.

It wasn’t her house, though it felt more like home than anywhere else she’d ever been. Like she belonged there, rotting right along with the yellow crown molding and the warped floorboards. Sunlight streaked through the boarded windows in thin, colorless bands, so that it looked as though the entirety of the house was underwater. A sunken horror, wrapped in a shipwreck silence. The hall yawned on and on without end, so that she couldn’t tell if the distance to the basement door was very short, or very long. The steps stretched down, down, down into blackness.

Somewhere out of sight, a clock ticked away the minutes. Her legs were leaden. Her throat was sand. She couldn’t run, couldn’t scream—couldn’t do anything but stand there, staring down into the dark. Couldn’t do anything but listen as a sibilant voice slithered out from the deep.

“Vivienne.”

She sat up in bed with a start. The battery on her phone was dead, the sky outside her window a whitewashed gray. Her insides were all fuzz, her mouth sour. She hated waking up this way—unrefreshed. Out of sorts. Molly and Judd—who typically slept at the foot of her bed—were nowhere to be found, and the air in her room held still as a breath. Stretching out the aching arches of her feet, she swung herself gingerly out of bed.

Right away, she was aware that something was wrong. The floor was slick and wet, as though she’d knocked over a cup of water in the night. She wrenched her feet back with a gasp. Tendrils of mist eddied skyward in her wake. The sight stopped her heart cold. Hands shaking, she rose up onto her knees and peered over the edge of the mattress.

Water as dark and rank as oil spilled out from beneath her bed. It seemed to pulsate, seeping both down and out, until it became as vast as a sea, as bottomless as a chasm. As she watched, frozen in horror, a single bubble expanded atop the surface. It was joined by another. Another.

As though something big was rising up from the depths.

The largest of the bubbles burst with a wet pop , spattering her face.

She sat up in bed with a start.

The sky was a wet, watery yellow in her window. The dogs lay sleeping on the bed beside her. Molly lifted her head as Vivienne shifted out from beneath her tangled clump of blankets. Beside her, Judd snored lightly, his ears flat against his scalp, oblivious to her panic. She crossed the room on tiptoes, prying open the door.

Immediately, she was struck by the wrongness of it. The hall outside her room wasn’t the wide, sun-soaked space she was used to but that same rotten dark from the house in her dreams. And there, moored in the shadows, stood another Vivienne.

Four years old, her femur exposed in a bone-white shard.

“Don’t touch the water,” she warned. Her voice was a child’s soft timbre. Her teeth were razor sharp; her pupils clustered black. “That’s where He sleeps.”

Vivienne sat up in bed with a start, a cry mangled in her throat. Sweat matted her hair to the side of her face. This time, both dogs sat awake and alert, as though wary of some unseen danger. She flopped ungracefully out of bed. Dry floor. She opened the door. Empty hall. Her heart beat and beat and beat as she fumbled down the stairs, running her hands one over the other along the railing. Her skin snagged on a sharp irregularity and she leapt back, startled.

Clumps of large blue-black mussels were rooted to the varnish, like barnacles on the underside of a dock. Water lapped wetly at the bottom step. On the landing behind her, the dogs had begun to bark. She heard them faintly, as though they were entire worlds removed. Trapped behind a veil.

The water rose and rose.

“Vivienne,” said that horrible voice, “come and swim.”

She fell back hard, scrabbling for purchase on the mussel-encrusted staircase. Wake up , she willed herself. Wake up, wake up, wake up.

“Vivienne,” said that voice again, though now it sounded less like a creature and more like a boy, insistent and maybe even a little bit irritated. “Miss Farrow .”

The barking careened into focus, until the sound was right on top of her. She rose to her feet, intending to race back up the steps, and collided inelegantly into the hard, flat wall of a boy.

“Ow,” said Thomas Walsh.

He was dressed for the day in a neat suit that had quite obviously been hand-selected by Philip and a ratty old tie that quite obviously hadn’t. A textbook sat wedged under one arm and in his right hand he brandished a half-eaten bagel. He looked entirely, blessedly human. There was nothing sharp about him. Nothing clawed, nothing cavernous. A swell of relief bloomed in her belly. She swallowed a lungful of air. Another. Another.

Are you real? she wanted to ask him. Am I awake?

And yet she was, she was sure of it. The correct color of sunlight poured in through the windows. Nothing was wet or chilly or wrong. At the top of the stairs, Judd let out a whine.

“Morning,” said Thomas. He didn’t ask whether she was okay, and she supposed she deserved that.

She wondered what she’d been doing when he stumbled upon her. Foaming at the mouth, maybe. Crawling the walls on all fours, like some sort of horror movie haunt. Shame made a thousand little cuts along her veins. She didn’t want him to see her like this, curled in on herself like a pill bug and sweating through her nightdress, a sleep mask pushed into the matted mess of her bangs.

Uneasy, she searched for some sort of way to redirect the focus back on him.

I thought you might be illiterate . In the miasma of her panic, she couldn’t recall the correct sign, and so she settled for finger spelling. I-l-l-i-t-e-r-a-t-e.

In any case, Thomas seemed entertained, not offended. Wry amusement flinted his eyes.

“Did you,” he said, glancing down at the book under his arm. “Well, you’ll be impressed—I’ve memorized at least half a dozen words.”

She tried a new tactic. That’s an academic textbook.

“Wow. Nothing gets by you.”

He was mocking her. He was mocking her . No one ever mocked her. Not tragic, quiet Vivienne, who never said a word. Not pretty, untouchable Vivienne, who wore the Farrow wealth like armor. She harbored no illusions about what kind of person people thought she was, but no one ever said anything about it. She signed a feeble something, dropping her hands between them with all ten fingers splayed.

“Yeah, well, you thought wrong,” he said, understanding at once. “I’m not a dropout. I’m taking a gap year.”

That’s not what your file said.

His eyebrows shot up. “You snooped through my file?”

You poke around in my life; I poke around in yours.

A smile broke across the lower half of his face. It was a sunrise grin—slow and warm and bright. He looked absurdly, beatifically pleased with her response.

It was the exact opposite reaction she’d been going for.

Don’t smile at me , she ordered.

“Do you want to know what I think?” he asked, ignoring her. “I think you’re more interested in me than you’re willing to admit.”

Don’t flatter yourself. I keep my enemies close.

“That’s not it,” he said. “You like me.”

He had the instant, regretful look of someone who hadn’t meant to say a thing quite how he’d said it. The words fluttered between them like a trapped moth. You like me. You like me. She was suddenly, starkly aware of how ridiculous she looked with her knotted bedhead and her silk pajamas, her face unwashed and her teeth unbrushed.

You’re wrong , she signed. I hate you.

He took a bite of his bagel, considering her as he chewed. The moment seemed to stretch on and on, quiet and excruciating. Finally, he swallowed.

“I don’t believe you. Thirty minutes, and then we’re leaving.”

She smothered the urge to stomp her foot. I can’t get ready in thirty minutes.

“Better go quick, then.” He took another bite, speaking around a mouthful of bagel. “I meant what I said. I’ll drag you to class if I have to.”

···

The ride to New Haven was quiet, the sky outside the car a clean, cloudless blue. Vivienne ignored Thomas to the best of her abilities, playing with the air vents so that the cold blew across her skin in intermittent chuffs.

“You don’t have to sit in the back, you know,” said Thomas as they idled at the third set of lights. “You can sit up front; I’m not your limo driver.”

Her only response was to turn up her nose and roll down the window. A torrid heat fell in through the crack, stung with exhaust. Up ahead, the light turned green. As Thomas accelerated through the intersection, Vivienne’s window slid perfunctorily shut. The temperature in the car went ice-cold. With a glower, she cracked the window a second time. Again, Thomas shut it.

“It’s too hot,” he said as they drew to a stop at another light.

He was right, it was. And yet she didn’t want to concede. Not to him. He kept his eyes trained on the road ahead, and she was met with the terrible urge to make a scene. Giving in to the impulse, she threw open the door and lunged out into the intersection. Cars barreled past in the perpendicular lane, whipping the pink petal of her skirt skyward.

Behind her, the car lurched instantly into park. Vivienne wrenched open the front passenger door and dropped into the air-conditioned seat to find Thomas already halfway out the adjacent door. She set to buckling herself in as he sank wordlessly back into his seat. Several cars behind them, an impatient trucker let out a prolonged honk.

Pale with fury, Thomas put the car into drive. His knuckles were white against the steering wheel. In the engine quiet, she swore she could hear his molars grinding to dust.

You said to sit in the front , she signed. Didn’t you?

His head turned on a swivel, his eyes wide. Satisfaction crackled through her at the look on his face. He masked his surprise quickly, accelerating into the oncoming turn.

“Next time you pull something like that,” he said, “I’m turning on the child lock.”

···

Stone College was sparse and colorless, its campus sprawled throughout the city proper. From the start, Vivienne’s mother had hated the thought of her daughter enrolling in something so pedestrian as community college. Her peers had all applied and been accepted to places with pedigrees. Harvard and Stanford. Yale and Princeton and MIT. Vivienne, meanwhile, hadn’t applied anywhere at all. She’d let the admission deadlines come and go. She hadn’t written any inspiring personal statements or gone to any evaluative interviews. What would she have written? What could she have said?

I am not my own, and here is why.

Her mother had been mortified. Philip, relieved.

He preferred to keep her close to home.

Stone was perfect. The school’s conservatory offered an eight-week intensive dance study, complete with ample studio time and a final solo performance to be featured in the end-of-summer showcase.

It scratched an itch. It kept her limber, gave her something to do with her days. Best of all—and most importantly—it made an excellent cover. As an added bonus, the low cost of enrollment meant Philip hadn’t even noticed when he paid double the tuition.

Vivienne stood beneath the sun-swept beams of the atelier and faced the mirror, careful to keep her eyes trained on the dead space just above her head. Careful not to look at the creature in the glass.

Outside, Thomas waited in the lobby where she’d left him, thumbing idly through his textbook. She moved through her warm-up and did her level best not to give any thought to him at all. It was harder than she’d expected. Her focus kept sliding to the crack in the door. From this angle, she could just make out the hard slice of his jaw, his figure in profile.

It wasn’t just mortifying, the way he’d found her that morning—it was dangerous. What would have happened if he’d come upon her talking in her sleep, her voice ground like glass, her words steeped in poison?

She didn’t want to think about that.

She didn’t want to think about the last person who’d heard her—didn’t want to remember Mikhail dying on the side of the road, or the way she’d babbled the same thing over and over, once it no longer mattered: Misha, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.

One hand on the bar, she moved into a battement, fluttering her foot in rapid succession. Ignoring the way the body in the mirror swirled along with her, a half step behind, a smile on its face.

The first hour was very nearly over when her phone lit up with a buzz.

Right on time.

Reed Connolly was a lot of things—most of which drove her up the wall—but he was never late. She plucked her phone out of the pink crush of her bag and opened the message.

Reed

I’m outside.

An icy spate of something unidentifiable threaded through her. She slid her phone into the waistband of her skirt and changed back into her sneakers, her eye on the lobby. Thomas remained engrossed in his reading, his thumb tapping out a silent beat against the page. Not for the first time that morning, she thought about how much easier this would be if he were gone. He wasn’t Mikhail. He didn’t understand what was at stake.

If she had her way, he never would.

When at last she slipped out the door, it wasn’t into the lobby where Thomas waited. It was, instead, into the empty northern hall. A boy hovered by the wide revolving door, a leather portfolio tucked under one arm.

“You can’t just text me an order and expect me to drop everything,” said Reed Connolly, sounding predictably irate.

Anemic pale and thin enough to be gaunt, he looked positively vampiric. He wore his dark hair buzzed to a crop, his ears pierced through with industrial bars. Above all else, Reed was an art school cliché—from his combat boots and his floral half sleeves to the narrow slits in his brows. But he was other things, too. A club member. An occult enthusiast.

Her direct line to Jesse Grayson.

Her foot in the door.

He was, all in all, the singular reason Vivienne had enrolled in Stone.

The summer conservatory had been a key part of their negotiation. I expect compensation , he’d said to her that first night, when she’d come to him for help. It’s a private club. There are rules in place to protect the anonymity of its members. If you want to meet the guy who wrote this thesis, you’ll have to make it worth my time.

I needed to talk to you , she signed now. It’s important.

He groaned and scrubbed a hand over his scalp. “Two minutes.”

She held up all five fingers between them.

“Three,” he countered. “I’m missing class.”

Five , she signed, doubling down. And then, in case he’d forgotten, she added, I pay your tuition.

He chewed on his lip ring, and she could tell he was considering pushing back. In the end, he decided against it, slumping back into the wall with a groan. “God, you’re a bitch. Go ahead.”

I need you to give something to J-e-s-s-e for me.

“This is why I’m missing class? To be your errand boy? Give it to him yourself.”

I can’t. He’s not answering my texts.

Reed’s laughter came out flat. “I can’t imagine why.”

Don’t joke. This is serious.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Reed. “Did you think the gravity of the situation escaped me? Do you know how much trouble I can get into? If someone finds out I let you in on official club secrets, I’m dead. And not in a metaphorical way. In a six-feet-under way.”

Don’t be dramatic. No one is going to kill you.

“It’s cute that you think so,” said Reed. “Look, I told you to leave it alone. If I’d known what you were planning to do with that dissertation, I’d never have introduced you and Grayson in the first place.”

He’s a coward.

“He’s careful. There are too many eyes on him. Cut him loose, Viv.”

I can’t. I need him. She dug into her bag and pried out a manila folder, passing it between them. Tell him to look through this. I think it will change his mind.

“What is it?” Reed thumbed open the file and pried out the first page. “Money?”

It’s private , she signed, trying and failing to snatch it back. He held it out of her reach, his eyes going steadily wider as he read through the printout.

“Holy shit. Whose texts are these? Yours and Grayson’s?”

Heat crept into her cheeks. She tried again to snatch the file back from him.

“And they say romance is dead,” he marveled, sliding the papers back into the folder and sealing it shut. “This is blackmail.”

It’s motivation.

“That’s one word for it.” He tucked the folder into his portfolio. “Here’s the thing—Grayson is part of a whole. All of us are. That’s the deal we make when we join. You can’t bully him into doing your little DIY exorcism without getting the rest of the House involved, and I don’t think you’ve really stopped to evaluate what that means.”

I don’t have a choice , Vivienne signed. She ground her teeth, as though by doing so, she could choke down the wriggling within her—could keep the Vivienne with sharp teeth and cryptid eyes from swallowing her whole. It’s getting worse.

“Okay.” Reed’s gaze softened marginally. “I hear you. But can I give you some advice? He’s too high up in the ranks. Grayson, I mean. The House watches everything he does. If you get in any deeper, it’ll be watching you, too.”

He turned to go, but she cut him off, stepping between him and the door.

What do you mean, it’s watching me?

“Your five minutes are up.”

She didn’t let him pass. Tell me.

She could see him debating how much he was allowed to divulge. Finally, he said, “Every club has its leader. We have ours. You think Grayson and I dabble in some dark shit? The chairman is ten times worse. He keeps a low profile, but he’s a real enthusiast when it comes to the occult. He bankrolls the whole operation. And if he knew you were messing around with his pledges—if he even suspected what you’ve got going on under all that pink—he’d come after you himself.”

A chill sank into her. But why?

“Because that’s what happens when you poke a hornet’s nest, Viv.” He peered over the top of her head, suspicion stealing across his features. “Who the hell is that?”

She glanced behind her and spotted Thomas veering steadily toward them, his gaze inscrutable.

“Do you know that guy?” asked Reed. At the look on her face, he said, “Got it. In that case, this feels like the right time to make my exit. I’ll get your message to Grayson, but do me a favor—don’t text me again unless it’s an actual emergency. The House watches me, too, these days.”

With that, he pushed through the revolving door and out into the crowded walk. Vivienne watched him go, ignoring Thomas as he drew to a standstill alongside her. Together, they watched Reed disappear around the corner.

“Who was that?” Thomas’s voice was deceptively light.

She readjusted her bag. A friend.

“Yeah? What’s his name?”

None of your business. She shoved through the door, exiting into the thick heat of early afternoon. Thomas followed, close on her heels.

“You’re upset with me.”

Wow , she signed, throwing his words from that morning back in his face. Nothing gets by you.

He flashed her a sporting grin and lifted her dance bag from her shoulder. “I’m not trying to piss you off. It’s just that you can’t bail on me like that. I’m supposed to interpret for you.”

Don’t lie. You’re supposed to spy on my friends.

To his credit, he didn’t deny it. “I can figure out his name on my own, but it would save me time if you’d just be honest.”

For a half second, she let herself wonder—permitted herself to imagine what honesty looked like. What would he do if she told him everything, right here, right now? If she told him there was something living inside her, taking up space, poisoning anyone unlucky enough to hear it speak? If she told him it was getting worse—that some days she was the girl in the glass, and it was the thing in her skin.

What would he say if she told him she’d found a way to carve it out of her?

If he knew that he’d been hired to make sure she didn’t succeed?

Thomas Walsh wasn’t an interpreter. He was a saboteur.

And he didn’t even know it.

P-h-i-l-i-p will explode if I miss dinner , she signed. If you want to keep your job, you should drive me back.

And with that, she stalked back to the car alone.

···

Farrow family dinners were always a wretched affair, but tonight’s was worse than usual. Philip was in rare form, grinning down the length of the table at Vivienne as she pushed her dinner from one side of the plate to another.

“I’ve got a task for you,” he said halfway through his second helping of chicken cacciatore. Vivienne pretended she hadn’t heard him. She poked at a bell pepper and thought very seriously about stabbing the fork through her hand.

She tried to remember what dinners might have been like if Philip Farrow had never come into their lives. If her mother was still Amelia Miller, seven months pregnant and answering phones at the front desk of a law firm in New York City. Maybe they’d live in a little apartment in Brooklyn. Just the two of them and a cat. Maybe she’d take the subway to school.

“Well?” Irritated by the silence, Philip dropped his fists onto the tabletop in twin thumps. At the far end perched Vivienne’s mother, pale and drawn. She, too, had barely touched her plate. The sudden slam made her flinch.

“She’s happy to do whatever you ask, darling.”

“I’d hope so,” said Philip. He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a cloth napkin before snapping it back into his lap. “Do you remember Bill Donahue? He and his family were at last year’s winter pledge campaign. His son, Bryce, took a shine to you, if I remember correctly.”

Vivienne speared the tines of her fork through a braised chicken breast. She wondered if anyone would notice if she retched right into her plate.

“Bryce Donahue is being groomed to take over his father’s company,” continued Philip. “He’s got his own way of doing things, and it’s slowing down the upcoming merger. I don’t need an innovator, I need someone who will roll over and submit. The company is floundering. It’s being swallowed up by a bigger fish. That’s business.”

She signed it just as he said it. That’s business , her right hand stroking over her left. It was his favorite catchphrase. She knew it cold.

Philip narrowed his eyes at her, trying to determine whether or not she was mocking him. She returned the stare with a slow blink, her smile demure.

Wary, he said, “Bryce Donahue needs a lesson in market shares. I’ve invited him and his father over for dinner tomorrow.”

The breath seized in Vivienne’s lungs.

“Philip, please ,” said her mother, casting a fleeting glance toward her daughter. “You know how I feel about you bringing your work home with you.”

“I’ll take a big, fat commission on the acquisition once the younger Donahue is out of the picture.” Philip took another bite of his dinner, speaking around a mouthful of chicken. “For that kind of money, you can reupholster every last room in the house, if you like.”

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t sit here another minute, listening to them bicker. Anticipating what came next.

That was business. It was never, ever personal. Not to Philip. Everything he did was for the good of the firm. Every grave dug. Every body buried—ever since that chilly September morning when he’d first happened upon their driver heaving his last breath and saw, in the tear-filled eyes of his trembling stepdaughter, an opportunity.

Electric with disgust, Vivienne pushed her chair back from the table and rose to go. Immediately, the smile slipped off Philip’s face.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

Anywhere but here , she signed. This conversation is making me sick.

“She asked to be excused,” interpreted her mother, with scarcely a look in Vivienne’s direction. Not that it mattered. She could have signed The Communist Manifesto for all her mother was doing to botch the translation. Taking further liberty, she added, “She’s not feeling her best this evening.”

Philip set down his fork and leaned back in his chair, fingers folding across his stomach. For a long time, he regarded Vivienne through the table’s lit candlestick glow, his gaze assessing.

“Is that right? You’re feeling unwell?”

Lying came easily to Vivienne, and so she nodded.

“We can’t have that, can we? Dinner is tomorrow night. I expect you to be on your best behavior. Cozy up to Donahue. Make him feel welcome. If all goes according to plan, we’ll take him fishing.”

Vivienne stared across the table at her stepfather and wondered what he’d do if she flipped it clean over. If she tore off the tablecloth and snapped all the candlesticks, threw the plates at the wall hard enough to smash them into pieces.

She wondered if he’d weep if she told him what she thought of him, right out loud. Sometimes they did. Weep, that is. They begged. They crawled. They foamed at the mouth and writhed on the floor. All she had to do was scream. She was a piteous Medusa, her mouth full of snakes. A siren, her voice full of venom.

One note, and she sent men to their graves.

She didn’t do any of that, of course. There was no throwing of plates or screaming of screams. She stood like a doll and waited to be excused. She always did, in the end. She was obedient down to her bones. That was the problem. In her fists, her fingernails carved shallow crescents into her palms.

Philip tsked. “Go ahead, then.”

Vivienne turned in a tight pirouette and headed for the door. She didn’t make it far before Philip called her name. When she peered back at him, the gleam had crept back into his eyes. She wanted to cringe away from it. To spit claws like a kitten and scratch the look off his face. Idly, he twisted that wretched signet ring round and round on his finger, the bone-white flush of it too lusterless to catch the light.

“Wear navy,” he said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “Above the knee. We want to make a lasting impression on the younger Donahue, now, don’t we?”