Page 61 of The Silent War

I looked at them—Charlotte with her ridiculous brush, Vivienne with her cases.

My girls. My proof that something of me still existed outside hospitals, Dynasty events and two crows that kept me up at night.

“I’ll send a picture,” I said.

“Good,” Charlotte said. “And if you see Rome?—”

“Tell him you said hi?” I offered.

“Tell him I said nothing,” she replied, smug. “He will know what it means.”

Vivienne set the trunk gently into her car like it was a person. Charlotte locked her door and slid an extra balm into the mailbox for luck.

“We should do face masks,” Charlotte said suddenly, as if she needed to swing the pendulum back to something pretty.

“We literally just weaponized the face,” Vivienne said.

“I meant the hydrating kind.”

“We’ll do masks after the reunion,” I said. “If we still have skin.”

Charlotte laughed, relieved by the joke she hadn’t been able to make herself.

Vivienne started the car. Charlotte hummed a song that had lived on the radio when we were ten, the year our mothers still believed the world would shape itself around us instead of the other way around.

We hadn’t become our mothers.

We hadn’t become normal.

We had become girls who knew how to build a thing that could pass for either salvation or sin, depending on who opened it.

Which, as Charlotte liked to say, is a kind of art.

Chapter Twenty-One

EMILIA

Alexander sat at the head. Corvin on his right, hand flat on a leather folder. Marus on his left, glasses clean enough to make him look thoughtful instead of dangerous. Two handlers stood near the door, tablets ready, eyes down.

A month ago I would have sat small. I would’ve counted light fixtures and told myself to be grateful I was allowed in the room at all.

Maybe the twins were a bad influence on me.

Alexander didn’t look at me first. He never did. He glanced at Corvin, then at Marus, as if checking a mirror that would answer back.

“We’re pausing all mergers,” Alexander said, like it was the weather. “Until the Accord paperwork is formalized.”

“The Adams spine isn’t something we can risk,” Corvin added. “We need the right man to stabilize it.”

“The right man,” Marus repeated.

I let them speak over me for another minute.

“Excuse me,” I said, even. “Before we continue—I have a condition.”

Corvin’s eyes lifted in a slow, practiced blink. Marus’s pen stilled. Alexander finally looked at me.

“If you’re unwell we can—” Marus started.