Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(9)

But I do. Those words…they keep her on the right side of the food chain. If I can’t take a knife to her body, I’m damn right taking one to her silent, choking heart. This girl, she came to me longing to be punished for the terrible things she’d done in my name; I’d be cruel and stupid to refuse. When I ran out of sins to purge from her, she picked up a gun and fired off another—she’ll tell you different, that the tables were turned, but she’s lying.

The thing is, grasshoppers, she f*cking shot me. I’m the sociopath, and I wouldn’t have shot her.





SIX YEARS AGO

Leontine





Aged 18

Hawaiian Airlines Flight 148, JFK to Honolulu



They say you’re ten times more likely to die on the road than in the air, but none of that makes me feel better about being on a plane. You fly out of a car? There’s always something to catch you, even if it’s a black tarmac road that mashes you to pulp on impact. The paramedics will find you; you’ll be put to rest in peace. Up in the air? You fly out of a plane and all you hit is water: endless ocean, kneaded by the tide’s hands, washed out to dark places unseen by human eyes.

Between my American mother and British father, I’ve spent my life on planes. You’d think I’d be used to them. You’d think that reading up on how planes work would help. You’d think that after enduring my forty-eighth take-off (or whatever), I’d have perfected some weird cocktail of happy clappy breathing techniques and panpipe MP3s to get me through the initial ascent.

Nope.

Pop go my ears, and Oh f*ck, oh f*ck, oh f*ck, goes my brain. We’re flying. Suspended in mid-air.

“Language,” mutters Mum, because I’m saying the Oh f*ck part out loud.

“I can’t help it,” I say through gritted teeth, my knuckles white around the armrest of my chair. She booked me a window seat because she thought it might help. Ha.

“Fear is all in the mind,” she laments in that sinuous, silky voice of hers, although it’s been somewhat muted of late. Years living with Dad in England wore her Upper East Side accent down at the edges, and there’s a molten quality to everything she says. She grew up emulating debutantes who wore pearls and just a lick of mascara, and then married into south west England, where middle class women wear Hunter boots and walk big dogs on pebbled beaches. Mum has always been patchwork. Confused.

My parents’ recent divorce only made this worse.

And what’s she on about, anyway? If fear is all in the mind, why is it spreading sharp roots beneath my breastbone, tickling and scraping at the hollows of my hips? The roots spurt hot adrenaline; I feel it burn each synapse, diffuse into every cell. I’ve always identified as a scientist, but if there’s one thing more powerful than science, it’s fear. We climb miles above New York, away from my reluctantly adopted new home, and I am not a girl. I am strange alchemy, glued to a chair.

Finally, the pilot’s voice crackles through to the cabin, assuring us all that it’s safe to unbuckle our seat belts. I wait ten seconds longer than everyone else.

“There.” Mum gives me a nudge with her elbow. “Everything’s fine. See?”

“Easy enough for you to say.”

“Mind your mouth.” There’s something sharp in her tone; annoyance, hot and spitting. Unusual for my mother, a woman who barely owns a temper. “I taught you better manners than that.”

I fold my arms, clutching at myself in a makeshift seat belt. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” She sighs. “Maybe it’s menopause. You think it’s menopause? I don’t remember being this snappy.”

Me either. I rarely give her reason to snap—no late night sneak-outs or scandals here. My new rich girl friends at Gainsborough Academy are disgusted with the dull landscape of my life. When I get back from spring break, they say they’re going to dirty me up. Um.

Of course, I only have new rich girl friends because Mum suddenly became rich; Dad pays for school, but nobody there paid much attention to me before I magically acquired my new Chanel tote. Mum’s just pleased I’m going to malls on weekends instead of taking apart clock radios in the back garden—sorry, back yard—and she claims some estranged relative died in Vancouver and left her the money. Except the money has kind of turned her into a bitch. I swear, the number of times she’s looked over her shoulder in a cafe or a restaurant, even the library…you’d think someone was watching. Waiting. Like this life isn’t really hers, and at any moment, someone could sweep in and take it away.

One way or another, this hasn’t stopped her splashing cash on a holiday to Hawaii. I should be excited, but lately, I’ve become accustomed to the slow roil of fear. I watch Mum in the quiet moments, when she’s stirring soup in our too-huge-for-two-people oak kitchen, or when her eyes wander from the page of a book, going everywhere and nowhere, glazed amid motes of dust. Something has changed, and when I least expect it, this knowledge hurls itself at me like a catastrophic cartoon piano.

Enough. I’m done panicking—I do enough of that anyway. I yank a copy of TIME magazine out of my satchel and splay it across my knees. That sharp, pine-like glossy page scent wafts up and I breathe it in, trying to relax.

Mum side-eyes the contents page. “Shouldn’t you be reading Cosmo or something?”