Vengeful (Villains #2)(73)

“That’s no way to talk to a lady,” she said, digging her nails into his skin. It withered in her grip, flesh peeling back to reveal bone that thinned and cracked until the slightest pressure made it shatter.

Marcella straightened, dusting her palms. She swore softly. There was a crack in her manicure.

June whistled a low, appreciative sound. “Well, that was fun.” She was perched on the sofa, legs swinging girlishly. She hopped down and started toward the glass doors, their surface now flecked with blood.

“Come on,” she said, passing Tony’s sideboard. “I need a real drink.”





X





THREE WEEKS AGO


EAST MERIT


MARCELLA had been to her fair share of bars, but these days, most of them had glowing stained glass, leather booths—at the very least, a menu.

The Palisades had cracked windows, wooden stools, and a grimy chalkboard.

It wasn’t that Marcella didn’t know this world—the world of astringent well drinks and tabs paid in petty cash—but she’d left it behind on purpose. June, on the other hand, seemed right at home, elbows leaning on the sticky counter. She was herself again—not the girl Marcella had glimpsed so briefly in Hutch’s office, or the one June had worn on their way in, but the one she had met at the Heights, with those loose brown waves, that long peasant skirt.

June ordered a double whiskey for herself and a martini for Marcella, which turned out to be straight vodka, ungarnished. Which, at the moment, she really didn’t mind. She stood at the bar, sipping the drink.

“Fuck’s sake, sit down,” said June, swinging around in her seat. “And stop wrinkling your nose.” The girl lifted her drink. “To a good day’s work.”

Marcella reluctantly perched on the stool, studying June over her glass.

She was brimming with questions. Two weeks ago, Marcella had been a beautiful, ambitious, but slightly bored housewife, with no idea that people like June, like her, existed. Now, she was a widow, one with the ability to ruin anything she touched, and she wasn’t even the only one with powers.

“Can you be anyone?” she asked June.

“Anyone I touch,” said the girl. “If they’re alive. And if they’re human.”

“How does it work?”

“Dunno,” said June. “How do you burn people alive?”

“I don’t,” said Marcella. “Burn them, that is. It’s more like . . .”—she considered the drink in her hand—“ruining. Wood rots. Steel rusts. Glass returns to sand. People fall apart.”

“What does it feel like?”

Like xsfire, thought Marcella, but that wasn’t quite right. She remembered how it felt when Marcus crumbled in her arms. The simple, almost elegant way he came apart. There was something raw about her power. Something limitless. She said as much.

“Everything’s got a limit,” said June. “You should find yours.”

The girl’s gaze darkened, and Marcella remembered the space between bodies, the brief glimpse of that other shape. “Did you feel it?” she asked. “When he shot you?”

June raised a brow. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Must be nice.”

June hummed thoughtfully, and then asked a very different kind of question. “Do you remember your last thoughts?”

And the strange thing was, Marcella did.

Marcella—who never remembered her own dreams, who rarely remembered a phone number or a catchphrase, who’d said a thousand angry things in the heat of passion and never recalled a single one of them—couldn’t seem to forget. The words echoed inside her skull.

“I will ruin you,” she recited, softly. Almost reverently.

Now, somehow, she could.

It was as if she’d forged the power through her own formidable will, tempered it with pain and anger and the vicious desire to see her husband pay.

And so she had to wonder: what kind of life—what kind of death—made a power like June’s? When Marcella asked, the girl went quiet, and in that quiet, Marcella felt the girl gaze into her own internal flame.

“My last thought?” June said at last. “That I would survive. And no one would ever be able to hurt me again.”

Marcella raised her glass. “And now no one can. And on top of it, you can be anyone you want.”

“Except myself.” There was no self-pity in June’s voice, only a wry humor. “Irony’s a bitch.”

“So is karma.” Marcella twirled her glass. “You know my story,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Private,” said June shortly.

“Come on,” she prompted.

June raised a brow. “Oh, sorry, if you thought this was a girls’-night-out kind of thing, where we get drunk and bond, I’ll have to pass.”

Marcella looked around. “Then what are we doing here?”

“Celebrating,” said June, tossing back her drink and signaling for another before pulling a slip of rolled paper from her pocket. At first, Marcella thought it was a cigarette, but then, as June unfurled it, Marcella realized it was a list.

Four names in tight scrawl.

Three of them had already been crossed out.