White Rabbit(45)

“I know.” Her face is pale, the bruise like an inky paw print stamped on her gray skin.

“You know?” Sebastian stares at her.

“Hayden told me.”

It’s my turn to gape. “Hayden?”

“He was here. Just a little while ago. He said April did it—that April … that she stabbed Fox?”

It’s a question, as if she can’t quite believe it, but my insides sink like a torpedoed battleship anyway. What the fuck is Hayden doing? Apart from undercutting my admittedly crappy scheme to surprise everyone with the news myself, I can’t fathom why he would want to spread this bulletin around. Is he deliberately trying to compromise April by telling her friends she’s guilty? “He just showed up out of the blue and told you Fox was dead?”

“Yes. I mean, no—not exactly.” Lia glances nervously up and down the fog-cloaked street like she’s terrified my psycho older brother will emerge from the brume at any moment to punish her for talking. “He was upset, okay? He was pissed. He had an issue with Fox, but he said Fox was dead, so … so—”

“So he came to you?” I make my skepticism plain.

Lia swallows and gives me a strangely plaintive look. “Don’t ask me to explain why—he wasn’t making a lot of sense. He was really, really angry, and I thought … I was afraid he was going to hurt me. I mean, look what he did!” She holds her bare arms out, and in the diffuse light, I can see for the first time that she has new bruises forming, the flesh over her biceps darkening with the suggestion of powerful hands. “He grabbed me, started shaking me—”

“Hey, just take a deep breath, okay?” Sebastian steps forward, putting his own hands on her arms—gently—unconsciously supplanting Hayden’s grip with his own. “You’re okay now.”

An unexpected wave of jealousy steals over me as I watch him soothe her injuries, watch her tilt her face to his with casual intimacy, their displaced chemistry palpable. They’re not together anymore, and I know it now—hell, Sebastian and I aren’t together anymore—but I feel a needle of crestfallen dismay stab into me anyway. Clearing my throat, I interrupt their moment. “Why did he come here, though? What did he want?”

“Money,” Lia whispers quietly, like it’s a dirty word. “He wanted his money back.”

Sebastian raises an eyebrow in my direction. “The money he paid Fox earlier tonight? For the drugs?”

Lia glances up, startled by his knowledge, but after a beat she gestures a mute confirmation. Baffled, I ask, “Why did he think you had it?”

“I don’t know!” She looks genuinely bewildered. “Like I said, he wasn’t making a lot of sense. He just showed up here, calling my phone over and over until I agreed to come down, and the second I was out the door he was in my face—ranting and threatening and shaking me—”

“Why did he want his money back?” I interrupt, hoping to distract her with something concrete to focus on. “What was his issue with Fox?”

Taking a breath, Lia glances around again—and this time, so do I. Her anxiety is contagious. Licking her lips, she says, to Sebastian, “Not here. Can we … can we sit in your car?”

I get into the back this time, allowing Lia to have the front, and when the doors of the Jeep are closed against the sightless expanse of the night, she relaxes visibly. “You already know that Fox and Arlo were partners—or, at least, they were supposed to be.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“I’ll get to it. Basically, they had this system worked out. They’d get a shipment from their supplier, divide it up, and then sell it. Fox’s customers were rich kids and college students and stuff; Arlo had a lock on basically everybody else. I mean, aside from our squad at Ethan Allen, they ran in totally different crowds, so working together made sense.”

“Okay,” I say, hoping this has a point.

“Once they sold everything,” she goes on, “they’d give their take—all of it—to their supplier, who would bank it and pay them back their cut. I don’t know exactly how much they were moving, or what their percentage was, but neither of them was really hurting for extra cash, you know?”

“So what did Fox do? Why did Arlo go after him tonight at the party?”

Lia’s face hardens, her dark eyes flashing like obsidian. “Fox got fucking greedy, that’s what he did. He wanted more money—as if he needed it—and thought he was such an untouchable badass that he could get away with pulling one of the stupidest, most dangerous scams in the book.”

“What scam?” Sebastian asks, and Lia drags her hands through her hair.

“The big problem with white rabbits is that, you know, every now and then they make some people go completely berserk, right? Lady thinks her neighbor’s turning into a dragon, so she runs him down with her SUV; or a dude jumps through a window because he’s trying to escape a swarm of invisible robot hornets.” She purses her lips. “Fox—who barely passed chemistry last year—decided that he could fix the problem and make some serious cash under their supplier’s nose.

“He had a thing about power. He wanted everybody to kiss his ass and bow down when he walked into a room, and it bugged the shit out of him that Arlo was the one who actually intimidated people. Fox insisted on being the point man with their supplier, so all the deliveries would go through him, because it meant he got to tell Arlo what to do. It made him feel like he was the one who was really in charge.” Anger pushes color back into her cheeks. “This dumb-fuck plan of his … he didn’t even ask Arlo if it was cool—he just went ahead and did it.”