Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(66)

I kneeled down and picked up the broken pieces of the Bitter Chocolate bar and threw them into the trash. I took the gold-foil wrapper. I was about to put it in my pocket when Natty took it from me. She folded it in half so that it was squarish and then she folded it several more times. When she handed it back to me, the paper had taken the form of a small, gold dragon.

“Hey, where’d you learn that?” Win wanted to know.

“Genius camp,” she told him.

So you see, I thought. It hadn’t all been for nothing.

XV

I GO TO RIKERS

THERE WERE NO VISITING HOURS at Rikers Island on Mondays and Tuesdays. I didn’t go on Wednesday either, because the visitation schedule was determined by last name. After some research, I determined that Jacks’s day was Thursday. I also read an exhaustively detailed dress code: among other things, no swimsuits, ripped or see-through clothing, spandex, hats, hoods, or uniforms. It also stated that “visitors to Rikers must wear underwear.” (NB: There had not been the remotest chance that I wouldn’t.)

The prohibition against uniforms put me in mind of the fact that I was no longer a student at Holy Trinity. Life had been so much easier with a uniform. As I was dressing that morning, it occurred to me that I would need to come up with a new uniform for myself. But, what? A uniform was meant to reflect your station in life. I was no longer college-bound or even a student. With a long list of offenses under my belt, I was not likely to become a criminologist. I was no longer an inmate at Liberty. I was no longer a cacao farmer. I was no longer my brother’s keeper. Or my sister’s either. Natty seemed increasingly able to keep herself.

At the moment, I was nothing more or less than a girl with an infamous last name and a vendetta or two.

But what to wear for avenging my slain brother?

I had to take two different buses to get to Rikers, and then I had to register, and finally I was led into a room with tables and chairs bolted to the floor. I would rather have visited Jacks behind a plastic screen with a phone like you see in those old movies, but I guess my cousin wasn’t considered dangerous enough to merit such precautions.

I sat down, and about ten minutes later, Jacks was brought into the room.

“Thanks for coming, Annie,” he said. My cousin’s appearance was much altered since the last time I’d seen him. He had shaved his head. His nose had clearly been broken in multiple places, though it was healed for the moment, and one of his cheekbones had a disturbing flatness to it. He also had fresh stitches above his eyebrow. “I’m not the pretty boy I used to be, eh, cousin?”

“You were never that pretty,” I said though I could not help but pity Jacks. He’d always been so vain about his appearance.

Jacks laughed, and he sat across the table from me.

I had things I wanted to know from him, of course, but the best way of dealing with Jacks was to let him talk.

“You finally came,” he commented.

“You’ve only been begging me to for months,” I said.

Jacks shook his head. “Nah, that’s not why you came. No one loves Jacks. You’re probably still holding a grudge ’cause I shot your boyfriend. You just want something.”

I looked at the clock. “What could you possibly have that I want?”

“Like I wrote. Information,” Jacks said.

True enough. “Your father’s dead,” I told him.

“Yuri, yeah, I heard. Who cares? That man was no type of father to me.”

It seemed hard to believe that he could feel so little for his own father. “Back in September, you said that Natty and I were in terrible danger, and maybe you know that since then there have been attempts on both our lives and Leo is dead.”

“Leo is dead?” Jacks shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that.”

“What wasn’t? What do you mean?”

“I had heard”—Jacks lowered his voice—“that someone in the Family was going to try to take you and your sister down. That way, there’d be no one from the Leonyd Balanchine side left to interfere in the business. No one was going to touch Leo though. Leo was gone to wherever you sent him. Leo was out of the picture.”

“Who, Jacks? Say who you mean.”

Jacks shook his head. “I … I’m not sure. Okay, see, here’s the thing. See, I didn’t poison everyone.”

“I believe you.”

“Really?” Jacks paused in surprise. “And I didn’t mean to shoot your boyfriend either. What I said to you last year was true. I only wanted to wound Leo so that I could take him back to Yuri. But the unlucky thing that happened was me shooting your boyfriend. Because I would have served a couple of months if I had just shot Leo, but … Well, you know how it went down.

“So, Yuri had Mickey come to me. He said, ‘City Hall wants a name to attribute to the Balanchine poisoning so that the Family can put it behind them.’ And I took the fall.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Mickey said he’d take care of me once I got out.”

“But what does that have to do with Natty and me?”

Jacks rolled his eyes. “So I said, ‘What happens when I’m out and Anya Balanchine and her sister are grown women? What stops them from shooting me right between the eyes in payback for all these things I’ve done?’ And Mickey said he would handle you.”