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MAYURI'S POV
February (4 Months Later)
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My neck didn't feel strong enough to hold up the weight of my head, and some moments after swallowing my oblivion, I slipped down the rabbit hole, straight into the dark and gory intestines of Wonderland, all twenty-three feet of them.
The white Xanax pill was a familiar visitor that had turned my stomach into an extended-stay hotel. It took up residence, wore the provided slippers, and donned the fluffy, monogrammed robes. It put its feet up on the table and smoked a cigar with one hand while channel surfing with the other.
Caroline reached out and gently pushed me down against the pillows. I let her, because it was easier to let waves crash over me than to try and surf. "Good girl," I heard her say, and then she sighed, looked away, and I wondered what she was thinking about.
"That's what my mother used to tell me." Caroline's voice was soft, dreamy, and coming from far away. "When I was little and ate all my vegetables. When I was a little older and I stopped telling her lies about my uncle." A grisly smile flickered over her face. "Whenever I did something she thought made me seem normal. Good girl, Care Bear. See, it's not so difficult to do what Mommy tells you."
My skin crawled. Caroline noticed.
"Oh, yes," she said, the words airy in a careless, flippant way. "I did make that up about Uncle Arjan."
Talking with her was sometimes like watching trashy daytime television. You'd hear something outrageous, ridiculous even, and you'd be on her line, a little metal hook through your lip. All she had to do was reel you in.
"You must have been so happy," I said, hating her even though my voice didn't, "driving them apart like that."
A smirk of self-satisfaction settled on her lips. "I didn't. He denied it. Cried about it. Begged me to tell the truth, to just say that I'd made it up because I was angry with him for taking my father's place." Her face turned hard, the unforgiving set of her lips and cheeks like marble. "It was," she pronounced, disgust dripping from every word, "disgusting. The way he blubbered like a child."
Seeing her then, an unrepentant snake sitting on the edge of my bed, within striking distance, sent my heart into stabbing pain. It was like her words were invisible voodoo, pricking pins into me, each one not gentle and precise, but thrust long and hard, like she was preparing for a javelin throw.
"Did I scare you?"
I shook my head, but it was too late. She'd already seen the fear on my face. I didn't even know why I kept up the pretense of courage. It was false bravado, the kind of courage that came as quickly as it left. I was not a lion-hearted girl. I was rabbit, snared in a hunter's trap, and my time was running out.
We both heard noises coming from the bathroom, clatters and pit-pats of soles slapping against cheap linoleum. Reed, my only flimsy defense against Caroline's capricious cruelty. I waited for the swing of the door, but Reed began to hum, some old jingle that used to play on television every year around Christmas, and with a start, I realized how long it had been.
I'd missed Christmas. I'd missed my parent's anniversary and Aaya's birthday and winter formal and the stupid fights about who would put up the Christmas tree—and the even bigger one about who would take down the Christmas tree—and our family tradition of staying up until midnight every year to watch the ball drop in Times Square on television, all of us crammed in Mom and Dad's bed.
My breath left me. All of it was gone. I'd been conscious of the time passing, even with all the hours I'd lost in a drugged stupor, but until that moment, the enormity of the loss never quite penetrated.
It was like when I used to wake up to Kelly Clarkson blasting from my phone's alarm and press the snooze button. It seemed like time was infinite then, in those in-between moments of dawn, when catching a few more minutes of sleep seemed more important than jumping out of my warm bed to get ready for school.
"She told him they should live apart. For my sake. It was only because she didn't trust me enough to believe me, but she didn't trust him enough to rule it out. He moved out. Lives abroad," said Caroline. "She used to visit him." Not a trace of sadness was in her voice.
"How did she die?" It was strange that I didn't know.
"Trial by fire."
"What does that even mean?"
Caroline shrugged. She had grown tired of the conversation, I could tell, and her hand twitched toward me. "Lie down." Fingers worked over me, arranging my pliable body like a ball-jointed doll. "Tilt your head," she instructed, and I did so.
My head was on the pillow, hair fanning around me like a dark halo. Some of the long tendrils, straight except where they curled at the ends, had been artfully tossed over my neck and chest. It was supposed to look sexy, but in actuality, it was anything but. My hair hadn't been washed in a week, and I knew it looked as stringy as it felt. My scalp was sweaty and my armpits even more so.
Nothing about tonight would be beautiful. Especially not me.
"You're lucky you have such long legs," she said, clucking her tongue and grinning at me like we were pals, just girlfriends chatting in the restroom before heading to our next class. "And those big brown doll eyes." She sighed in envy.
I finally asked the question that had been simmering inside me ever since she'd admitted her accusations against her uncle were lies. "Was Baron another lie?"
Caroline hummed and her long, nimble fingers unbuttoned my jeans and pulled down the fly. "Kick them off," she said, and when I didn't, she began to yank.
Whenever we stopped and had a chance to shower, she'd let me wash myself, but the Venus razor she hoarded to herself, insisting I couldn't be trusted with it. It was humiliating, letting her crouch between my legs and slide the sharp blades over my skin, holding perfectly still and praying that she wouldn't nick me.
As bad as that was, it would have been nothing compared to the shame of having hairy legs revealed when my jeans came off, and I raised my head long enough enough to make sure my legs were just as bare as they'd been this morning when Caroline had dry-shaved me.
"I don't think you were raped," I said, closing my eyes when I felt her fingers skip up my calf, over my knee, and shimmy to my upper thigh. "I think you're an actress."
"Who's my audience?"
"The whole world. Me, maybe. Reed, definitely."
Her fingers stopped moving. "Is that right?" The words were slow, deliberate. Weighed with calm.
"You're a fucking psycho, but you were never abused, were you? It's a catchphrase to you, a gimmick. You know it's the one thing that makes people uncomfortable, guilty and ashamed enough to listen to you, to do what you want." I couldn't stop the words from coming, couldn't stop looking at her as I went on the offensive, claws unsheathed.
Her face was pristine, unruffled in its delicate, serene beauty. It was her mask, the one she wore when things weren't quite going her way, and the barely-there flutters of her eyelashes meant she was thinking hard and thinking fast.
"You've warped your brother. Turned Reed into the same dark, writhing, twisting creature as you. You're like that thing that's left behind, hopelessly in agony, squirming in King's Cross Station when Harry dies and sees Dumbledore in limbo. You're what's left of Voldemort," I said, my babble coming out in a stream of words that I could barely sound out, my mouth dry and tongue incapacitated.
"You talk a lot," said Caroline. Her voice was hard. "It's just too bad you don't know what you're talking about." And then she propelled herself forward and kissed me. Her mouth was hard, too.
I struggled at first, until I realized it wasn't a kiss, she just needed me to lie still until it was over. Her thumbs dug into my upper arms, holding me down, and she kept her face flush against mine, mouth bruising mine until she was sure her point was made. Then, and only then, did she let me go.
"It was a party at his place. Over the summer. Reed was with his friends, that gangly Chinese boy and that bitchy loudmouth."
Korean. Fenris is Korean. And the bitch could only be Dom.
Caroline glanced to the bathroom door, still closed. "I was excited to be in Baron's bedroom. Sitting on his bed, looking at his stuff. It felt so intimate. Like it was the start of the rest of my life. And I thought, yeah, I can do this. I can do high school. I can be good at this." She cleared her throat. "Mostly, I was just drunk."
"I wanted to be better than the rest of them. I wanted to have a hot senior boyfriend. I wanted to be friends with Reed's friends. I didn't have anything to trade for it except sex. And I learned a long time ago that even the whisper of sex can hold power."
She was talking about Uncle Arjan.
"I didn't realize I didn't like what was happening until we were both undressed. And then it was too late, I guess. No one told me there was such a short window of time I had to end it and leave. And by then...by then I just had to go through with it. I knew it was wrong when I saw how much blood there was, but he just told me to take a shower with him, and he was so handsome when he wanted something, Mayuri. Do you remember how handsome he was?" Caroline smiled, as if reliving that horrible memory. "So I did. I never said no. Not to the shower. Not to anything."
"You can say no at any time," I whispered. "There is never a window on that. No always means no." I was so sleepy, so tired, and even though it was one year too late, I wanted to tell Caroline this.
"No is never no," said Caroline with a weary laugh that sounded about a hundred years old. "No just means no until someone ups the ante and offers up something sweeter. He wanted me, I wanted what he could offer me."
"That's not how sex works."
"It's how everything works," she corrected me. A scowl played on her face. "You should know this by now, Mayuri."
Me? Why should I know this?
"You didn't want any part of this, until you were the one to come up with the idea of burning Baron's body in his parent's own house." She laughed. "You see? Your morals were traded for freedom. Your friend Matt's life was traded for yours. Everything is valuable, because everything has a price."
Caroline laid down next to me, head sharing my pillow, shoulders touching. "I didn't kill him because he raped me," she said softly. "I killed him because he didn't hold up his end of the bargain. He said he didn't know I was a virgin and he didn't want to deal with the clinginess of a sophomore slut. He laughed, said it wasn't even good for him." She turned to me and screwed up her face, eyes squinting shut, cheeks two round balls of flesh, lips contorted into a grimace. "He made this face at me and said this was how I looked the entire time."
A shiver passed over me, and Caroline, feeling my shoulder edge away from her, looked at me with irritation. "Don't be so naive," she spat. She leaned over my body and clenched her fingers into me in an overt show of ownership. "It's not your face that makes or breaks you." Abruptly, she released me, and my breath escaped in a terrified gasp. "The best weapon," she said, "is between your legs."
The door opened and Reed came out, his hair damp and sticking to his forehead like Frankenstein's monster. "Everything okay?" He eyed me, my long legs splayed out on the bed, the white cotton undies, and the way Caroline loomed over me. "I heard raised voices."
"Just a little girl talk!" Caroline sing-songed. She sprang from the bed and made her way to Reed, giving him a peck on the cheek. "I'm going to take a long shower."
I saw Reed's face burn and I knew the emphasis his sister placed on the word long wasn't lost on him. Both of us knew that Caroline wanted us to have sex and was giving us the time to do it.
I wasn't sure how I felt, watching Caroline sashay into the bathroom. Her rape wasn't the brutal, violent thing we had all probably imagined it to be. It was callous and cooly calculated.
Caroline had been, to my horror, a willing participant in her own rape. It made no sense and I couldn't reconcile her actions to my own understanding.
The water turned on inside, splashes of water falling sharply against the tile of the shower.
"Put your jeans on," said Reed, looking away. "You don't have to do what she tells you."
Didn't we, though? I sat up, feeling dirty and violated in more ways than one, and tugged the fabric up my legs until I was covered.
"Reed," I began to say, readying myself to beg, but he shook his head.
"Please don't." His voice was strained. He turned away from me and ran a hand over his face, shading his eyes from view. "You know I can't."
"You said you couldn't let this happen to another girl. Not on your watch, remember?" I whispered, watching the muscles in his back tighten as I quoted his own words back to him. "She's so deep inside your head, Reed, that you can't even see that her lies and the truth are two totally different things."
"It's my fault!" He spun around, eyes red-rimmed. "I lied so much, I lied about everything, and not only sometimes but all of the time, Mayuri. So when Caro told me what Uncle Arjan was doing to her, our mom didn't believe me either, because I was the boy who cried wolf. If I...if I hadn't been such a little shit, then maybe I could have saved my sister."
"You couldn't have." I stared at him, into those blue eyes I had once loved, into those spidery red threads criss-crossing over the whites of his eyes. "You couldn't have, Reed. Listen to me. Your sister is not yours to save. She is not the damsel in distress, the princess in the tower. She loves her distress. She wants so badly to be fucked up that she does whatever she can to achieve it."
I took a deep breath. "You may have been the boy who cried wolf, but she's the girl who cried rape. Twice. And both times, she got what she wanted. Don't you see how insane she is?"
He didn't. Or he couldn't. Or maybe did he did, and he willfully blinded himself to what was so obvious to me - Caroline Norcross was an animal, and one day, someone would put her down like one.
"She is going to kill me. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But don't fool yourself into thinking it won't be your fault," I said harshly. "Don't think that you didn't put a bulls-eye on my back the second you held me at gunpoint and forced me into your car."
Reed took a shuddering breath and closed his eyes. "I just wanted something normal. I just wanted you."
You wanted to ruin me. You wanted to extinguish my light so I would be in the dark, cowering like a frightened child, just like you.
"I know, Reed," I whispered. I held my arms open to him and without suspicion, he burrowed into them. His familiar body closed to mine, his neck exposed, my fingers itching to wrap around it.
My heart was baying for my freedom. For Reed to pay. Thump, thump, thump.
His shirt rode up in the back. I could see, tucked into the waistband of his jeans, the stiletto.
I envisioned myself stabbing him again. This time not once, but twice, thrice, many times. Every blow would be a killing blow.
I sucked in a breath as his arms clung to me, his breath warming the tender breasts above my heart.
I didn't have the strength to do it. My body wasn't my own, anymore. First, it belonged to Caroline. Then, to the drug she forced down my throat. My fingers didn't remember their old strength.
"I love you, Mayuri," he said, uttering that old, familiar lie.
He slumped to the side, knowing I wouldn't say it back. One arm flung over my waist, preventing me from leaving. Reed was a light sleeper. The slightest movement and he would wake, his blue eyes staring at me in the dark like two glowing moons, lustrous with terror.
The tiredness was a part of me now, the way Reed's depraved love was a part of him. His love was a needle, skewering me to him. His every action laced our flesh tighter together, thread unbroken no matter how much I struggled.
I wondered how many minutes had passed, how much longer I could count on Caroline's absence. Soon, surely, she would come out. Soon she would see that Reed and I had not performed as her little flying monkeys.
"I hate you," I said, watching with satisfaction the way his face blanched.
And then I turned on my side, tears sliding down my cheeks. His arm lifted and I heard a clink of metal. The knife on the nightstand. And then the weight of his arm on my hip was back.
Inside the bathroom, the water still flowed.
The best weapon is between your legs.
I turned around. Reed's body adjusted to mine. His blue eyes regarded me. He was waiting for me to make the next move.
The best weapon is between your legs.
"Why do you like me so much?" I whispered.
The best weapon is between your legs.
"I don't know." His forehead pinched, like he'd never thought about it before. "I...I thought you were like me."
"And am I?"
Mutely, he shook his head.
I pressed closer to him, saw his lips part, and as my face angled over his, for a moment we shared the same breath. The look on his face arrested me. He looked at me in a shining, earnest way, like he would reach into his chest, rip out his heart, and lay it in my hand. And in that one moment, I wondered who Reed could have been if he had been anyone, anyone other than this.
All things truly wicked start from innocence. It felt branded onto my mind.
My lips fluttered over his, a graze of butterfly wings, and then our mouths met. I sensed the energy inside him, the parts he didn't want to show me, the stiffness and tension in his shoulders, and I knew he was holding himself back with great difficulty.
My eyes, which had drooped closed, now opened, and I saw the gleam of the knife behind his head. I understood then what Caroline meant. I had traded my hate for something better - revenge.
Everything had a price.
The best weapon is between your legs.
I deepened the kiss, and pushed at his shoulders until he lay on his back, panting up at me.
The best weapon is between your legs.
My knees straddled him on either side and I dipped my head, kissed his neck, sucked roughly on the skin until I heard his guttural moan of pleasure.
The best weapon is between your legs.
I was used to sleeping next to him, to waking up next to him.
This would be the last time we shared the same bed.
This would be the last time I lay side by side with his heart.
And so, because this would be the last time, I memorized the gold in his eyelashes, the curve of his mouth, the sharp cut of his jaw.
He was beautiful in a way I hadn't thought boys could be beautiful. There was an aura of doom around him, and maybe that was what had attracted me to Reed Norcross—and Reeve Norgard—and the implausible, imperfect world he offered.
You're wrong, Caroline. The best weapon is not between my legs. But you got me to thinking about a different kind of weapon, and for that I'm grateful, but it's time for me to go now.
I was about to make a grab for the knife, but a soft chime broke the stillness, and we both froze.
"Shit," Reed swore. "My phone." He dug it out of his pocket. It wasn't his old phone - that had been tossed back in Indiana so the police couldn't track it. This one was a prepaid phone picked up at a Walmart, what my dad called a burner phone.
His eyes met mine, shocked. "It's Dom," he said.
Dominika Mikhailov.
I took a deep breath. Dom was a lion in ways I never could be. Part of me thought she would be proud for what I was about to do - what I would have already done if her message hadn't interrupted me.
"You're still in touch?" I said, minimizing my words so he didn't hear the tremor.
He didn't answer me, just kept staring at the screen with the open, intense look he always wore around me. The force of his stare made my entire body tingle. Whatever hate he held in his heart for the girl who dumped him still rivaled whatever love he still felt for her.
I waited for him to turn the phone around to face me, but he didn't.
"Reed?" I asked, voice quiet. If only I could grab that phone...
His eyes stared at the phone, unseeing, and rage flooded through me, burning hot in my veins. "Look at me," I uttered, each word hard as stone. "Look at me."
He did.
We stared at each other until he looked away first, blinking hard at the stiletto. For one horrible moment, I wondered if he had seen through my ruse, but then he turned back to me, indecision etched on his face.
"I don't...she doesn't matter to me. You matter, Mayuri."
Empty words, Reed, empty air.
His phone chimed again. I waited until Reed's eyes went glassy, and then, while he was still scanning the message, I snatched the knife.
My fingers were so sweaty that the cool metal almost slipped from my fingers. My heart drummed, the tempo rising into a crescendo that deafened my ears and made the whole world go white.
Reed mouthed my name, and the phone dropped to his lap, facedown. My hand shook, but I maintained eye contact with him and tightened my grip on the hilt so hard that my fingernails dug into my palm.
"Don't," he gasped, the word mangled in his throat.
He tried to reach for my wrist, but my answer to that was to press the tip against flesh, to push just enough that his eyes grew wild and both his hands raised to his ears. "I'm backing off," he said, desperation slurring the words. "See?"
The Xanax was no match for what was running through my veins right now. It was pure fire, adrenaline spiked with the mightiest of pick-me-ups, the kind of performance enhancer that could be felt, but never sold.
As I saw his fearful eyes I felt the rush of power that made me wonder about Baron's last moments. Was this how he looked when the blade was at his throat? When he felt the first slice? Was this how Caroline felt when she held a life in her hands?
"Don't," said Reed again, casting an eye at the bathroom door. I noticed he was careful to keep his voice down.
The stiletto was pressed just above my navel. It would be a bad death, a gutting that would be painful and slow, and almost certainly fatal.
And I was ready to do it.
"Don't make me," I responded, slowly getting off the bed, not taking my eyes off Reed for a second. "Give me the cell phone."
"You won't do it," he said, hands scrambling to find the phone. He looked at me with defiance.
"I will." I laughed and it terrified me how mad I sounded, how inhumane. "You think this life is something precious to me?" With my free hand, I gestured to the hotel room. "Even Alice got to go home."
"I love you."
There it was again, that tired phrase, that emotional Band-Aid that was meant to excuse every-fucking-thing he did to me. Like clockwork, he trotted it out like a secret password that would make everything okay.
"I told you before," I said quietly, "that if you loved me, never let me know."
"Give me the knife, Mayuri."
"This," I said, pushing the knife, "is what I think of your love." Upon the last word, I had to bite down to keep myself from crying out.
"No!"
Gasping, I realized that it didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. It had only just broken the skin, but from the horrified look on Reed's face, I knew that it had stained my tank top. It felt like I wasn't in my own body, but that someone far more sure of herself had taken control.
"Put the phone on the corner of the bed, and then back up to the headboard. All the way," I instructed.
Reed's fingers trembled but he did as I told him. After placing the phone on the edge of the bed, he crab-crawled backward until his back hit the headboard. With his knees drawn up to his chest, he said, "Take me with you."
I hope one day I don't remember your face. Your smell. The taste of your lips.
As I scooped the phone and clutched it against my chest, I began to walk backward to the door, keeping the knife perpendicular to my stomach. I knew Reed wouldn't pursue me.
The answer had been in front of me this whole time. He'd told me almost every day: I love you. I love you. I love you.
He loved Caroline and me with every fiber of his being. And his love for me was, just barely, more than his bastardized love for his sister. But that difference, that sliver of a difference...that was enough.
I fumbled with the door, difficult to do with one eye on Reed, and when it swung open, and the cold air greeted me, I didn't even care that I was underdressed for February weather.
"Mayuri—"
Whatever his last words were, I didn't hear them. I slammed the door and spun around, trying to get my bearings. Unlike the previous town, this one was a little bigger, and across the motel parking lot was a street where cars were stopped at an intersection. Just beyond that, a Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
I took off in that direction, not breaking speed even when I made it past the place where Caroline's car was supposed to be parked. It wasn't there. No sign of Ethan and no Gia. I didn't have time to think about why that could be, I just kept going, hair flying behind me, heart burning.
I didn't look behind me, even though I was terrified that at any moment a hand would clamp around my arm. That Reed would materialize and whisk me back to the dark hotel room, possessive and greedy hands on my body, Caroline's smug eyes glowing at me in the dark like a cat's.
My legs pumped faster and faster, in a way that I didn't even run in a mandatory gym class, and when there was a gap in the stream of cars, I took my chance and ran across the street. And I kept running and running until I reached the doors of the Olive Garden, almost collapsing agains them.
Free.
The word didn't really register at that minute, because all I wanted to do was throw up. I slid myself through the door and half-staggered up to the hostess, whose smile transfigured into one one of abject shock and concern once she saw my bedraggled appearance.
"Miss, do you need help?"
"Call 911," I said. "My name is Mayuri Krishnan and I was kidnapped four months ago."
She stared at me, frozen, and then sprang into action, muttering about getting her manager.
I leaned my weight against the podium and fought for breath, every muscle in my body screaming. The knife was still in my hands, but in the shock of my entrance, I doubted the hostess had seen it. I let it fall to the podium, right on top of the laminated menus.
I still had the phone, too. I flipped it open to see a Facebook page and a message from Fenris. I didn't care what it said, so I got out of there and found the green button with a phone icon on it.
I punched in my home number and wondered what I would do if no one was there to answer. Luckily, my mother picked up on the third ring. "Hello?" her cultured voice said, shooting euphoria in my chest, exploding like fireworks.
"Mom?"
Silence. Then, in a voice that sobbed every syllable, "Mayuri?"
"Mom, I got away." I slid to the floor, back against the podium. "I'm safe. I found people."
"Where are you? Where are you?" she was shouting now, and in the background, I could hear my father's voice demanding to know who she was talking to, and then, with both of them on speakerphone, I began to talk.
I left out the part about needing medical attention, because that would only make Mom cry harder. I also left out the other things that would hurt them, but I told them where I was and I told them that Reed and Caroline were still at the hotel, and then I told them that the hostess hadn't returned yet, so I'd better call 911 myself and make sure the police were coming.
"Mayuri, call right back," my mom cried into the phone. "Promise me, promise me."
"I promise."
"I'll come get you," Dad said, sounding choked. "I'll fly out right this second."
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
"We love you," Mom said. "We love you so much." The rest of her words were lost as she cried into the phone, and then Dad took it from her and said, very calmly, that I had better call the local authorities and make sure they had someone come take my statement right away, as well as send a car to the hotel to apprehend the Norcross siblings.
And that was what I did.
When the blue and red flashing lights came, police vehicles parked right in front of the doors and men in black walking toward me, I slowly stood up and said in a steady voice, speaking to myself as much as my parents, "I'm okay, they're here now. I'm going to be okay."
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Hi, all! Make sure to check out my other YA fantasy-thriller, Deadlies! It features mayhem, magic, and murder. And Malice Girls, which is...well...self-explanatory. Let's just say it's about a girl embarking on a quest of revenge at her boarding school and there may or may not be an evil twin involved. I'm really excited about these stories, so please, if you would like to help support me and you like my writing, check them out. If you liked SS, I think you'd really enjoy these, too.
So, here we have it. The penultimate chapter of Silver Stilettos. There is JUST ONE MORE and I promise, it is going to be way less crazy than this, and it may even warm your heart to see what happens next for Mayuri. I did consider this chapter coming from Caroline's POV but honestly, we've been freaked out by her so much already that we didn't really need to get inside her head to know what makes her the way she is. And it's probably creepier to have Caroline's sadism told from Mayuri's POV, anyway.
Did you like that Mayuri saved herself or would you have preferred Fenris' plan to be what saved her? Did you like how this chapter progressed? Any suggestions? :)
P.S. This song is totally what I imagine as Caroline's theme song, lmao. It fits her so perfectly.