Chapter 8

Vincent's POV

Three knocks, a pause, two more, then a single one, every one of them set down with the same spacing, as though whoever was out in the hall had measured the sequence with a ruler before starting.

I came up out of deep water with a yank, and before my eyes were even open my hand had already found the strip of white light in the seam of the curtain; only after that did I place the sound as coming from the other side of the door.

When I got out of bed, the floor wasn't quite where I expected it to be, and the temper came up through my chest and stuck in my throat.

I pulled the door with my whole arm, so the panel banged into the wall and bounced back at me a couple of inches, and the light from the hallway cut in across my shoulder and landed on the tops of my feet.

I was about to ask her whether she had any idea what time this floor still counted as sleeping hours, and the thought that got there ahead of the question was that I wasn't wearing a shirt.

Too late either way. Her eyes rested on me for less than half a second before dropping away, and her throat moved once. The hallway was quiet enough that the swallow carried.

"What is it?" I said, since flattening my voice was the only tool I had on hand.

I meant to keep my eyes nailed to her face, on the theory that holding them there would show me what she was going to try next, but somewhere in the middle they slid.

Below the hem of her nightdress, on the outside of her right knee, there was a scrape gone dark red, a small flap of skin lifted at the edge, the rim of it gone yellow-green, the swelling pushing the skin up until it shone.

I stood there with my mouth open and my head empty for about two seconds.

She got in first. "My mom asked me to bring you breakfast," she said, the smile already in place before the words were out — brows pressed low, the corners of her eyes curved up, her voice softened by half a degree.

"You haven't come downstairs all morning. You barely touched dinner last night."

Looking at her like that, I found the whole performance ridiculous. Out at the slag heaps in Black Creek, when she pointed me toward the road, her face had been blank in the way a person's face is blank when they're reading a notice taped to a wall. The day of the storm, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking up at me, she had been just as clean, without even the suggestion that she wanted something from me.

Now she stood at my door holding a tray and smiling, courteous, a long way past courteous. Fake. I had watched that particular change of face too many times to be fooled by it; everyone around my father does it, and I know the steps by heart.

Which only made me want to see what was underneath.

So I took the tray and let the corners of my mouth come up.

The next second the whole thing went into the trash can beside the door, and the pastries hit the bottom with a dull, wet thud.

Her body moved a beat ahead of her face. She threw herself forward half a step and put a hand down into the can to fish them out, fingertips scraping across the crust of the top one and coming up with nothing but grease, and when she straightened I knew what was in her eyes this time.

"You and your mother came here for the money. You know that as well as I do." I let it out slowly, with the doorframe against my back. "I'm telling you both to keep your heads down. Don't go thinking you can butter me up and be done with it."

She lifted her eyes and put them straight on me. "If you're that scared, then keep an eye on the family money," she said. "Don't wait until the day my mother and I walk off with it to figure out what happened."

For a second I almost relaxed, because there it was, cornered, and she knew it. The docile act was for the money, and one poke brought the real thing up into the open, the same routine as every face my father has kept around him, and she hadn't even bothered to make a graceful exit from it.

I waited for her to pick the smile back up. She didn't.

She scooped the half-eaten pastry out of the can, gray with ash, and swung her arm.

Frosting and sugar came apart against my chest, the crumbs going wide, one small white patch stuck below my collarbone and the rest of it running down my skin. Cold, sticky, the sweetness so thick in my nose it was hard to breathe around it.

Damn it.

"Slip of the hand." She slapped the crumbs off her fingers, and there was something sly in the way she said it, slow, drawn out. "My dear brother won't mind."

Then she bent, lifted the empty plate out of the trash, and went, not missing a step, the corner at the end of the hall swallowing her back whole.

I didn't move until the sweetness reached the back of my throat, and then I raised a hand to wipe at it and only managed to glue my fingers together, nothing coming clean.

In the bathroom, I ran the water as hot as it would go and stood under the shower head and let it bear down from my nape across my shoulders. Under the water I realized I wasn't tired anymore at all, that the weight that had been sitting on the back of my skull had been flipped off by somebody, and the thing it left exposed underneath, I recognized.

What sat underneath was competitiveness, wanting to win and needing the person across from me to know it.

I have never once thought of that as a defect. It's wiring.

Three years on the football field, and every time I stepped onto it I knew what the other side was thinking and which lane I was going to run. Before I quit, the coach told me my reads were better than anyone else's on the team, and that my only real problem was how easily I carried my temper out there with me.

I don't play anymore. The reads didn't go anywhere.

So I understood exactly where the heat in my chest came from: when she threw half a filthy pastry at me, she had walked over to the other side of the line before the kickoff and stood there with her eyes bright, waiting for me to move first.

The round before, she had lost, and lost clean; she drank the cup I had fixed for her without a twitch and told me it tasted good. This round she handed back what she owed me, straight to my face, and threw in a brother on top of it.

I need to get her to drop the face once, somewhere my father can watch it happen. At the table, in the living room, while he's halfway through some story with a glass in his hand. One smile that doesn't land, one glance that slides off toward the edge of a plate, and he'll ask the rest of the questions himself.

The picture cut out. What came back was a different frame: her bending down to reach into the trash, her skirt drawing tight, the scrape on the side of her knee showing half out from under the fabric, red enough to sting the eye.

How in hell had she banged herself up like that?

I put my forehead against the tile and closed my eyes for a while.

I'm probably sick.