Crown, however, doesn’t hesitate. Not for a moment.
He takes off the glove on his right hand and drops it to the ground, exposing the razor-sharp fingernails beneath.
And he stabs his arm straight through Villiam’s heart.
Villiam, Crown and I each let out a cry—Villiam’s of agony, Crown’s of anguish and mine of horror. Luca collapses, gasping for breath. The hold on me breaks, and I immediately rush to Luca’s side. I place his head in my lap.
“Are you all right?” I ask. “Please, please be all right.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, and he doesn’t speak for almost a minute. Just when I am certain he is gone, he manages, “I’m fine. Just a migraine.”
“Thank goodness,” I say, over and over. I kiss his cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
He takes a deep breath, but his expression remains rigid. “I know.”
Crown pulls his arm out from Villiam’s chest, and my father falls face-first into the grass. His usually clean shirt is stained a deep scarlet. Even knowing everything he’s done, all the hurt he’s caused me, I still cry out. Another member of my family is dead.
“You killed my little boy.” Tears spill from Crown’s eyes. He grabs his glove off the ground and covers his blood-soaked hand. “Evil, evil man.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I help Luca to his feet, but he’s so weak that he needs to lean on me for support. Not that I have much to give him. I’m so shaky from crying that I can barely stand myself. Like mine, his hair is stringy with sweat, and his whole body feels hot to the touch. “Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask him.
He winces. “I’m fine.”
“What do we do with him?” I ask, nodding toward Villiam’s body, which I refuse to look at. Several hours ago, he was my father. Now he’s a killer. It’s going to take me more than a few minutes to be able to process that. For now, I can only feel as though I’ve lost someone else I loved. Someone who betrayed me.
How much of my love was genuine and not the result of his manipulation?
How much was his?
“Move him to his caravan,” Crown snarls. “Then leave him for someone else to find.”
I startle at Crown’s tone. He so rarely says anything hurtful; his words are almost always full of kindness and encouragement. The harsh look on his face, the blood on his arm—this is a Crown I don’t recognize.
The Crown after Blister’s death.
“We’ll walk back to Kahina’s caravan,” I say. “She’s probably worried sick.” And I have no desire to stay here, with my father dead on our floor.
“You can summon Nicoleta,” Crown says, “if you don’t want to move him yourself.”
I examine my father’s body. “No. I should do it.” I can’t keep allowing Nicoleta to deal with all of my problems for me. And he was my father, not hers.
While Luca rests against the table, Crown and I pick Villiam up. I grab him under the arms, and Crown grabs his feet. I cringe. I have no desire to touch him or to be within five hundred feet of him. But we can’t leave him here. So I cast my moth illusion, and we carry him arduously to his caravan. We lay him on the floor by his bookcase.
Afterward, I dunk my hands in the water basin in our tent to wash away the smell of his cologne. I wipe the snot and sweat from my face, and Crown comfortingly rubs my back.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“I can’t believe it,” I say. “I can’t believe he did this to me. To us.”
Crown, Luca and I walk down the path to Kahina’s caravan, and I continue to cloak us in the illusion of moths. This is a strictly residential neighborhood, made up primarily of schools, homes and orphan tents. I picture Zhihao, Jiafu’s younger brother, and how he will cope with the news of Jiafu’s death.
Those who aren’t fighting by Skull Gate are packing and hiding in their caravans, as if prepared to leave at any moment. Several caravans are missing from their usual spots—perhaps they’ve already left. The usual smells of kettle corn and bonfires are gone. Everything smells of the smoke still smoldering over Skull Gate.
I bang on Kahina’s door until my fist hurts. She opens it and pulls me into a hug. “Sweetbug, sweetbug,” she says. “I was so worried. What’s happened to you?” She eyes the blood on Crown’s arm.
Kahina helps us inside the caravan, and I immediately collapse on her cushions. The other Trunks in my mind fly open, unable to be contained a second longer, and suddenly Kahina’s caravan is quite full with her, me, Luca, Crown, Nicoleta, Hawk, Tree and Unu and Du...as well as Kahina’s many potted plants.
“What happened?” Nicoleta asks. “Crown, your arm, are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” he says softly.
All eyes turn to me to tell the story. I take a deep breath, slide my hand into Luca’s for support and begin.
I have to stop several times to cry, or to hear the way my words hang in the air—to hear the truth in them. Villiam, my father, killed the illusions, and he’s been planning to since the moment that I created them. The entire time I’d been paranoid about the killer watching us, I’d been right. He had been watching us. For much longer than I imagined.
And the worst part is to remember him at Blister’s and Venera’s funerals, helping us dig the graves. And how he comforted me after every single death. I was so naïve. And he...he’d been so cruel tonight. I’d never heard such harsh words escape him. I trusted him. I considered him my family. And that’s how he thought of me all this time. Not as a daughter but merely a tool.
But, still, I’m not sure about that. I don’t think I ever will be.
“All that matters is that we’re safe now,” I say.
“You killed him?” Unu asks Crown. “You killed the proprietor?”
“What was it like?” Du asks.
Nicoleta hushes them as Crown pales. “It’s rude to bring up things like that.”
“That man got what he deserved,” Crown says. “That’s all I have to say about it.”
And yet, I grieve for him. I grieve for the man I always thought of as my father.
“And, Luca,” Kahina says, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “A bit nauseous. Agni used charms to make me pass out. And my head hurts, of course, but that will pass.”
“Is there anything I can get for you?” she asks.
“Do you have any gin?”
She clicks her tongue. “Afraid not.”
“But there’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” Nicoleta says. “If each of us are tied to some...person, why not simply kill us anywhere? Why bring us all the way north, into the middle of a war? Villiam could’ve carried out his plans in the Down-Mountains, anywhere.”
“Because Sorina is a charm-worker, obviously,” Luca says. We wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t, as if that explanation is sufficient.
“I’m still not sure I understand you,” Nicoleta says with a hint of annoyance.
“Charms only work in close proximity. I had protective charms, but they only worked if I wore them. If one of you—us—are killed, it doesn’t mean anything unless we’re close enough to the person to whom we’re tied.”
You. Us. I’m reminded once more that Luca is one of the illusions, another person I made up. Which means that everything he remembers about his life before Gomorrah is a lie. He never had a life before Gomorrah.
I squeeze his hand. He doesn’t squeeze back.
“So are we going to leave now?” Hawk asks. “Gomorrah will go back south?”
“Who’s going to be proprietor now?” Unu asks.
“Luca could do it,” Du says. “Luca’s a genius, aren’t you, Luca?”
I am almost hurt that Du didn’t say anything about me. I was Villiam’s protégée. I’ve been training to become the proprietor for a long time, but no one had expected it to happen so soon.
But I cannot imagine myself succeeding Villiam. Not after everything he’s done. I don’t want anything to do with him or the Gomorrah family.