Page 15 of The Initial Insult

She yells for Hugh first, which I expected. Then Brynn and Gretchen and David. At least two of them are actively vomiting on themselves, and Felicity knows that. This is true panic; complete loss of logical function. She pulls on her chains, gouging her own wrists in the process, small drops of blood splattering onto the floor at her feet. She’s kicking, too, lunging at me as she screams. One of her jester slippers flies off and hits a ceiling beam, fluttering back down, light and useless as the bell chimes.

It takes a few minutes for her to burn down, but when she does Felicity Turnado is a goddamn mess. Tears have streaked her makeup and she’s worked herself into a sweat, her flimsy costume sticking to her skin and showing every goose bump that ripples to the surface once she’s done throwing her fit. She’s kicked up a fair amount of coal dust, too, blackening both of her legs up to the knee.

“Done?” I ask.

“Tress,” she rasps at me, cap now hanging down over one eye. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Let me tell you,” I say, pulling my chair up. It’s an old one, something I salvaged from a third-floor bedroom. It’s decorative, small and spindly, a chair for a lady to sit on in front of her mirror while doing her makeup. That mirror was broken when I found it, the drawers of the vanity swollen with rot and sticking forever shut.

“I’m going to make you talk to me,” I say.

“You don’t have to chain me up to get me to talk to you,” Felicity shouts, voice breaking on talk.

“But I do if I want you to be honest.”

She settles in her chains, eyes bright and boring into mine. “What do you want?”

“I want to know what happened the night my parents disappeared.”

Chapter 12

Felicity

It’s the worst thing she could say to me.

If she wanted money, I could make sure she got it. Needed a car to drive out of her shitty life, I’d buy her one. But I can’t give her what I don’t have.

“I don’t—” She holds her hand up, and I obediently fall silent.

“Let me tell you what’s going on here before you finish that sentence.” She gets out of the chair and comes closer to me, hands on either side of the crevice I’m chained inside of.

“You’re in a coal chute. Those manacles are anchored into limestone with masonry screws. I’ve learned a lot about containment in my life, and trust me, you’re not getting out.”

“This is insane,” I spit at her, not sparing my words. “Hugh will be looking for me.”

“Hugh is currently distracted,” she says, and she sounds so confident that I feel a ripple of unease, something different from the panic that hit earlier. Before I was an animal, reacting with venom. Now I’m a human . . . a scared one who hears a voice inside her head say, This is really happening. Then, underneath that, the little voice that whispers in my ear at night . . . You deserve it.

Fuck that, is usually how I respond to the voice before falling asleep. And I do the same now. I’m Felicity Turnado, and I can’t just disappear from a party without anybody noticing.

“My friends will know I’m gone,” I say. “Remember what those are? Friends?”

That last bit is shitty, but so is hitting someone with a brick. Tress only shakes her head, not bothered in the least.

“You really need to know the consequences before you talk.” I go still, my voice a dead thing in my throat, gaze following Tress as she walks back to the chair, the bulb above her head making her eyes dark pools.

“I want to know what happened that night,” she says again. “But I’ve got a lot of other things to say to you, too. So we’re going to take our time, and we’re going to talk everything out.”

I nod enthusiastically. This is something I’ve actually wanted to do forever.

“But,” Tress says, holding one finger in the air. “If I don’t like what you say . . .”

She walks over to a pile of bricks, one that looks like it’s been sitting there since the beginning of time, left over from what they didn’t use on the house. Tress picks one up, comes closer to my little nook. My pulse jumps, tight and hot where the metal bites into my wrist.

“If I don’t like what you say . . .” She fades off, shrugging her chin over her shoulder. Behind her there’s a smooth brick wall, the face uninterrupted, each brick notched into the next in a tightly constructed pattern. One section is slightly brighter than the rest, out of place.

“There were two coal chutes,” Tress says. “I practiced.”

Chapter 13