Page 109 of Feed Your Fiends

“B-but I can tell you about Marisol. We dated,” Silas gasps finally, tears rolling down his cheeks. “A long time ago. Before I ever married Delphine.”

“You had a baby with her, a son,” Bart says.

“A baby?” he asks quizzically. “Marisol was never pregnant for me.”

“Liar.”

“If she was, she never told me. I don’t know anything about a son.”

I look to Bart, wondering if he believes that.Do I believe that?

“I want to play nice. I want to be fair,” he says coolly. “Zedd. Show us how sharp those knives are.” He offers Zedd Sylo’s arm. “That’s it. Slice off the thinnest layer.”

Zedd does so without a seco nd thought, not because Bart’s ordering him but because he wants to. He’s mesmerised by the thin membrane, full of silvery hairs. I watch as pinpricks of blood ooze onto the raw, pink flesh left behind as Silas cries rather softly to his credit.

“Fry it,” Bart barks.

It crackles, sizzles, and pops, the sweet scent as horrifying as it is satisfying.

Zedd pulls it from the oil and lays it on a plate he pushes in front of Silas. Just like the chicharrón, there are fat bubbles, and Silas’s cries and snorts sound as piglike as his flesh looks as he melts into animalistic noises.

“Talk,” Bart says, gripping the back of his neck and pressing his lips against the crispy skin. “Or eat. We can go all night. You have so many layers we can peel back.”

Elle

Libellule’s feels like a phantom of its former self as I ease into the dimly lit club with my key. It’s a Friday night, so why are we closed? Especially when the social media hype had been high even after Gant’s stunt with the hose.

“Hale?” I call, my soft boots dragging across the floorboards. “Rie Rie?”

No answer.

The golden balcony railings shimmer in the wisps of silvery moonlight drifting through the windows, and suddenly, a vision of Gant free-falling over the banister shoots to the forefront of my brain.

Gant.

I check the time on my phone, and I’m bathed in a bright blue. Two sixteen. He’d be at the penthouse soon. That gave me less than an hour to get back, although I don’t know why I care to be back on time.

My heart thunders as I wonder where he is. We said no secrets… It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the money, so why isn’t Libellule making any tonight?

I’m about to call out again when I hear a female voice and spot a light in one of the back rooms. Hale’s room. I creep into the hallway and spy through the crack in the door, expecting to see Stassi, but the woman in front of me is too short, her long jet-black hair hanging past her hips.

It’s the same woman Gant had dragged me past on the night of the twins’ party. I remember her loud aesthetic of heavy smokey makeup, glimmering bangles, and so many necklaces that, despite the deep plunge of her corset, her breasts aren’t visible.

Her voice, clearly fuelled by anger, is mingling with Hale’s equally fierce words. The foggy night air from moments before is still fogging my mind because it takes me a second to realise that I can’t understand what they’re saying. Not because I’m not close enough. Not because they’re whispering but because they’re not speaking English.

Not just that, but I can’t even identify the language itself. It doesn’t sound like anything I’d heard of. It’s beautiful, with its intonations and inflections.

I don’t know why it surprises me that Hale’s, at the very least, bilingual. It should be a crime for people as wealthy as the one per cent and their children to never learn a second language, especially when they travel the globe constantly.

Children.Heirs…

Did Gant speak multiple other languages? Insecurity trickles down my spine at the thought. Whatever languages my partner is fluent in, I want to be fluent too, so there’s never a barrier between us. Little digs of side conversations I can’t understand because I’m too lazy to learn.

But is it laziness? Languages are hard as an adult, and what if he spoke three or more? Then, logic settles into me. There are far more barriers between Gant and me than foreign languages. Like him trying to ruin my dance career. Like the fact that we’re from two extremely different worlds that I’m about to shift closer together by a fraction with my earnings. Still, we’re on different planets.

The jingle of the woman’s bangles brings me back to the present as she points a long fingernail at Hale accusingly. The gold is engraved with intricate carvings all around.

Despite the foreignness of the language, the angry undertones and cadence aren’t lost on me. I don’t need to know exactly what she’s saying to understand that she isn’t happy with Hale.

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