Page 373 of Hell Hath No Fury
Now, she didn’t respond for long enough that I finally gave up and put my open computer beside me on the passenger seat so I could pull forward in the drive-thru line again. Finally, I reached the pick-up window and the female employee handed me the paper bag and shake with a jaunty smile and wave.
“Happy holidays!” she called as I pulled away without responding.
Fuck the holidays.
The only present looming for me was one delivered in the form of a swan and who the fuck knew when I’d find it. The closest I would come to opening a present was unwrapping my burger and fries.
It was only when I hit my first red light that it occurred to me to check the damn food for exactly that. My hands shook as I ripped open the bag, fries tumbling out across the center console. I flipped open the cardboard box holding the burger and there it was.
Printed on receipt paper from the restaurant.
A pixelized image of a black swan that was the hacker’s trademark.
Only this one was wearing a fucking Santa hat.
‘Tis the season, indeed.
On the back, a series of numbers I decoded in the time it took me to blink.
Christmas Eve at Club7. Find out if you’ve been naughty or nice.
CHAPTER TWO
Finnegan
Christmas Eve was a bitch.
Not much to celebrate when you’re nineteen years old and alone without a person to care for you in the entire fucking world the night before the first anniversary of your mother’s death. I hadn’t even heard from S1gn3t since I’d confessed I would miss her.
Still, I was nineteen, so at least I could bury my sorrows in beer.
The taste of it was yeasty on the back of my tongue as I surged with the crowd of bodies writhing on the dancefloor of Club7. It was a dark, cavernous space lit by the fluorescent blue, red, and white glow of neon lights. The pale face of the girl currently straddling one of my thighs was tinged blue like the dead.
A flash of my mum’s face crossed my mind’s eye.
I pushed away, my tall body cutting through the warm bodies like a knife through butter.
Suddenly, the cold, lonely misery of the empty mansion my cousin owned was preferable to the mass of bodies I’d sought to drown myself in.
I tugged at the collar of my black tee, seeking the chain around my throat. The tiny pendant at the hollow of my throat was dwarfed by my fingers. A little gold-plated rendering of a swan I’d saved all my money to buy my mother for Christmas last year.
I’d never had an opportunity to give it to her, so I wore it instead. A reminder of her I held close to my skin.
She’d loved the creatures, long necked and graceful with a surprising mean streak that reared its head when they were threatened.
“I want to be like that,” she’d murmur looking at the old internet print-out of The Threatened Swan by a Dutch artist I could never remember the name of we had hung up in the kitchen. “Beautiful, but deadly.”
She’d been beautiful, all right, but deadly only in the way that her beauty had been the thing to kill her in the end.
It seemed both perverted and appropriate that the 0bs1d14n Sw4n used the same emblem. If they had answers about my mother’s murder, it would be a little too much like fate, something I’d never believed in until now.
I pushed aside a guy at the crowded bar and claimed a stool, ignoring his curse and glower. If he wanted to fight me over it, I’d be happy to oblige. There was this restless, seething energy beneath my skin that was swelling to some kind of breaking point.
It was either fight or fuck.
“What can I get you, Red?”
When I turned my head to take in the bartender, I let a low whistle out between my teeth. Her hair was dyed a vibrant orange like a neon tangerine and there were three rings in her lower lip, two through each eyebrow.
