Page 2 of Twisted Hearts

I’ve been different since then. A little reckless, maybe. A little aimless. A little feeling like I’m just bouncing around, waiting to crash into something.

Neve, Callie, and the rest of them assume it’s because of the explosion that sent me to hospital with fragments of my new pub embedded in my shoulder and thigh like so many cruel, wooden bullets.

That’s a lot of it, of course. But in the almost four months since that night, my body has healed. And I’ve mourned our family friend, Sean Farrell, who died shielding me, Callie, and Callie’s grandmother Dimitra from the worst of the blast.

But I’m still not the same.

When we were little kids, before Castle became our bodyguard, an older, grizzled street brawler named Eoghan used to watch over Neve and me. We used to sit together in the kitchen of our family home and listen while he told what I now realize as an adult werehorrificallyinappropriate stories for children—tales of his various battles, fights, shootouts, and brushes with the law. And one thing he said back then always stuck with me in particular: when warriors die, they meet the ghosts of those they sent to Heaven or Hell before them.

It was only a terrifying story when I was a little girl.

Now I know it’s true.

Because when I was in that hospital bed getting emergency transfusions as they rushed to stitch up the nicked artery in my leg, I got closer to whatever happens after life than I ever had been before.

And I saw the ghost of the one I sent there first.

The crime I’ve buried for more than a year. The crime that no one knows about.

Everyone looks at me and sees “the good one”. The little angel who’s always played by every rule, charmed every teacher, and aced every test.

When I look in the mirror? I see a darkness.

A killer.

I’d shut it away before the bombing, somehow. I’d kept it buried, hidden in the blur of day-to-day life and my friends and family finding their own happy-ever-afters—Neve with Ares, Cillian with Una, my friend Elsa with my brother-in-law Hades. But when I saw that ghost leering at me, pointing an accusing finger at me, all the walls I’d built around that one act of evil came crashing down like Jericho’s.

And now they won’t go back up. Even though I know what I saw was just the morphine and blood loss talking. Ever since, it feels like I’ve been slowly speeding faster and faster toward a cliff.

Aimless. Just bouncing around.Reckless, after spending my entire twenty-one years on the planet avoiding risk at all costs.

Hence, me being here—wherever “here” may be—with Britney Torres, a blindfold on my face, and a mission to steal something of value in about two minutes.

The mission is part of my initiation into the very exclusive, very secretive Crown Society—a club for “excellent students with driving ambition” at Columbia Business School. It’s sort of like Yale’s Skull and Bones, or the almost mythological Kings and Villains at Lords College in London.

The list of Crown Society alumni allegedly includes Senators, members of Congress, heads of major corporate entities and tech behemoths, and no less thanfiveformer U.S. Presidents. Needless to say, being a member opens doors to a world and opportunities most people can only fantasize about.

The downside is, you have to deal with absolutecuntslike Britney Torres—a senior member of the Crown Society, and unfortunately my “pledge adjudicator”, aka, the bane of my existence over the last three weeks of hazing and initiation tasks.

But honestly, you know what? I’ve been shot at, threatened, declared war upon, and blown up. Britney’s going to have to bring her bitchy mean-girl schtick up about a hundred notches if she thinks she’s going to get to me.

With a ding, the elevator doors finally open. Wherever we are, it’s pretty high, given the length of time we were in the elevator.

“Still feeling fine?” Britney jeers as she leads me out into a cool, air-conditioned space. It smells clean andrich. I frown under my blindfold, trying to think where we might be, so I know how to prepare.

A year and a half ago, the Eilish everyone knew wouldn’t havedreamedof doing any of this. Tonight’s task—the final test before being confirmed as a member of the Crown Society—involves “proving you’re ready to take on the establishment by taking what’s theirs for your own”.

Which is a sort of overly dramatic, overblown way of saying I’m supposed to break into the office of some rich, powerful head of a major company and steal something of sentimental and usually monetary value to them. Apparently, the current recordholder is a pledge from five years ago who managed to steal one of Napoleon’sactualswords from the office of the CFO of Blackpool Financial Group.

“Yep,” I mutter back at Britney. “Still fine.”

She snickers. “If you say so.”

I shiver, and it’s not from the air conditioning. Wherever we are, the established members of the Crown Society have prepared the place, which includes paying off guards, looking for blind spots to sneak in, and hacking into the building’s security system to make sure the crime I’m about to commit doesn’t lead to my imprisonment. There’s still obviously risk involved—a lot of it. But they don’t want or need their prospective pledges going to jail.

“Okay, Kildare,” Britney murmurs, moving closer to me after we’ve just walked up a staircase of some kind. “Your clue is ‘if you want to make an omelet’.”

My brow furrows. That’s the other thing: I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to steal. And Iwon’tknow until I get into whatever office I’m about to walk into and hopefully figure it out.

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