I never should have talked to him so long ago on the sidewalk outside the club. If I’d kept walking, I’d be back with Parker, Jacob, and Deb, eating chocolate pancakes with fake syrup, pretending to be one of them. Better to be a pretender than to be the one being duped.

Xander must feel the violence rolling off me because he chokes down the start of my name.

I wish he would suffocate on it.

I open my door back up, holding it for him. I already told him the only two words I needed to say. He gets nothing else from me.

He stands and strides for the door, and I think I’ve won this one piece of dignity when he pulls the door from my hands and shuts it again.

“Please,” he says. The word is shallow and meaningless to me.

I shake my head.

“I need to explain.”

“What do you need to explain, Xander? The vampiric garden you keep? Because I already know. I’ve seen it.”

His mouth opens and closes. “How?”

“Roman,” I snap. I wince as I say it. Roman will be in trouble if Xander says anything, and there is no love between them, but fury loosens my tongue. I take a step closer to him. “Why? I was already part of the troupe. You already had your sack of magician blood. Why mess with my feelings, too?”

The shame flickering on his face cools. He pulls a wallet from his back pocket and hands me a creased picture from the folds. Everyone’s in the picture: Xander, Aristelle, the twins, Reina, Diantha, and a girl I don’t know with short, wild blond hair and a grin that makes everyone else seem sour. “Who is she?” I ask. I can already guess, but I need the story. I need something to make me hate them just a little less. I already carry around too much anger. I can’t keep adding to it or I won’t be able to lift my head from the weight of it.

He takes the photo back from me. “She was part of our troupe. Two years ago, our apprentice left right before the competition began—thanks to that bastard Roman. We didn’t have time to find anyone else to enter, much less train them. It would have been a death sentence, and Sarah was too nice. Better than all of us. She refused to bring someone in without a chance of winning just to save herself. So we were punished. They took Sarah as our sacrifice.”

I look up into his face, but he isn’t looking at me.

“Aristelle and I decided to never let that happen again. We needed our apprentices to be as invested as possible.”

My rib cage feels like it’s being pulled from different directions.

“Sarah was Diantha’s best friend,” he adds.