been a beautiful, ambitious, but slightly bored housewife, with no idea that people like June, like her, existed. Now, she was a widow, one with the ability to ruin anything she touched, and she wasn’t even the only one with powers.

“Can you be anyone?” she asked June.

“Anyone I touch,” said the girl. “If they’re alive. And if they’re human.”

“How does it work?”

“Dunno,” said June. “How do you burn people alive?”

“I don’t,” said Marcella. “Burn them, that is. It’s more like . . .”—

she considered the drink in her hand—“ruining. Wood rots. Steel rusts.

Glass returns to sand. People fall apart.”

“What does it feel like?”

Like xsfire, thought Marcella, but that wasn’t quite right. She remembered how it felt when Marcus crumbled in her arms. The simple, almost elegant way he came apart. There was something raw about her power. Something limitless. She said as much.

“Everything’s got a limit,” said June. “You should find yours.”

The girl’s gaze darkened, and Marcella remembered the space between bodies, the brief glimpse of that other shape. “Did you feel it?”

she asked. “When he shot you?”

June raised a brow. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Must be nice.”

June hummed thoughtfully, and then asked a very different kind of question. “Do you remember your last thoughts?”

And the strange thing was, Marcella did.

Marcella—who never remembered her own dreams, who rarely remembered a phone number or a catchphrase, who’d said a thousand angry things in the heat of passion and never recalled a single one of them—couldn’t seem to forget. The words echoed inside her skull.

“I will ruin you,” she recited, softly. Almost reverently.

Now, somehow, she could.

It was as if she’d forged the power through her own formidable will, tempered it with pain and anger and the vicious desire to see her husband pay.

And so she had to wonder: what kind of life—what kind of death—

made a power like June’s? When Marcella asked, the girl went quiet, and in that quiet, Marcella felt the girl gaze into her own internal flame.

“My last thought?” June said at last. “That I would survive. And no one would ever be able to hurt me again.”

Marcella raised her glass. “And now no one can. And on top of it, you can be anyone you want.”

“Except myself.” There was no self-pity in June’s voice, only a wry humor. “Irony’s a bitch.”

“So is karma.” Marcella twirled her glass. “You know my story,”

she said. “What’s yours?”

“Private,” said June shortly.

“Come on,” she prompted.

June raised a brow. “Oh, sorry, if you thought this was a girls’-night-out kind of thing, where we get drunk and bond, I’ll have to pass.”

Marcella looked around. “Then what are we doing here?”