Poison Kiss: Luxe paperback

ROLOGUE

VICTOR (THREE YEARS AGO)

“Victor, Juliet, come down – it’s dinner time.”

Reluctantly, I toss down the book I’m reading for English Lit and head downstairs. I have an essay to finish by tomorrow, and I’ve been too busy with basketball practice and building a garden at the Emerald Beach Hospice to get to it until tonight. I want to keep studying, but it’s Thursday night dinner in the August house, and no matter what’s going on in our lives we don’t miss Thursday dinner.

I enter the dining room to see Noah setting the table and Mom tapping away on the laptop that’s set up in Gabriel’s place. He’s on tour in Australia, so it’s noon on Friday for him, which means that he’s only just rolled out of bed. My father stares forlornly out of the screen, his long, dark hair mussed on one side of his head, as Mom tries to get the audio to work.

“Gabe, can you hear me?” Mom fiddles with the volume
switch.

“Every time we have one of these calls, it’s like hosting a bloody seance.” Gabe holds his hands up and wiggles his fingers as if he’s summoning a ghost. “Can you heeeear me? Are you out theeeere?”

“Don’t get me started on you and your seances,” Mom grumbles as she collapses in her seat. “Vic, remind me to tell you about the time your father organized a seance for my nineteenth birthday that ended in a shootout and the discovery of a secret passage.”

“I’ve heard that story before, Mom.” I roll my eyes as I reach for the rolls. “About a hundred times.”

“Right, of course you have. All I can say is, be grateful that your resourceful and beautiful mother fought that particular battle so you don’t have to deal with a gang war and a psychopathic twin sister.”

“That, and your dear old dad blocked off that secret passage with concrete before you were even born,” Noah adds.

I roll my eyes. “That’s so annoying. Juliet and I would have loved a secret passage to play in.”

I peer across the table at my sister, hoping to catch her eye and share our private joke. Our parents don’t know that we found another secret passage years ago – it leads from a sliding panel in the back of Juliet’s closet to a trapdoor beneath a gnarled old tree in the woods behind our house. We used to play in it as kids, but now we use it mainly for sneaking out to parties.

But my sister isn’t in her seat to share our private twin
moment.

That’s odd.

Juliet knows how Mom gets about Thursday night dinner. She was hanging out with some friends after school. I know because I waited in the parking lot for her for twenty minutes but she never showed up. She often does that when she’s distracted by some cute girl or new designer collection and forgets to tell me that she doesn’t need a ride.

But all her friends know to get her home in time for
Thursday dinner.

Why isn’t she here?

I whip out my phone and fire off a quick text. Hopefully, Jules will see it and get here before Mom notices and kicks her ass. Luckily, Mom’s still distracted by secret passages and tales from her misspent youth.

“—it was a bit of a shame to brick it up, but a secret passage in a house filled with teenagers is a bad idea – I’m not giving the two of you an easy way to sneak out. At least now, with that passage blocked and all the modifications we made to Howard Malloy’s security system, this place is finally mildly more secure than a slice of Swiss cheese—” Mom drops her fork. “Hang on a second, where’s your sister?”

Damn, foiled.

“She’s probably still in the shower or something,” I say, frantically pounding out another message to Jules.

GET HERE NOW. MOM’S ABOUT TO GO POSTAL.

“Not good enough. She knows what time we eat.” Mom
moves into the hallway and calls up the stairs. “Juliet? Dinner’s on the table. Could you answer me, please?”

Nothing.

Mom meets my eyes with her icicle gaze, and my stomach twists. “Vic, where’s your sister?”

C’mon sis, don’t get us both in trouble. I will Juliet to appear, but she remains ominously absent. All three of my parents in the room exchange a look, and Gabriel leans forward on his chair, his dark eyes flecked with concern.

“Did she go somewhere after you picked her up?” Eli asks
me, his expression quizzical.

“I don’t know.” Fear twists in my stomach. Even if Juliet was hanging out with her friends after school, she should be home by now. She’d never, ever miss Thursday night dinner. “She didn’t show up to meet me.”

“She what?” Noah slams his glass down. “You didn’t think to mention this until now?”

“It’s not a big deal. She often forgets to tell me that she doesn’t need a ride. I saw a bunch of her girlfriends heading off in the direction of the mall. I figured she was with them.”

“When we allowed the two of you to drive to school by yourselves, it was with the very explicit instructions that you know where each other is at all times.” Noah’s already dark eyes are storms of rage. “You don’t know where your sister is.”

“I’m sure she just lost track of time,” I say quickly, but even I’m not so sure now.

Mom picks up her phone and calls Juliet. “It’s gone straight to voicemail.” She tosses the phone to Eli. “You put that tracker thing on their phones. Follow it. I want to know where she is right now.”

Eli fumbles the phone as he clicks through to the app he installed that tracks me and Juliet wherever we are. It’s a bit annoying to think that our parents can find us no matter what we’re up to, but it’s a necessary part of life when you’re the child of a crime boss.

“She’s still at school.” Eli shoves his chair back. “I’ll go and get her.”

“I’ll drive.” Noah’s already shrugging on his coat. “And Victor is coming with us. I want to have a word with both twins about managing their safety.”

I’m too nervous about my twin’s absence to worry about how ominous he sounds. I don’t care if Noah takes our car away. All I want now is to see my sister alive and okay. I jog after my dads and manage to hurl myself into the backseat before Noah stomps on the gas. I yank the door shut, and Noah careens off in the direction of Stonehurst Prep. Neither he nor Eli says a word, but Noah’s knuckles gripping the wheel are bone-white.

We pull up at the front gates. I can see lights on in the library and the auditorium – the debating club is practicing and there are rehearsals for the school’s production of Heathers. Noah grabs the phone from Eli and points toward a dark corner of the student lot, where a narrow path cuts through the new greenhouses toward the art suite. “She’s in that direction.”

I jump out of the car and follow Noah and Eli as they move through the lot, behind the trash cans, and start to search the path. The horticulture club – of which I’m the president – made our end-of-year project to plant this area with trees and shrubs native to California. It looks nice in the
daytime, but at night it’s shrouded in creepy shadows that move in the breeze. It’s also… not somewhere that Juliet would hang out. My sister isn’t at school a moment longer than required unless she’s working on one of her fashion assignments in the art suite. And she doesn’t like to get dirt under
her nails.

So why is she in the bushes?

Why do I have such a bad feeling about this?

No, don’t think that. Juliet’s fine. She’s probably hiding behind a tree, ready to leap out and yell, “boo!”

Noah skids to a stop in the middle of a clump of Californian lilacs. “Here,” he frowns at the screen. “This is where it’s telling me her phone is.”

She’s not here. No one is here. It’s just a random spot in the middle of the garden.

A lump of fear rises into my throat. Eli moves away, calling Juliet’s name. Noah and I exchange a look, and as one we drop to our knees and start hunting through the shrubs. We don’t want to say aloud what we’re looking for, what we don’t hope to find…

My hand brushes something smooth hiding in the leaves. I pick it up, my heart pounding.

It’s Juliet’s phone, and it’s been smashed to pieces.

Wordlessly, I hand it to Noah. He frowns at the phone, his
shoulders tense. The fear bubbles in my throat. I open my
mouth to say something, but I don’t have the words—

At that moment, Eli comes running up. “I’ve found a bunch of footprints,” he says, making what my mom likes to jokingly call his Sherlock Holmes Orgasm Face. “At least three pairs in the soft dirt over there. There are signs of a struggle. They lead out to the loading zone behind the greenhouse. I think someone might’ve—”

His phone rings, cutting him off before he can say what he thinks these bastards did to my sister. I can see my mom’s name on the screen. Eli grabs it from Noah and brings it to his ear, hitting the speaker button so we can all hear. “I think we have a problem, Claws. They—”

“They took my daughter,” Mom says, her voice cold and slow and furious. “They called me just now. They have demands.”

Stonehurst Prep Elite
Book 1 - Poison Ivy
Book 2 - Poison Flower
Book 3 - Poison Kiss