How do you hurt the people who hurt them?
We brewed coffee, talked in low voices as the sky healed from the bruises of night. It’d been years since we’d stayed up together till dawn. Ingrid sat in the windowsill, one knee bent. A silver-blue thread of smoke unraveled from the cigarette in her hand. Legs bare, pale and iridescent as nacre in the breaking dawn. Her camisole barely covered her underwear.
I thought of all those high school nights we’d kept each other awake. Half-clothed, half-delirious, whispering about the future. The apartment we’d share, the entwined life. My sisters coming to visit when they were older.
Like a real family.
Black Iris, I told her, was my family now.
It was Laney and Blythe’s mad brainchild. Back in college, Blythe cheated on Armin, and Armin lashed out at her and everyone she loved. He challenged an underling—an incoming Corgan freshman who aimed to join his secret society—with a task: ruin a random queer girl’s life. That not-quite-random girl was Laney Keating. She was bullied, humiliated online, harassed mercilessly at school. When she tracked the trail of those who’d hurt her, it led to Armin. So she entangled him in her web and set about gradually ruining his life. Drugs in his drinks, sweet lies about love in his ear. A slow neurochemical dismantlement. The ultimate what-goes-around. And the whole time she was poisoning Armin, Laney was hooking up with both him and Blythe. One for love, one to make her final revenge sweeter. She was stone cold and stone hard. She fucked a man and made him fall in love just to hurt him more when she revealed how she’d been systematically destroying his sanity.
If Laney Keating ever met Ingrid Svensson, the universe would implode. The big bang in reverse.
Laney started Black Iris to organize what she was already doing—wreaking vengeance on those who’d wronged her. When she ran out of victims, she extended her services to others. Revenge for hire.
That’s where the rest of us came in.
Laney and Blythe enlisted Armin as their first recruit. He’d been broken, subjugated. Tamed. He bankrolled their early projects, smoothed hairy situations, tapped his social connections. He used his psych training to profile their targets. Guilt drove him to be a good little lapdog. Laney kept him on a tight leash; Blythe did the dirty fieldwork.
When Ellis came home to announce her engagement, Laney seized the opportunity. Ellis was the drama that started everything—the girl Blythe had cheated on Armin with, the only girl to ever break Blythe’s heart. Black Iris needed a tech to handle communications and make the group untraceable online. So Ellis stayed behind in Chicago while her fiancée went back to Maine. It’s just a temporary thing, E said. I won’t get into hot water, I promise.
I saw the way Ellis looked at Blythe. Not with longing—maybe a faint smolder—but mainly worry. It made me think of Inge, always watching over me. Disapproving but still caring.
Once you love someone that deeply, it never really stops. It just evolves into other forms.
Plus, Laney wanted Ellis here for a reason. A balance point within her twisted threesome. Someone to haunt Armin and keep him in line—and someone to look after Blythe, hold her back from the edge.
Once Ellis was officially on board, she recommended me.
I’d known them all for years now, but being in Black Iris brought us closer. We’d seen sides of each other we never had before. Our capacity for cruelty—and for kindness. Laney sheltering that girl at the coffeehouse. Armin pulling strings for me unasked.
There was good in us, beneath the righteous outrage.
It didn’t surprise me when Ingrid said, “I want in.”
I spun the ashtray between us. Cinders flaked off, sparkling darkly. “Not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because Laney will kill me for telling you, for one.”
Inge nudged my hand with a toe. “For two?”
“For two,” I said, cupping her foot without looking at her, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
One of the most frightening and admirable things about Ingrid Svensson was her consummate self-control. An iceberg of a girl, all her cracks and jagged edges below the surface. Beneath that smooth fa?ade she could rip you the fuck apart. And I was one of the few people on earth who knew. Who’d seen.
Who’d touched her there, and been torn.
Now she sat very still, expressionless, but I felt the churn of something cold and terrible inside her.
This time, she surprised me. “Bring her here.”
“Who, Laney?”
“The British one.”
I sat up straighter. “I don’t know anything about Tamsin.”
“You know she doesn’t trust them. She told you they’ve known about Adam for months. That puts her on our side.”
“Why are you us-versus-themming already? I’ve been friends with these people for years.”