They found the Rembrandt. The bust is all over the news, dominating headlines. The police tracked it right down to the warehouse on the outskirts of L.A. where Eris took me, and along with the painting they found over twenty kilos of meth and cocaine. They made several arrests—I recognize one of the mugshots as that baby-faced guy at the party I saw take Eris' painting to the back—and have put out a warrant for the real culprit: Ximena Leyva, art dealer and luxury real estate agent, who likely fled the country.

Information about her is scarce—she supposedly keeps a low profile, and they say Ximena isn't even her real name. They're now investigating all of her previous auctions, clients, and sales, hoping to track down more missing artwork.

Does William have something to do with all this? His name is absent from all the headlines, but one of the main publications is the news agency he's working at. Did he tip off people at his press? How could he so blatantly use the intel I gave him? If the police decide to investigate everyone who attended that party, it could put me at risk. I never asked to be involved with any of it. I have mountains of homework to catch up on—I really don't need to be summoned to a police station and grilled about why the hell I went to L.A. with Eris Lugo.

William's gone on a trip to I-don't-even-know-where, so it's not as if I can confront him at the moment. But during lunch the day after the news breaks, as I'm sitting in the library like usual, someone decides to confront me.

Vanilla invades my senses. Something sharp and cold digs into my neck. And I press my legs tight together as she yanks my braids back and says against my ear, "You're so scared of dying. How would it feel for it to be me?"

All I can think about is the feeling of her straddling me, holding me down at her art studio. Now she's holding a knife to my neck, and instead of scaring me, it makes me laugh.

"Wouldn't be smart of you to stab me here of all places," I manage to say.

When she presses the knife deeper into my skin, I gasp, arching my back, and I'm ready for her to cut me when she pulls it away.

"I fucking trusted you," she hisses. Her hand is still in my hair, and she pulls harder, forcing my head upward until I meet her gaze. "And you snitched."

"Why," I say. "Why did you trust me?"

She lets go of my hair with an aggressive push but doesn't move from behind me. I can hear her breathing heavily.

"When did I ever give you a reason to trust me?" I ask.

She doesn't answer.

"You wanted to trust me," I continue. "You wanted someone to confide in about your mess, when I was the last person you should've told."

She sits in front of me at the table, posture slumped and relaxed, nothing like the way she stares me down. Her shirt is tight and low-cut, exposing the lacy edges of her bra. The black bra I saw on her bedroom floor. Oh no. I close my eyes, hating myself for looking. For imagining, for a split second, what she looks like under her grimy clothes.

"This is a dangerous game, Persephone Baines."

The way she uses my full name puts me more on edge than her knife. And she's right. There were big players at that party, and I leaked the information. It would be far too easy to connect it to me, but I don't think William is so much of an idiot he'd implicate me in this story.

"Let me guess," Eris says. "You told your journalist uncle."

"I didn't tell him everything," I admit, because what use is there in denying it now? "Besides, he wasn't the one who wrote the stories that have been coming out. How do you know this wasn't already an investigation? How do you know this wasn't already planned to take Ximena down?"

Eris leans back in the chair, twirling the knife around her fingers like she's a mafia boss interrogating me. "She is part of a smaller cartel. Real old school, but they've been losing power fast."

Eris leans back in the chair, twirling the knife around her fingers like she's a mafia boss interrogating me. "If she gets caught by the feds and snitches on Iker... that's when we'll start having problems. He's pissed. He's so fuckin' pissed, bruh. He thinks it's because of you and your big mouth."

Good, I think. He deserves whatever comes for him.

Especially if he's been cheating on his wife with Ximena.

"If I really wanted to snitch," I say, "I would've called up the FBI, gotten my million-dollar reward, and dropped off the face of the earth."

"Nah, instead your dumb ass went ahead and told a journalist."

"He's not working with the cops," I say. "They found this out on their own. If they hadn't, you would've seen the stories about it before the arrests were made. The news is only coming out now because the cops caught them, which means they were already on their trail."

Eris sits up. "So there's a different snitch we need to worry about. A double-agent."

I breathe a sigh of relief. "Good. You're finally realizing how idiotic it would be to put all the blame on me."

"I should por andar de chismosa. You're lucky. So lucky you have me on your side."

"Why don't you, then?" I challenge, even though the rational part of me is internally screaming at me to shut up. "You could just say it was me and let your dad come for my throat. Have it be an easy kill."

She raises an eyebrow. "We got a competition to win."

My legs are still pressed together, the tension returning to my lower gut. "And if it weren't for the competition, would you let me take the blame?"

"No," she says.

"Why not?"

"Listen, I might hate you, but I don't want you getting shot. What kinda psychopath would that make me?"

"The same psychopath that murdered multiple people."

"That's way different."

"How?"

"You're not involved in this shit. You're an outsider."

"And if I wasn't?"

"I don't know, Persephone. Just be glad I actually believe you. Next time, I won't be this forgiving. Next time, I'll be the one to draw your blood."

I give her a teasing smirk. "Looking forward to it."

She stands up and leans over the table until she's centimetres away, glaring at me. "You think this is a game? You think I'll fucking hesitate?"

I tilt my head upward, the smirk still plastered on my lips, identical to the ones she always gives me, the ones that make me want to do nothing more than carve them off her face. "You've been hesitating this whole time."

She grabs my chin for a second before pushing me away. "Ungrateful bitch. Don't make me regret covering for your ass."

▴ ▴ ▴

Eris ignores me for the rest of the week. Doesn't respond to the notes I slip in her locker or my text messages, and I barely see her at school. When I do, she refuses to acknowledge my existence, focusing instead on her boring friends and even a new girl. I don't know why, but the sight of it fills me with an unfamiliar, unbearable irritation. The girl looks so much like me I physically can't stand it—curvy and dark-skinned except much shorter than me and with corn rows instead of braids, the polar opposite of Sara from just last week. Are they dating? Are they hooking up? Is Eris bringing her to her room, kissing her in front of the Santa Muerte altar? Does she let the girl touch her, lift her shirt up over her head, run her hands over the lace of her black bra? All these images invade my mind throughout the day and make me increasingly nauseous. Is that why Eris isn't texting me back? We have a painting to finish, and I don't have time for her to be fooling around.

On Thursday, as I'm climbing onto the back of Fitz's motorcycle to go home, a car pulls up in front of us. Axel's car. He graduated last year—what in the world is he doing here?

"Who's that?" Fitz asks.

I give him back my helmet, step down from the motorcycle, and a loud honk pierces the air. Then the window rolls down, and it's not Axel staring back at me—it's Eris.

"Hola, bitch. Get in."

I roll my eyes and let myself into the passenger's side. I'm relieved it's her instead of Axel—I'd much rather deal with her insults and threats than his awkward flirting.

"Took you long enough," I say.

"You think I was gonna take you back to my house after the shit you pulled? I've had to beg at Iker's feet to let me bring you over again."

"How endearing," I say, laughing. "But we could've just painted at my house. Or is that not enough of an upper-class experience for you?"

"Shut up," she says. "I'm not in the mood to put up with your comments today. You already pissed me off enough last time."

"Is that why you've been ignoring me all week?"

"Yeah. Every time I see you I want to cut you, but I can't have that on my record."

"Sure, Eris."

We're silent as she drives. I've been irritated, annoyed, and anxious for days, but there's a lightness in my chest now, and I have no idea why. Being around her so much as of late is unbearable, but I'm constantly looking for her when she's gone, her voice calling me pendeja echoing over and over in my head. I always wonder what she's doing, what kind of conversations she's having, what new threats she's facing. Has she started on copying my painting yet? I don't want to ask.

Once we get to her studio, we immediately start mixing paints and picking out brushes. She has such a huge collection of supplies I find it hard to choose.

We don't speak. We're both fully focused, giving one another room to work, and I attempt to make my movements lighter just so she doesn't touch me to adjust my grip again. We prop the canvas up on a large easel, and I try not to freeze or flinch every time her arm slightly bumps against mine. She's painting with her left while I'm painting with my right, evoking an odd equilibrium as if for just this instant we're a multi-armed god unleashing its creation.

Matching her pace fills my nervous system with adrenaline. It's as if I'm aware of every misplaced stroke, every minuscule mistake, every line that isn't perfectly straight. But as I let myself paint more freely, there's movement in the canvas. The shapes and shadows don't look so static and two-dimensional and stiff. I still make precise measurements and calculations, but the execution is much more fluid.

"Damn," Eris says under her breath. "Who took that stick out of your ass? This is really good."

"What's this, are you actually complimenting my work?" I taunt. "What's wrong with you?"

She's stopped painting. She's staring at the canvas, eyes flickering back and forth, lips moving silently as if all the calculations I write on paper she's doing in her head. Then she smiles, and it wipes all the grumpiness off her raccoon face.

"This is my favorite thing I've painted," she says. "So much better than all the crap Iker makes me do."

"Really?" I ask. It feels personal, too personal, that her favorite painting is the one she's done with me. But as I step back and inspect our work, I realize it rivals some of my best paintings, the ones that have won prizes and sold for thousands of dollars. It has a geometric, Persephone-esque structure without being too abstract. It has Eris' detailed realism with a mystical, haunting theme. The saint is broken, bloody, fragmented, the iconic crying Mary murdered by human hands and interspersed with an eternal, holy death.

Then, a knock on the door. Eris and I break out of our trance, and a teenage boy with dark hair shielding his face, a serious slouch, and a Gucci shirt paired with black skinny jeans and Vans, steps into the room.

"Uh, Dad told me to get you for dinner," he mumbles. "He told me to bring your friend, too."

And that's how I end up at a massive dining table with the entire Lugo family. The boy is called Nico, there's an Asian-looking girl in a ballet uniform called Daphne, a young kid in a Messi soccer jersey called Daniel—I thought Mexicans hated Argentina, but I guess not him—and then, of course, Axel, who's refusing to look at me.

"This is so exciting!" Eris' mom Maria says after she and the siblings set the food on the table. I would've thought they'd have cooks and butlers to help them, but it seems like it's just them. "Eris showed us the painting you two are working on... it's really wonderful!"

"Neither of us have painted anything like it before," I say, "so it's been interesting."

Maria is short and chubby with rich brown skin only Nico seems to have inherited. I expected her to be like Ximena, all artificial with perfect makeup and jewelry, but Maria looks like a normal, busy suburban mom.

Eris stares down at her plate, silent. Having me in her art studio was one thing, but introducing me to her entire family at dinner is a whole other level of weird.

"It's a powerful image," Iker says in his gruff voice. "Re-imagining Biblical figures and giving them a contemporary spin has been popular lately. I've seen many works with those themes, so in the next round you should try something more original."

Eris tenses all over. She looks up at her father with the same animosity as that day in the library with me. "Yeah, you don't say anything about originality when you're going on about how my paintings need to be more classic."

"The classical, Baroque style has been lost to modernity," Iker says without missing a beat. "Anyone with the discipline to perfect it and integrate it in this century should be respected."

Eris scoffs like she's heard the same thing a million times before. Her siblings give each other side-glances and hidden smirks.

The food for tonight is pozole, a traditional meat-based stew with corn and cabbage. I won't make a fuss about being vegetarian, so I force the pork into my mouth. It's spicier than what I'm used to, but it's not bad. There are multiple plates of corn tortillas spread around the table, and Daniel eats them one after the other. There's also guacamole and chicharrones and lime, which Axel seems to like, and the crunchy sound of him chewing fills the silence.

I expected the usual small talk, the where are you from and what are you planning on studying in college and what do your parents do? But I soon realize that Iker and Maria likely know everything there is to know about me already, and they don't seem like the type to play dumb.

"What do you do for work, Maria?" I ask. A risky question, but the silence is getting on my nerves, even though none of the Lugo siblings seem to mind—maybe they're used to these silent dinners with Iker's serious, looming presence at the end of the table.

"Oh, raising all these kids is my full-time job," she says. "But my brothers and sisters work at a company in Mexico City."

The questions pile on in my head, none of them something I can ask out loud. Eris told me she married Iker as part of a deal to solidify an alliance between two cartels. Would she ever be interested in him otherwise, or did she force herself to love him?

"Well, you have a beautiful family," I say. Eris' head jerks in my direction, eyes narrowing as if to say, that better not be sarcasm. Nico notices and stifles a laugh with his hand. Daphne elbows him in the ribs, whispering something I can't hear. And Axel looks at me for the first time with that sad, puppy in the rain expression, as if asking me, so you think I'm beautiful?

"Are you and Eris dating?" Daniel blurts out. "She's never brought a girl for dinner." A pause as he shoves a spoonful of stew in his mouth and swallows, letting out a satisfied ahhh. "I really like your hair."

I try not to laugh too hard. "I'm actually her worst enemy."

"Nah," Eris drawls, and I nearly choke on a corn kernel when she moves her chair closer to mine and wraps her arm around my waist. "We're so in love. We're actually getting married after graduation, so you better get used to having her around, dad, because you'll be the one walking me down the altar."

Various shades of what-the-actual-fuck expressions spread around the table, none greater than mine.

I cough, trying to shove Eris away, but she kicks me in the shin, hard, and hugs me closer. "We're thinking of taking a vacation to Monaco, and she'll be a lot of help because she speaks French, isn't that right baby?"

Baby? My stomach drops. What kind of twisted alternate dimension has that bowl of pozole transported me to? It's all because I was too polite and ate the pork—that's the only explanation, because who does this bitch think she is?

"Eris, enough stupidity," Iker says, unamused. "You've embarrassed the girl enough as it is."

Eris lowers her head, matching Iker's authoritarian gaze with her rebellious one. And I finally understand what this is. She wants to use me to piss him off, to get any reaction out of him, knowing how much he disapproves of me. But I'm here to paint, not to bear witness to her daddy issues at the dinner table.

Her hand lingers on my waist for a second too long, then brushes my thigh as she finally pulls away, and my already-warm cheeks burn straight to the bone.

"This is a joke, right?" Axel asks. "I thought you two couldn't stand each other. And Persephone, aren't you straight?"

"Soooo straight," Eris drawls, kicking my leg underneath the table again. I kick her back harder. "The straightest. So straight she's going to become a nun and marry Jesus."

Daphne facepalms. I physically cringe—God, why is this a topic of discussion?

"Is that true?" Maria asks curiously. "Are you also Catholic?"

"Um, no," I say, forcing my posture perfect even though all I want to do is sink into the vintage upholstered chair and disappear. "I don't believe in God."

"Very good," Iker says. "The world doesn't need more delusional fools."

Maria hisses something to Iker in Spanish. The siblings give each other raised eyebrows and half-smiles.

Maria goes on to tell me about each of the siblings and their accomplishments. Nico's a violin prodigy who's rehearsing to solo Vivaldi's "Summer" concerto in August. Axel is double-majoring in Astrophysics and Nuclear Engineering at the University of California San Diego and has just won a state chess championship, giving him the highest rank in the West Coast. Daniel is going to an exclusive, intensive fútbol training camp in Spain for the summer. Daphne is putting in more than five hours a day to prepare for a ballet recital, and she's recently been in contact with recruiters from France and Russia. And Eris?

"You don't need to speak for me, amá," she says. "Me and Ef here are winning the Arts Olympiad. Done deal."

Is this all Maria's kids are to her? Legacies? Talents she and Iker have probably been shoving down their throats since they started crawling, children more trophies than family, things to brag about at high-class parties. 

After dinner, all I want to do is go back upstairs and paint, but Iker motions for me to follow him. Eris remains at my side, but he turns to her and orders, "You go help Maria with the dishes."

I can hear the vibrant chatter in Spanglish from the kitchen, where all the siblings seem to be helping. At least the Lugo spawn aren't the type who've never had to clean up after themselves.

Eris walks back down the hallway, then turns to watch me cautiously until Iker brings me into a pristine office. He takes a seat on a black leather chair behind a polished wooden desk. Classical paintings hang on the walls lined with bookshelves. The lights are dim, the dark vintage wallpaper giving an haunting vibe. Iker pours himself a glass of whiskey and watches me stand there awkwardly, like he's not sure what to do with me.

"How did you like the art show?" he asks.

I clear my throat. "Um. I don't have much to say about it."

"But your uncle did."

"He doesn't have anything to do with it," I immediately say—I've been preparing for this confrontation since stepping foot in this house. "I called him yesterday and he told me as much. William isn't a liar. He actually said that the newspaper that first came out with the story, one that's based in Tijuana, is compromised by the cartel you've been trying to take down. They have an informant. They're trying to scare Ximena away from working with you... Sinaloa people."

Iker folds his hands over the table, his cold gaze revealing interest.

"If you get rid of me and William," I continue, "and there's still a rat in your leagues, more information will leak. Instead, you could look for the rat. And you could let my uncle help you. He can keep you and your cartel out of the news and focus on your enemy instead."

Here I am trying to save William's ass. William is an influential journalist, far more influential than what he's paid for. And despite none of this being ethical in the slightest, even journalists have to pick sides if they want to survive.

"I will be in contact with him," Iker says. "And let this be a warning. My daughter is wrong for trusting you, but if you cross us again, there will be consequences."

What he really means: if this was Mexico I'd have both your heads hung from a bridge.

"And as a reminder," he continues. "You still have a debt to pay."

▴ ▴ ▴

a/n: is it just me or is persephone catching feelings 👀👀 what did you think of the lugo family? i honestly love writing about them! and this may not be the last time you see eris' lil bro nico—the sequel/spin-off to this book will actually be featuring him and persephone's brother fitz! and instead of art, it will revolve around music. the title is currently "the self-destruction game" 😏

a few weeks ago i also drew our main girls. still needs color (i left all my colored pencils back in brazil 😓) but i used no references so this is basically what eris and ef look like in my brain.

song for this chapter is maria by shelly (video linked in the beginning)