“Well, look who it is,” Tyler said. As the man passed, Tyler put his foot in front of the man’s legs to try and trip him. The man stumbled, then kept on walking as if nothing had happened. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t torment him,” I said as the driver went by me, in a world entirely his own. “He’s not himself.”

“What does that even mean?” Tyler asked.

Vivi took Tyler’s face in her hands, looked at him for a moment, and then leaned in to kiss him. It was a deep kiss, rich with whatever elixir lived on my sister’s lips. My lips. Even I felt the power of it and, underneath that, something else—a pinch of envy.

Vivi pulled back and watched Tyler carefully.

“Well, I feel violated,” he said as he wiped his wet mouth. “Yuck. Not interested, FYI. Been there, done that. You’re all as bonkers as each other.”

“Interesting,” Vivi said to me. “He’s entirely unaffected. Maybe because he has no brain.”

“How old are you?” Tyler said.

Vivi could tease him all she wanted, but I knew why Grey dated Tyler.

The second time someone kissed me was backstage after Grey’s very first House of Hollow catwalk at Paris Fashion Week. The show had been a resounding success, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. A hard stone sat in my stomach because a man had been watching me for two days. I never learned his name. All I knew was that he was an up-and-coming photographer who wore a brown leather jacket and tied his light hair in a bun. He was tall and young and handsome and spoke with a purring accent. Women should have been all over him, but he lingered for too long around the models, and he liked to look at me too much. I suppose he figured that a teenage girl would be thrilled by the attention from a grown man. I suppose he figured that I liked the way he brushed his fingers across the back of my jeans when he asked me for a selfie together.

I suppose he figured a lot of wrong things.

What I figured was this: It was vitally important that I was never alone in a room with him. I had spent two days making sure he never got the opportunity, not because I was certain something bad would happen, but because I couldn’t be certain that nothing bad wouldn’t happen. Now that the show was over, I could let my guard down. I was flying home to London the next morning, Grey had organized an Uber back to my hotel room, and the creepy man wouldn’t be there.

All I needed was to dash backstage to get my coat.

Backstage had been chaotic for hours before the show started, busy with filament-limbed models and makeup artists and producers darting across the space, yelling into headsets—but it was quiet now. The chemical smell of hair spray lingered, as did the burned-hair tang of curls left in irons for slightly too long. The Hollywood lights bordering each of the mirrors were dark, and the dresses that each of the models had worn on the catwalk had been packed into garment bags and hung on rails along one side of the room. I couldn’t help smiling as I passed them in the lowlight, these small miracles of thread and fabric born from my sister’s wild brain. I’d seen rough sketches of her creations in the months leading up to fashion week, but nothing had prepared me for seeing them in real life, the beauty and grotesquery of them.

I found my coat draped across the back of a folding chair and shrugged it on.

“Hello, Iris,” a male voice said. I turned. It was the photographer.

Here, with me. In the dark. Alone.

“Oh. Hello. I didn’t know anyone was still here.”

“They’re not. Everyone’s gone to the after-party.”

“Where’s Grey?”

“I just saw her get in an Uber.” That didn’t sound right. Grey was supposed to take me back to my hotel before she went partying. Cate had made her promise. “I can give you a lift home, if you want.”

I tried to slip past him, to see if he was telling the truth, but he caught my wrist and sent my heart cartwheeling in panic.

“You’re beautiful, you know,” he said with his lips, but with his fingers gripped tight enough around my arm to leave bruises, he said something different. And then it happened. He leaned in to kiss me. He got too close. He breathed in the untamed power of me, fizzing with sweat and fear, and it sent him wild, the same way it had sent Justine Khan wild. His eyes turned to saucers, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground, under him, under his weight and his hardness as his fingers scratched at my waistband, trying to force their way into my jeans. I screamed and I fought beneath him. I thrashed and scratched his face with my nails, but the sudden scent of his own blood only made him more rabid. The hot stink of his breath in my face. The warm trail of saliva he left on my skin as he kissed me, bit me, licked the wounds he left on me.

I’m not sure if Grey heard my scream or felt my distress instinctually, but suddenly she was there—not gone, like the photographer had said—standing over us, wearing the face of a vengeful god. She took the man by the throat and wrenched him off me with one hand, then slammed him against a mirror, shattering the glass and light bulbs behind him. Her slim fingers were so tight on his neck, he could barely breathe, but—though his face was red and his throat made clucking sounds as it struggled to pull air into his lungs—the photographer did not seem to mind. He was already violently high on her, giddy and lovesick.

Why was it a useful, easy power on Grey, but on me, it made me a victim?

Grey was breathing hard, spitting venom with every exhale. She squeezed the man even harder, until I could see the capillaries bursting beneath her grip. “You are going to go home,” Grey ordered, “and when you get there, you are going to kill yourself. Make it slow. Make it painful. Do you understand?”

The man bit his lip and smiled, then nodded coyly, like he was flirting with her.

“Grey,” I said through my sobs. “Don’t. Don’t make him do that. It’s . . . It wasn’t entirely his fault. It was . . . more of an accident. I got too close and he went too far. I don’t know how to . . . Please. Please take it back. Just let him go.”