How To Ruin A City

Chapter Seventeen

Catalina

The one true recipe for disaster was Cassandra and I baking.

No pun intended.

Stop laughing.

Chloe's words kept echoing at the back of my skull each time I looked as Cassandra. My eyes trailed the bruises covering her arms and face as my thoughts struggled to come to a conclusion. I bit my lip and debated asking, then decided against it. We weren't that close. She had no reason to tell me.

"How's French going for you?" I finally managed to ask.

Cassandra laughed. "Easy considering I already know the language. Don't tell anybody, though."

I snorted. "They'd just move you to Spanish."

"And I'm fluent in that too, but God forbid I end up in German."

My eyes widened. "How many languages do you know, Cassandra?"

She gave me a playful smile. "Almost five. I'm still learning Italian and Portuguese, and I can understand it well enough, I'm just not fluent." She paused to put the cookies in the oven, giving the piles of dishes on the counter a look. "Let's go find something to watch while this bakes."

We started a horror movie only for a scene about some guy getting cooked alive in an oven came on. Cassandra quickly switched channels and turned to me.

"Didn't want to give you any ideas."

I rolled my eyes and glanced at the TV to find we were watching a talk show about supers.

This again?

"-so Vérité switched her alias to Roulette and is now working with a mercenary known as White Reaper. Great to know Iron Beach can take even the sweetest vigilantes and turn them into monsters. Honestly, I think that-"

Cassandra turned the TV off.

I pulled out my phone and searched for the video that everybody seemed so interested in discussing and beckoned her closer.

Vérité, or Roulette, had shed her leather jacket and spandex suit for a black and red mix of the two fabrics. Her mask and hat were replaced with something that covered her full face. Her hair color changed from black to blonde, and was worn down instead of back in a high ponytail.

I glanced at the gun in her hand, then at White Reaper as he leaned against a parked car to watch the interaction.

"Let's play a game," she said in an airy, lighthearted voice.

I remembered that the press interviewed her once. They asked her why she didn't work at TVAH. Her response was something like, "I just want to help people. I'm not doing this for money."

Was that all a lie?

Roulette gave a small smile towards the person recording the video, making their already shitty and shaky filming worse.

"I don't want to play," the man she was talking to whispered, but I only knew that from reading the subtitles that flashed at the bottom of the screen.

Roulette sighed. "Too bad, maybe you would've gotten away if you just agreed to the game. Now stand still."

The man suddenly stopped shifting on his feet.

"Catalina," Cassandra whispered. "Maybe we-"

A gunshot went off as the cameraman dropped his phone. I flinched. Cassandra covered her mouth the stifle a squeak. The screen cut to black.