Rain slicked the chapel’s stone floor as Drake paced, the shattered Walkman crunching under his boots like brittle bones. Graylyn stood by a rain-lashed window, her stillness carved from the same ice as the cemetery angels outside. Reagan’s voice bled from a janitor’s radio—“Trust, but verify”—drowned by the Ravenswood L-train’s scream as it tore past walls scarred with ’87 Bears victory graffiti.

“They don’t fear my pen,” Drake said, voice stripped raw. “They fear what’s in here.” He tapped his temple. “Father’s taught me how they work—every lie, every deflection. I could unravel that senator’s whole act before his coffee cooled.” He kicked a cassette tape, its magnetic ribbon spooling like entrails. “But he’ll vanish me into some ‘training exercise’ before I type a word.” The CIA’s ghost lived in his pauses—the way his eyes darted to shadows, the habit of measuring exits.

Graylyn didn’t turn. She lit a clove cigarette, the Zippo’s flare catching the frost in her gaze—the look that made Lake Forest matrons call her “our little Botticelli.” Smoke coiled around a vandalized saint’s face. “They hung my first solo show when I was thirteen,” she said, voice like chilled velvet. “Mother chose the frames. Father curated the buyers. ‘Graylyn paints harmonies,’ they told Chicago Tribune. Not protests.” Ash dusted her boot. “You think exposing them burns the playbook? It just proves you’re a loose thread they’ll cut.”

Drake halted. This wasn’t the girl who’d crowd-dived at the Metro; this was the creature forged in Gold Coast galleries, where rebellion meant painting rot beneath gilded lilies. Her stillness was a weapon.

“Subtlety,” she whispered, sliding the Sisters of Mercy flyer from her sleeve. Cabaret Metro, October 31st. “That senator? Our fathers? They built the stage. You don’t smash it.” Her fingernail—black-polished—tapped the venue’s name. “You let them lean in. Make them taste the poison in the sugar.”

Wind howled through Rosehill’s oaks. Drake stared at the flyer—its gothic font bleeding ink in the damp. Graylyn’s confession hung between them: the way she’d hidden her uncle’s face in the storm clouds of Lake Michigan Dusk, the arsenic-green she’d mixed into a patron’s portrait. Her art was a silent war.

He picked up a cassette shard, edges keen as a spy’s razor. “Halloween.”
Her lighter flared—a tiny, contained sun. “Dance in their spotlight, Drake. Let them applaud the knife.” The train wailed again, carrying the scent of wet earth and distant power.