gitanes | notes + quotes.

0 🗡️ thirteen pieces

» Her father’s business was full of bad young men who planned on dying young and rich, with a wife and children to weep over their graves. Criminals were, as a rule, disgustingly sentimental.

» The bride and groom thanked her again, sincerely. They seemed to accept without question that she spoke for her father. And if she told them something else some other time – even gave them an order — she bet they’d accept that without question too. She could see why Anton wanted people to believe that he spoke for her father. Why he wanted her to get used to letting him boss her around. Why she couldn’t let him. . . . Lila wondered how many other things she could make people give her.

» Her father reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet. As he did, she saw the strap under his arm and the butt of a silvery gun. The waiter saw it too. Her father grinned like a shark, said a few words she didn’t know, and took a bank note for five hundred euros from his billfold. The door opened wide. “Money will buy you anything in the world. It’s all for sale. People’s time. Their dignity. Whatever. Whenever. And most people’s price is shockingly low.〞 That’s the lesson he thought he taught Lila, but the lesson she learned was different. It wasn’t money that opened that door. It was fear.

» A boy who wasn’t a worker couldn’t be anything but a plaything to a girl like Lila.

♥ LILA:A force to be reckoned with. That’s what I’d like [my dress to say].

» The silver looked darker on her – more iron than the bright tinsel she’d initially thought it was – and the paillettes looked almost like scales. The color made her blue and green eyes stand out against her skin like jewels. Lila loved the dress. It said just what she wanted to say. It was the precise color of her father’s favorite gun.

♥ LILA: I'm a princess.
♦ BABCHI: Yes. My princess. The princess of a land of ice and snow. With icicles as sharp as knives.
♥ LILA: I'm a fairy.
♦ BABCHI: Yes. My fairy. You aren't like other girls. You will laugh when others weep. Your heart will be a riddle.
♥ LILA: Someday, I will fall in love with a boy. And he will be a prince.
♦ BABCHI: If you fall in love, little one, there is a cure for that. You — and you must do this yourself — you cut out his heart and eat it. Then you won't love him anymore.
♥ LILA: I won't want to be cured.
♦ BABCHI: That is very true and that is exactly what makes it so hard. If you wanted to, it would be easy. But you'll do it anyway. You're my princess, and when the time comes, you'll know what you have to do.

» She forgot Cassel wasn't just always there, waiting for her.

» The scent of old blood rose up, maybe from the floorboards, maybe from the cloth or the knife. Sometimes, when Lila was a little girl, her father would come home smelling that this. She wondered what it would be like to smell the scent on her own skin.
Once upon a time there was a girl with golden hair and no fear. She burned her hands on stoves because she wanted to touch the pretty red coils, she stuck her fingers in sockets and ran with knives. She told her cousins that when she grew up, she would be the boss of them all, and she meant it. There was a girl whose heart was as hard as diamonds.

Until someone locked her in a cage and hid the key.

That was the story Lila told herself, the one that might not have been true, but that she repeated over and over anyway. That was the way she kept herself eating and drinking and pushing at the bars, looking for a way out. That was the fairy tale that sent her off to sleep each night and woke her every morning.

Once upon a time there was a girl with golden hair and no fear. Someone locked her in a cage and hid the key. But the girl would have her revenge.
» Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too.

1 🗡️ white cat

♠ CASSEL: I'd dreamed of a white cat, inhaling sharply, as if it was going to suck the breath from my lungs, but then it bit out my tongue instead. There was no pain, only a sense of overwhelming, suffocating panic. In the dream my tongue was a wriggling red thing, mouse-size and wet, that the cat carried in her mouth. I wanted it back. I sprang up out of the bed and grabbed for her, but she was too lean and too quick. I chased her. The next thing I knew, I was teetering on the slate roof.

» Nonomura. Goldbloom. Volpe. Rice. Brennan. Zacharov.

» Tiny liquid shapes. A tabby jumps atop a rusted can of paint, while a white cat sits in a patch of long weeds, just the end of its tail twitching.

♠ CASSEL: I dream of being lost in a rainstorm. . . . I run for the only visible light, shading my face with one hand. . . . The door opens. . . . Out of the gloom, cats come, tabbies and calicos, marmalade cats and butterscotch cats and cats so black I can barely tell them from their shadows. They creep toward me, hundreds of them, swarming over one another to get close. I jump up onto one of the chairs, snatching a candlestick, not sure what sick thing my brain is about to conjure next when a small, veiled creature walks into the room. It's wearing a tiny gown, like the kind that expensive dolls wear. Lila had a whole row of dolls in dresses like that; her mother would yell at her if she touched them. We played with the dolls anyway when her mother wasn't looking.

The veil slips and falls. Underneath is a cat's face. A cat, standing on two legs, her triangle head tilted to one side, almost like her neck's been broken, her body covered in the dress.

"I need your help," says the tiny figure. Her voice is sad and soft and sounds like Lila's, but with an odd accent that might just be how cats sound when they talk. . . . "A curse was placed on me. A curse that only you can break."

The other cats watch us, tails flicking, whiskers twitching. Still silent.

"Who cursed you?" I ask, trying to smother my laughter.

"You did," says the white cat. . . . Lila's dead and cats shouldn't stand, shouldn't press their paws together in supplication, shouldn't talk. "Only you can undo the curse," she says, and I try to watch the movement of her mouth, the flash of her fangs, to see how she can speak without lips. "The clues are everywhere. We don't have much time." I open my mouth to speak, but I feel claws on my back, nails sinking into my skin and I yelp instead.

2 🗡️ red glove

3 🗡️ black heart