to be near you, for a while. marissa.

It started when Juliet left for the Capitol.

Keepers checking in. Asking a few questions. The usual faces, names, queries. They'd shut the shop for one day - her funeral - and carried on. "It's what she would have wanted," Marissa had insisted with tight lips and glazed eyes. "For us to keep going."

She didn't want her mother. Not even as she drowned in the river, not even as she was butchered, not even as she took her last breath. "J-J-J-J-" her daughter had chattered through the shock and the blood loss. "-James." She had wanted her brother.

And suppose Marissa should have seen it coming. Those two were always each-others. The twins, the show-runners, the ones who ran it all together. The ones who took care of everyone, together. The ones that should have inherited this, together. She should have seen it coming - but it still hurt like a spear plunged into her stomach.

Like an arm severed from her shoulder.

Like a leg hacked off at the hip-

It had started when they opened the shop back up, when the solemn glances had covered their home like the winter snowfall. The extra audits. The quiet trickle of regular customers withering away. Paranoia had never been Marissa Monaghan's keeper, but unhinged and broken and mourning - she cracked, just a little. And it slipped into her heart slowly, like the tip of a knife, and anxiety bled into her veins until it consumed her.

Marissa had always been one step ahead. But she heard them coming. Saw it, felt it before it had arrived on their shop doorstep. They would be caught. Each and every one of them. Juliet's sacrifice had not been in vein, but it had brought more than just sympathetic looks to the Monaghan home. Control, more than the family had, was the only way to stop it. Her grandfather had done it with money and her father had done it with the ticket into the Justice Building they'd bought fourty years ago and now it was Marissa's turn to seize control the only way she knew how.

Her husband had told her she wasn't ready. She had spat back, "It doesn't matter if I'm ready."

Their daughter hadn't been ready to die. Marissa knew that from the look on her face as she bled out into the river - but she'd done it anyway, for Noah. For their family.

So she filled out an application, hung up a poster in their shop window, and drew up a new plan in her grandfather's study.

It started the day Marissa Monaghan jumped the gun and ran for Mayor.