I didn’t understand. This man—this killer—had brought me here. He’d used the only bargaining chip he had to bring me here, and now, having seen me, he was handing it in?
Why? If you enjoy tormenting Judd and Sterling, if you want to leave them with the taste of fear in their mouths, with the bitter knowledge that the people they love will never be safe, why cure Briggs?
“You’re lying,” Agent Sterling said.
We should have brought Lia, I thought. And a second later: I shouldn’t be here. The feeling started in my gut and snaked its way out to my limbs, weighing them down.
“Am I?” Nightshade countered.
“Incurable. Painful.” I spoke the words out loud without meaning to, but didn’t pull back from talking once they’d made their way out of my mouth. “You wouldn’t just hand away your secret. Not this easily. Not this fast.”
Nightshade’s eyes lingered on mine a moment longer. “There are limits,” he admitted, “to what one might say. Some secrets are sacred. Some things you take to the grave.” His voice had taken on a low, humming quality. “But then, I never said your Agent Briggs had been afflicted with that poison.”
That poison. Your poison. Your legacy.
“Go.” Judd spoke for the first time since the man who’d killed his daughter had been brought into the room. He met Sterling’s gaze and repeated himself. “He’s telling the truth. Go.”
Go get the antivenom.
Go save Briggs.
“We’re done here,” Sterling said, reaching for the button on the wall.
“Stop.” The word burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t draw my gaze away from the killer’s. You brought me here for a reason. You do everything for a reason—you all do.
Nightshade smiled. “I thought,” he said, “that you might have some questions for me.”
I saw now, the game he was playing. He’d brought me here. But staying? Listening to him? Asking him for answers?
That was on me.
“Go,” Judd told Sterling again. After a split second’s hesitation, she did as he said, dialing her phone on the way out. Judd turned back to me. “I want to tell you not to say another word, Cassie, not to listen, not to look back.”
But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t make me walk away. I wasn’t sure he could walk away himself. You can look at the files, Judd had said, back when this all began, but you’re not doing it alone.
Neither one of us was doing this alone now.
“Beau Donovan.” I turned back to the monster waiting patiently on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t make my mouth form the words to ask about my mother, not yet. And I couldn’t—wouldn’t—bring up Scarlett. “You killed him.”
“Was that a question?” Nightshade asked.
“Your people left him in the desert fifteen years ago.”
“We don’t kill children.” Nightshade’s tone was flat.
You don’t kill children. That was a rule they lived by. A sacred law. But you have no problems leaving them in the desert to die of their own accord.
“What was Beau to you? Why raise him at all, if you were going to turn him out?”
Nightshade smiled slightly. “Every dynasty needs its heir.”
My brain whirred. “You weren’t raised the way Beau was.”
The rest of them, Beau had said, they’re recruited as adults.
“The term Master suggests an apprentice model,” I continued. “I’m assuming Masters choose their own replacements—adults, not children. The cycle repeats every twenty-one years. But the ninth member, the one you call Nine—”
“Nine is the greatest of us. The constant. The bridge from generation to generation.”
Your leader, I filled in. Beau hadn’t just been born in their walls. He’d been born to lead them.
“You left him to die,” I said.
“We do not kill children,” Nightshade repeated, his voice just as flat as it had been the first time he said the words. “Even if they prove themselves unworthy. Even when they fail to do what is asked and it becomes clear they will never be able to take the mantle to which they were born. Even when the way must be cleared for a true heir.”
What did they ask you to do, Beau? What kind of monster were they molding you to be? I couldn’t let my mind go down that path. I had to concentrate on the here and now.
On Nightshade.
“And the little girl?” I said. “The one I saw you with. Is she worthy? Is she the new heir? A true heir?” I took a step forward, toward the glass. “What are you doing to her?”
I don’t believe in wishing.
“Are you her father?” I asked.
“The girl has many fathers.”
That answer sent a chill down my spine. “Seven Masters,” I said, hoping to jar him into telling me something I didn’t know. “The Pythia. And Nine.”
“All are tested. All must be found worthy.”
“And that woman I saw with you? She’s worthy?” The question tore out of me with quiet force. My mother wasn’t worthy.
My mother fought.
“Did you take her, too?” I asked, my mind on the woman I’d seen. “Did you attack her, cut her?” I continued, my heart pounding in my chest. “Did you torture her until she became one of you? Your oracle?”
Nightshade was quiet for several moments. Then he leaned forward, his eyes on mine. “I like to think of the Pythia more as Lady Justice,” he said. “She is our counsel, our judge and our jury, until her child comes of age. She lives and dies for us and we for her.”