Three missing bullets. I imagined lying on my back, bullets burning in my gut, my chest, my leg. You would have lost consciousness. Without immediate medical intervention, you would have died.
“But the Masters chose you,” I said, my voice so soft that I could barely hear the words. “Just like they chose my mother.”
If I was right, Mallory Mills hadn’t died of those gunshot wounds. The Masters had shot her, then saved her. They’d taken her, framed her husband, and, once she’d healed, forced her to fight her predecessor to the death. They’d held her captive, right up until they’d taken my mother.
“What do they have in common?” Dean asked quietly.
“Mallory was in her early twenties.” I fell back on facts. “My mother was twenty-eight when she disappeared. Both of them were young, healthy. Mallory’s hair was dark. My mom’s was red.” I tried not to remember my mother’s infectious smile, the way she’d looked dancing in the snow. “Both of them had been abused.”
My mother had left home at sixteen to escape a father more monstrous than Michael’s. And Mallory Mills? There was a reason she’d been living under an alias, a reason that the district attorney was able to convict her ex without a body.
You choose women who have experienced violence firsthand. You choose fighters. You choose survivors. And then you make them do the unthinkable to survive.
I wanted to step toward Dean. I wanted to close my lips over his, to forget about Mallory Mills and my mother’s name on this tombstone and every single thing I’d read in that file.
But I couldn’t. “When I went to see your father, he quoted Shakespeare at me. The Tempest. ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’”
Dean knew his father well enough to read between the lines. “He told you that your mom might not just be their captive. He told you she might be one of them.”
“We don’t know what those monsters have done to her, Dean. We don’t know what she’s had to become to survive.” A chill settled over my body, even though I could still feel the heat from Dean’s. “We do know that she’s not just another victim. She’s the Pythia. Lady Justice—that’s what Nightshade called her. Judge and jury. Like she was one of them.”
“Not by choice.” Dean said the words I needed to hear. That didn’t make them true.
“She chose to kill the woman we buried.” Saying those words was like tearing off a bandage, followed by five or six layers of skin.
“Your mother chose to live.”
That was what I’d been telling myself for the past ten weeks. I’d spent more nights than I could count staring up at my ceiling and wondering: Would I have done what she did if I’d been the one forced to fight for my survival? Could I have killed another woman—the previous Pythia, pitted against me in a battle to the death—to save myself?
As I had dozens of times before, I tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes, to imagine what it must have been like for her after she’d been taken. “I wake up in near-darkness. I should be dead, but I’m not.” My mom’s next thought would have been of me, but I skipped over that and on to the realizations that must have been racing in her mind once she’d pieced together what had happened. “They cut me. They stabbed me. They took me to the brink of death. And then they brought me back.”
How many women, other than my mother and Mallory Mills, shared this story? How many Pythias had there been?
You wait for them to heal, and then…
“They lock me in a room. I’m not the only one there. There’s a woman coming toward me. She’s got a knife in her hands. And there’s a knife beside me.” My breath was jagged. “I know now why they came so close to killing me, why they brought me back.” To my ears, my voice even sounded like my mother’s. “They wanted me to look Death in the eyes. They wanted me to know what it felt like so that I would know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I wasn’t ready to die.”
I pick up the knife. I fight back. And I win.
“The Masters stalk these women.” Dean pulled me from the darkness. He didn’t use any of our profiling pronouns—not I or we or you. “They watch them. They know what they’ve been through, know what they’ve survived.”
I stepped forward, stopping just short of resting my face on his chest. “They watched my mother—for weeks or months or years, and I can’t even remember the names of all the towns we lived in. I’m the closest thing we have to a witness, and I can’t remember a single useful detail. I can’t remember a single face.”
I’d tried. I’d spent years trying, but we’d moved so often. And each time, my mother had told me the same thing.
Home isn’t a place. Home is the people who love you. Forever and ever, no matter what.
Forever and ever, no matter what.
Forever and ever—
And that was when I remembered—I wasn’t the only one my mother had promised to love. I wasn’t the only witness. I didn’t know what had been done to my mother or who she’d become. But there was someone who did. Someone who knew her. Someone who loved her.
Forever and ever, no matter what.
My sister, Laurel, was small for her age. The pediatrician thought she was about four—healthy, except for a vitamin D deficiency. That, along with her pale skin and what little we’d been able to glean from Laurel herself, had led to the theory that she’d spent the majority of her life indoors—quite possibly underground.
I’d seen Laurel twice in the past ten weeks. It had taken almost twenty-four hours to arrange this meeting, and if Agents Briggs and Sterling had their way, it would be the last.
It’s too dangerous, Cassie. For you. For Laurel. Agent Sterling’s admonition rang in my ears as I watched the little sister I barely knew stand opposite an empty swing set, staring at it with an intensity at odds with her baby face.
It’s like you can see something the rest of us can’t, I thought. A memory. A ghost.
Laurel rarely talked. She didn’t run. She didn’t play. Part of me had hoped that she’d look like a kid this time. But she just stood there, ten feet and light-years away from me, as still and unnaturally quiet as the day I’d found her sitting in the middle of a blood-drenched room.