I tried to pull back from him, but he held me close.
“You’ve been looking—and looking and looking—for some way to make it right. You’re not a killer, Cassie. You just finally accepted that sometimes, the biggest sacrifice isn’t made by the person who gives up her life.” He lowered his forehead to touch mine. “Sometimes, the hardest thing to be is the one who lives.”
My body was shaking. My hands trembled as they found their way to his chest, his neck, his face, as if touching him, feeling him beneath the pads of my fingers, might make what he was saying true.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I heard the sobs before I realized I was sobbing. I dug my fingers into the back of his neck, his T-shirt, his shoulders, holding on for dear life.
“I love you.” Dean lifted the words from my mind. “Today, tomorrow, covered in blood, haunted and waking up in the middle of the night screaming—I love you, Cassie, and I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“None of us are.” Sloane’s voice was quiet. I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t sure whether this was a private moment, wasn’t sure if she would be wanted.
But you can’t stay away.
“You aren’t alone,” Sloane said. “And I’m not going to ask if now would be an appropriate time to hug you, because I have calculated within a reasonable margin of error that it is.”
Michael didn’t say anything as he piled on behind Sloane.
Lia arched an eyebrow at me. “I didn’t cry when you were gone,” she informed me. “I didn’t break things. I didn’t feel like someone had put me in a hole.”
For the first time since I’d known her, Lia’s voice caught on a lie.
“How did you find me?” I did Lia the favor of changing the subject.
“We didn’t,” Sloane said. “Celine did.”
Celine? I looked for her and saw her standing behind the police line, watching from a distance, her dark hair caught in a faint wind.
“It was the picture,” Agent Sterling put in. “Of your mother and Laurel.” Behind her, my little sister lay curled in the back of the ambulance, asleep.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Celine saw the resemblance between you and your mother, between your mother and Laurel, and between Laurel”—Agent Sterling’s expression flickered, just for a moment—“and me.”
I thought of Director Sterling telling me that some privileges—such as torturing the Pythia—were reserved for active members of the cult, while others were open to Masters who’d already handed their seat off to a replacement.
You held a knife to my throat. You let one hand gently glide down the side of my face.
I’d tried, over the past few months, not to think about the way that Laurel had been conceived.
“She’s not just my sister.” I met Agent Sterling’s eyes. “She’s your sister, too.”
“We tracked the director.” Agent Briggs came and stood behind Agent Sterling, as close to her as Dean was to me. “And he led us to you.”
For a long moment, our FBI mentors stood there, Sterling’s gaze aimed forward. I expected her to go into Agent Veronica Sterling mode, to step away from him, to point out that her father had been manipulating them—both of them—for years.
Instead, Sterling let her veneer of calm waver. She leaned back into Briggs. And his arm wrapped around her.
We’re the same, I thought, watching Sterling let go. Now more than ever. Laurel was Agent Sterling’s, and she was mine—just like what had happened in the Masters’ tomb. What we’d done. What we had to live with now.
“Come on,” Dean said, brushing his lips over my temple. “Let’s go home.”
I buried my mother—for the second time—in Colorado. This time, the funeral wasn’t a sham. This time, her body was the one in the casket. And this time, I wasn’t just surrounded by the family I’d found in the Naturals program.
My father’s family was there as well. Aunts and uncles and cousins. My father. Nonna.
I’d told them a version of the truth—that I’d been working with the FBI, that my mother had died at the hands of the same people responsible for my cousin Kate’s death, that Laurel was my sister.
She’s you, and she’s me, and she’s ours. My mother’s words had never been far from my mind in the days since we’d wrapped up the Masters’ case.
The FBI had identified and neutralized nine killers that night—seven Masters, one apprentice, and the man born to rule them all. Six killers in custody, three—Malcolm Lowell, Director Sterling, and TA Geoff—dead. The FBI was keeping the case quiet for now, but it wouldn’t stay quiet for long.
In the meantime, Laurel needed something that I couldn’t give her alone.
“You will come back to the house with me,” Nonna declared, hoisting my little sister up like she was nothing. “We will make cookies. And you!” She pointed a finger at Michael. “You will help us.”
Michael grinned. “Sir, yes, sir.”
Nonna narrowed her eyes at him. “I hear you have a problem with the kissing,” she said, having jumped to that conclusion when I’d been reluctant to talk about my romantic status months earlier. “If you behave yourself, I will give you some pointers.”
Dean almost choked trying to keep a straight face. That was Nonna to a T—half general, half mother hen. She was the one I’d come home to—not my father, who couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
Watching Nonna putting Michael handily in his place, Judd smiled slightly. “Your grandmother,” he said. “She’s single?”
One by one, the others cleared away, leaving me alone at my mother’s gravesite. The therapist the FBI had sent me to had told me that there would be good days and bad days. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there by myself before I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Agent Briggs. He looked exactly as he had the day I’d first met him, the day he’d thrown down the gauntlet and used my mother’s case to tempt me into meeting with him.
“Director.” I greeted him with his new title.
“You’re sure,” FBI Director Briggs said, “that this is what you want?”