It looked like there had been a fight. Like you’d been attacked.
I wondered if that was all it had taken. I wondered if Celine had turned her artist’s eye on the destruction, thinking of ways to make it look even more realistic. The bloody handprint on the door. The drops of blood on the carpet. I wondered how she’d figured out how to delete the security footage, if she’d picked the lock on her own studio door.
“An artistic challenge.” Dean picked up where I’d left off. “A game. To see if she could fool everyone. To see how long…”
How long it would take them to notice you were gone.
“Someone care to tell me what I’m missing here?” Agent Sterling’s voice blared from the phone, reminding me that she was still on the line.
“Michael’s a liar,” Lia said flatly. “And Celine Delacroix is a poor, pathological little rich girl who kidnapped herself.”
“Don’t talk about her that way.” Michael’s response was instantaneous and instinctual. “Whatever she did, she had a reason for it.”
“Did you pine after her when you were growing up?” Lia asked the question like the answer didn’t matter to her in the least. “Did you pursue her, the way you got all moon-eyed over Cassie when she first showed up?” Lia was aiming below the belt. That was the only way she knew how to hit. “Did you convince yourself you weren’t good enough for her,” she said, her voice low, “because a person like you could only ever be good enough for someone as horrible as me?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Michael told her.
“Do you love her?” Lia asked, her voice dripping with syrupy sweetness.
I could see Michael’s temper fraying. He ran his thumb over his bloodied lip and stared at Lia. “Longer and better than I’ve loved you.”
We found Celine Delacroix the next morning, sitting on the edge of a dock a two-hour drive from her house—the same dock where she and Michael had been photographed years before. Beside me, Dean watched, stone-faced, as Michael walked toward the end of the dock—toward Celine. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face when she spotted him. I couldn’t hear his greeting or the words she offered in return. But I saw the exact moment when the fighter in Celine gave way to something softer.
Something vulnerable.
“This is what happens when they’re together,” Dean said, and I knew that he wasn’t talking about Michael and Celine. “Michael knows exactly what Lia’s feeling. Lia knows every time he lies to her. They hurt each other, and they hurt themselves.”
I thought about everything that had happened: Michael’s confrontation with his father, his fight with Lia, the realization that we’d been dragged away from hunting for my mother’s captors by what amounted to an elaborate prank. We’d been on this case for less than twenty-four hours, but even that felt like too much.
One day until Michael’s birthday. Three days until April second. As I watched Michael sit down next to Celine, the countdown to the next Fibonacci date resumed in my head.
“Relax, Dean,” Lia said, coming up behind us. “I’m fine. We found the girl. We saved the day. If you think I’m going to get all emotional over Michael Townsend, clearly I’ve been doing this cold-hearted shrew thing all wrong.”
Michael didn’t tell us what Celine had said. He didn’t tell us whether she’d explained why she’d done what she’d done or what she’d hoped to gain by it. By midmorning, we were back on the plane, a whole herd of emotional elephants in tow.
Briggs didn’t say a word to Sterling about the fact that she’d known from the get-go that this case had nothing to do with the Masters.
Sterling didn’t say a word to Briggs about the way he’d jumped the moment her father had indicated how high.
Michael and Lia didn’t acknowledge the angry words that had passed between them.
I didn’t tell Dean that the night before, I’d dreamed of his father, of my mother, of blood on the walls and blood on her hands—and on mine.
Once we were in the air, Judd pulled me to the back of the plane. He settled into one seat and nodded toward another. I sat. For several seconds, he said nothing, like the two of us were sitting side by side on the front porch of the Quantico house, enjoying our morning coffee and a bit of quiet.
“Do you know why I said yes to this case?” Judd asked finally.
I turned the question over in my head. You want the Masters as badly as I do. They’d killed his daughter. But though this case had appeared related, my gut said that Judd—unlike the director and Agent Briggs—had watched Agent Sterling very carefully through the whole exchange.
He hadn’t been backing Briggs’s decision. He’d been backing hers.
“A girl was missing.” I repeated the words Agent Sterling had said the day before. “A girl that Michael knew.”
“Michael was coming back here.” Judd had never doubted that—not for a second. “And when one of my kids goes down an emotional rabbit hole like that one, he—or she—sure as hell doesn’t do it alone.”
Judd gave those words a moment to sink in, then reached into his bag and pulled out a folder.
“What’s this?” I asked when he handed it to me.
“A file someone tried very hard to bury,” he replied. “While you were off gallivanting after Miss Delacroix this morning, one of Ronnie’s contacts managed to dig it up.”
Ronnie was short for Veronica—as in Agent Veronica Sterling.
“Inmate named Robert Mills.” Judd resorted to speaking in fragments as my fingers found their way to the edge of the folder. “Convicted of murdering his ex-wife. Killed in prison not long after he was convicted.”
The man Redding talked to. My grip on the edge of the folder tightened. The one whose ex-wife’s body was never found. The one who was taken, just like my mother.
As I opened the folder, Judd caught my chin, and his weathered hands turned my face gently toward his.
“Cassie-girl, don’t go down this rabbit hole alone.”
The information in the file was bare-bones. Robert Mills had been convicted of murdering his ex-wife. Despite the fact that her body had never been found, there had been a preponderance of physical evidence. His DNA was found at the crime scene, which was soaked in his ex-wife’s blood. He had a history of violence. Mallory Mills had been living under an assumed name at the time of her murder; Robert had recently discovered her location. The police had found three blood-soaked bullets at the scene, and each had tested positive for Mallory’s DNA. Forensic analysis of a gun found in a nearby Dumpster had revealed that at least six shots had been fired, leaving police to conjecture that the other three bullets had remained embedded in the victim’s body.
The gun was registered to her ex-husband.
You were left, shot and bleeding, on the floor for more than five minutes. There were pools of blood—upwards of 42 percent of the blood in your body.
Beside me, Dean studied the crime scene photos on his phone. Back at the house, Agent Sterling was probably tacking up her copies of these pictures, one more piece of the puzzle on the basement wall. I’d chosen a different location to process what I’d read on the plane.
The cemetery.
I stared at my mother’s name, etched into the tombstone: LORELAI HOBBES. I’d known before we’d buried the body that the remains we’d laid to rest there weren’t hers. Now I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that they might belong to Mallory Mills. This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about the life my mother had snuffed out to save her own. But now I wasn’t just thinking about the body six feet beneath us; I was thinking about a living, breathing woman, holding her image in my mind as I walked back through the evidence that had been used to convict her ex-husband of murder.
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.
You’re young, Laurel. You’re resilient. You’re in protective custody. I wanted to believe that with time, Laurel was going to be just fine, but my half sister had been born and bred to take a seat at the Masters’ table. I had no idea if she was ever going to be okay.
In the weeks that Laurel had been in FBI custody, no one had been able to get any actionable information out of her. She didn’t know where they’d been holding her. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—describe the Masters.
“Based on the level of deterioration on that merry-go-round, I would estimate that this playground was built between 1983 and 1985.” Sloane came to stand beside me. It had been Agent Sterling’s suggestion to bring another Natural with us. I’d chosen Sloane because she was the most childlike herself—and the least likely to realize just how psychologically scarred Laurel really was.
Sloane squeezed my hand comfortingly. “In the Estonian sport of kiiking, players stand on a massive swing and attempt to rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees.”
I had two choices: I could either stand here listening to every playground-related factoid Sloane could think of in her attempt to calm my nerves or I could talk to my sister.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Laurel pivoted, tearing her gaze away from the swing set and bringing it to me. I made my way toward her, and she turned her attention back to the swing. I knelt next to her, giving her a moment to acclimate to my presence. Sloane came and sat down one swing over.
“This is my friend Sloane,” I told Laurel. “She wanted to meet you.”
No response from Laurel.
“There are two hundred and eighty-five different species of squirrel,” Sloane announced as a greeting. “And that’s not counting any number of prehistoric squirrel-like species.”
To my surprise, Laurel tilted her head to the side and smiled at Sloane. “Numbers,” she said clearly. “I like numbers.”
Sloane gave Laurel a companionable smile. “Numbers make sense, even when nothing else does.”
I focused on Laurel as she took a tentative step toward Sloane. Numbers
are comforting, I thought, trying to see the world through my little sister’s eyes. Familiar. To the men who brought you into this world, numbers are immutable. A higher order. A higher law.
“Do you like swings?” Sloane asked Laurel. “They’re my second favorite use of centripetal force.”
Laurel frowned as Sloane began swinging gently back and forth. “Not like that,” my sister told Sloane firmly.
Sloane slowed to a stop, and Laurel stepped forward. She reached out to trail her tiny fingers along the links of the swing’s chains. “Like this,” she told Sloane, pressing her wrist against the metal chain.
Sloane stood and mimicked Laurel’s motion. “Like this?”
Laurel lifted the swing and wrapped the chain carefully around Sloane’s wrist. “Both hands,” she told Sloane. As my four-year-old sister painstakingly wrapped the free chain around Sloane’s other wrist, my brain finally processed what she was doing.
Chains on the wrists. Shackles.
I’d wondered what Laurel saw when she looked at the swing set, and now I knew.
“Bracelets,” Laurel said, sounding as happy as I’d ever heard her. “Like Mommy’s.”
If I hadn’t already been on the ground, those words might have brought me to my knees.
“Mommy wears bracelets?” I asked Laurel, trying to keep my voice even and calm.
“Sometimes,” Laurel replied. “It’s part of the game.”
“What game?” My mouth was dry, but I couldn’t afford to stop talking. This was the closest Laurel had ever come to telling me about the way she’d been forced to live, about our mother.
“The game,” Laurel repeated, shaking her head like I’d just asked a very silly question. “Not the quiet game. Not the hiding game. The game.”
There was a beat of silence. Sloane picked up the slack. “Games have rules,” she commented.
Laurel nodded. “I know the rules,” she whispered. “I know all of the rules.”
“Can you tell Sloane the rules, Laurel?” I asked. “She wants to hear them.”
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