Sleep came for me in the dead of night. I dreamt of my mother’s eyes, wide-set and rimmed in liner that made them look almost impossibly large. I dreamt of the way she’d shooed me out of the dressing room that day.
I dreamt of the blood and woke the next morning to something sticky dripping onto my forehead, one drop of liquid at a time. My eyes flew open.
Lia stood over me, a straw in one hand and a can of soda in the other.
She eased her finger off the top of the straw and let another drop of soda hit my forehead.
I wiped it off and sat up, careful not to wake Dean, who lay beside me on the couch, still dressed in his clothes from the night before.
Lia put the straw in her mouth and sucked the remaining liquid out before plopping it back down in her soda. Smirking, she eyed the sleeping Dean, then raised an eyebrow at me. When that failed to engender a response, she made a quiet tsk-ing sound with her tongue. I stood up, which forced her to take a step back.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her, my voice muted.
Lia twirled the straw contemplatively in between her middle finger and her thumb. “So you two weren’t up until the wee hours of the morning looking at the information on that drive Agent Sterling gave you?”
“How did you—”
Lia cut off the question by turning my still-open laptop to face me. “Fascinating reading.”
I felt a sinking sensation deep in my gut. Lia knows. She read the file, and she knows.
I waited for Lia to say something else about the files on that computer. She didn’t. Instead, she strolled toward the bedroom she’d claimed as her own. After a long moment, I followed, just as she’d intended me to. We ended up out on the balcony.
Lia closed the door behind us, then hopped up on the railing. We were forty stories off the ground, and she sat there, perfectly balanced, staring me down.
“What?” I said.
“If you mention a word of what I’m about to tell you to Dean, I will disavow any knowledge of this conversation.” Lia’s tone was casual, but I believed every word of it.
I braced myself for an attack.
“You make him happy.” Lia narrowed her eyes slightly. “As happy as Dean can be,” she modified. “We’d have to ask Sloane for the exact numbers, but I’m estimating a two hundred percent reduction in brooding since the two of you embarked on…this thing of yours.”
Dean was Lia’s family. If she had a choice between saving every other person on the face of the planet and saving Dean, she would choose Dean.
She hopped off the railing and gripped my arm lightly. “I like you.” Her grip tightened, as if she found that admission mildly distasteful to say.
I like you, too, I almost said, but didn’t want to chance that she’d see those words as a shade short of the truth.
“I missed you,” I said instead—the same words I’d said to Sloane. “You, Michael, Sloane, Dean. This is home.”
Lia looked at me for a moment. “Whatever,” she said, pushing down any emotion my words had wrought with a graceful little shrug. “The point is that I don’t hate you,” she continued magnanimously, “so when I say that you need to put on your big-girl panties and woman up, I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“Excuse me?” I said, pulling my arm from her grasp.
“You have Mommy issues. I get it, Cassie. I get that this is hard, and I get that you have every right to deal with the whole body-showing-up thing
in your own way and time. But fair or not, no one here has the emotional bandwidth to deal with the Continuing Woes of Cassie’s Murdered Mother.”
I felt like she’d slammed the heel of her hand into my throat. But even as I weathered the blow, I knew Lia had said those words for a reason.
You’re not cruel. Not like that.
“Sloane slipped two pairs of chopsticks into her sleeve last night at the end of the meal.” Lia’s statement confirmed my gut instinct. “Not disposable ones. The nice ones they had on the table.”
In addition to being our resident statistician, Sloane was also our resident klepto. The last time I’d seen her take something, she’d been stressed out about a confrontation with the FBI. For Sloane, sticky fingers were a sign that her brain was short-circuiting with emotions she couldn’t control.
“Let’s call that Exhibit A,” Lia suggested. “Exhibit B would be Michael. Do you have any idea what kind of absolute mind-warp going home is for him?”
I thought of the conversation I’d overheard between Lia and Michael the day before. “Yes,” I said, turning back to face Lia again. “I do.”
There was a beat of silence as she processed the truth she heard in those words.
“You think you do,” Lia said softly. “But you couldn’t.” “I heard you guys talking yesterday,” I admitted.
I expected Lia to have a knee-jerk reaction to those words, but she didn’t. “Once upon a time,” she said, her voice even as she turned to stare out at the Strip, “someone used to give me gifts for being a good girl, the way Michael gets ‘gifts’ from his father. You might think you understand what’s going on in Michael’s head right now, but you don’t. You can’t profile this, Cassie. You can’t puzzle it out.”
When she turned back to face me, the expression on her face was flippant. “What I’m saying here is that Michael is about one downward spiral–induced bad decision away from eloping with a showgirl, and Sloane has been acting weird—even for Sloane—since we got here. We are officially at issue capacity, Cassie. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to be effed up right now.” She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “It’s not your turn.”
