The EMTs who treated Laurel insisted on treating me as well. I tried to tell them that the blood wasn’t mine, but the words wouldn’t come.
Agent Sterling sat down beside me. “You’re strong. You’re a survivor.
None of this was your fault.”
The profiler in me knew that those words weren’t just for me. I’d killed my mother. She’d killed her father.
How did a person survive that?
“As touching as this moment truly is”—a voice broke into my thoughts
—“some of us had to mislead, blackmail, and/or explicitly threaten at least a half-dozen federal agents to get past the police line, and we’re not the kind of people who excel at waiting.”
I looked up to see Lia standing three feet away. Sloane was pressed to her side, a fierce look on her face. Behind them, Michael had a physical grip on Dean. Every muscle in my boyfriend’s body was tensed.
Michael blackmailed the feds, I thought. You threatened them, Dean.
Explicitly.
Dean had spent his entire life keeping his emotions carefully in check, never losing control, fighting against even a hint of violence. I knew, just by the way he was standing, the way his eyes drank me in, like a man dying of thirst in a desert, unsure whether he was beholding a mirage—you didn’t care what you had to do, who you had to hurt, what you had to threaten.
All you care about is me.
I stood, my legs shaking as I did, and Michael let Dean go. My boyfriend caught me before I fell, and something inside me shattered. The numbness that had settled over my body receded, and suddenly I could feel everything— the ache in my throat, the ghost of the pain from the poison, Dean’s body folding around mine.
I could feel the knife in my hand.
I could feel myself holding my mother and watching her die.
“I killed her.” My face lay on Dean’s chest, the words ripped from my mouth like a tooth pulled out by force. “Dean, I—”
“You’re not a killer.” Dean’s right hand cupped my chin, his left gently
tracing the line of my jaw. “You’re the person who empathizes with every victim. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, and if you’d been given a choice—if it had been up to you whether it was your life on the line or anyone else’s—you would have told the Masters to take you.” Dean’s voice was rough in his throat. His dark eyes searched my own. “That’s what the Masters never understood. You would have walked in there willingly, knowing you wouldn’t have walked out, and not just for me or Michael or Lia or Sloane—for anyone. Because that’s the person you are, Cassie. Ever since you walked into your mother’s dressing room, ever since you were twelve years old, part of you believed that it was your fault, that it should have been you.”
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.”
