But I’d told her that I was sure.
A piercing scream cut through the air. Laurel wasn’t silent now. She wasn’t stoic. She wasn’t Nine.
She’s just a baby. He’s hurting her. He’ll kill her if I don’t—
No.
“Yes,” my mother said, closing the space between us. She’d always known exactly what I was thinking. She’d known me the way only someone with our particular skill set could.
Someone who loves me, forever and ever.
“Do it,” my mother insisted, pressing her knife into my hand. “You have to, baby. You are the best thing I ever did—the only good thing I ever did. I can’t be that for Laurel, not now.” She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t panicked.
She was sure.
“But you can,” she continued. “You can love her. You can be there for her. You can get out of here, and you can live. And to do that…” She placed her left hand over my right hand, guiding the knife to her chest. “You have to kill me.”
Dancing in the snow. Curled up in her lap. Behavior. Personality. Environment.
I love you. I love you. I—
Her grip on my hand tightened. Her body blocking the motion from the Masters, she jerked me forward. My hand on the knife. Her hand on mine. I felt the blade slide into her chest. She gasped, blood blooming around the wound. I wanted to pull the knife out.
But for Laurel, I didn’t.
“Forever and ever,” I whispered, holding the knife in place. I held her. She slumped forward, bleeding, the light beginning to drain from her eyes.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I didn’t look away. I didn’t so much as blink, not even when I heard a door slam open.
Not even when I heard Agent Briggs’s familiar voice. “Freeze!”
My mom isn’t moving. Her heart isn’t beating. Her eyes—they don’t see me. I pulled the knife out of her chest, and her body fell to the ground as FBI agents poured into the room.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Gone.
On some level, I was aware of the fact that shots were being fired. On some level, I was aware of the fact that arrests were being made. But as I stood there, the bloody knife in my hand, I couldn’t bring myself to look up. I couldn’t watch.
I couldn’t look at anything but the body.
My mother’s red hair was splayed out around her, a halo of fire against the bright white of the sand. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyes unseeing.
“Put down the knife!” Agent Sterling’s voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “Step away from the girl.”
It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking to me. She wasn’t talking about my knife. I turned, forcing my eyes to the stands.
To the director.
To Laurel.
He was crouched behind her, his knife at her throat. “We walk out of here,” he said, “or the child doesn’t.”
“You don’t kill children.” It took me a moment to realize that I was the one who’d said the words. Of the hundreds of victims we’d identified as being the work of the Masters, not one of them had been a child. When Beau Donovan had failed their test, they hadn’t taken a knife to his throat.
They’d left him in the desert to die.
“There are rituals,” I said. “There are rules.”
“And yet, you’re not quite eighteen yet, are you, Cassie?” The director never took his eyes off of his daughter. “I’ve always believed the rules are what we make of them. Isn’t that right, Veronica?”
Agent Sterling stared at her father, and for an instant, I could see the little girl she’d been. You adored him once. You respected him. You joined the FBI for him.
She pulled the trigger.
I heard the shot, but didn’t register what I’d heard until I saw the tiny red hole in her father’s forehead. Director Sterling fell to the ground. As the FBI rushed Laurel, my little sister knelt, touching the wound on her captor’s forehead.
She looked up and met my eyes. “The blood belongs to the Pythia,” she told me, her voice haunting, almost melodic. “The blood belongs to Nine.”
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.”