Like mother, like daughter—
All thoughts cut off as Dean lifted my wrist to his lips, pressing a soft, silent kiss to the once-abused skin. He closed his eyes. I closed mine. I could feel him, breathing behind me. I matched my breaths to his.
In. Out. In. Out.
“You don’t have to be strong right now,” Dean told me.
I turned, opened my eyes, caught his lips in mine. Yes. I do.
Like mother, like daughter—I was a fighter.
My neck arched. I pulled back from Dean, my face less than an inch from his.
“You should really put a tie on the door or something.” Lia sauntered onto the back porch, utterly unremorseful about interrupting us. “Serial-killing cults and citywide manhunts aside, a little discretion on the PDA front goes a long way.”
I took that to mean Lia hadn’t received any updates on the case. Briggs and Sterling hadn’t called. Nightshade’s still out there. The FBI is still looking.
“Lia.” Dean’s tone clearly requested that she vacate the premises.
Lia ignored him and focused on me. “I told Michael to put on his big-boy pants,” she informed me. “I think the near-death experience might have put a damper on his downward spiral, and besides…” Lia met my gaze. “I told him it was your turn.”
There was a beat of silence as I absorbed the full meaning of Lia’s words. She was here for me. Michael was here. Sloane—shattered, grieving Sloane—was here.
Briggs saved my life, Judd had said. He saved me, the day he brought me Dean.
I wanted Nightshade behind bars. I wanted answers—but when I let myself, I wanted this more. Dean and Lia and Michael and Sloane—home is the people who love you most.
Forever and ever.
No matter—
“Guys.” Michael stood frozen at the back door. Behind him, I could see Sloane, dark circles ringing her eyes.
I knew, then, that there was news. The thudding of my heart, the roar in my ears—I knew there was news, and I was terrified to let Michael say a single word.
“They got him.”
Nightshade.
The man in the picture.
They got him.
“The woman?” I heard, as if from a distance. My voice. My question. “The little girl?”
Michael shook his head, which I took to mean that they hadn’t been with Nightshade.
The Pythia. The child.
My heart raced as I thought of the man I’d seen, the man I’d remembered.
You killed Judd’s daughter. You killed Beau. You know why that symbol was carved onto my mother’s coffin.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Lia’s voice was low. “Michael.”
I couldn’t read Michael the way he would have been able to read me, but in the second it took him to reply to Lia’s question, his expression was enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
“Nightshade stuck Briggs with some kind of needle.” Michael looked from Lia to Dean to me. “Injected him with something. They don’t know what.”
My mouth went dry and the roaring sound in my ears surged. Poison.
One last trick up Nightshade’s sleeve. Your grand finale. Your au revoir. I’d been worried that the FBI wouldn’t catch him. It hadn’t occurred to me, even for a second, to worry about what might happen once they did.
Undetectable. Incurable. Painful. I didn’t want to remember what Judd had said about Nightshade’s poison, but the words kept repeating themselves in a loop in my head.
“Cassie.” Judd appeared, his face grim. “We need to talk.”
What else was there to say?
Undetectable. Incurable. Painful.
Sloane’s lips were moving as she silently went through a list of every poison known to man. Dean had gone ashen.
“He claims there’s an antidote,” Judd said. Our guardian didn’t specify who “he” was. He didn’t have to.
Nightshade.
“And what does he want?” Dean asked hoarsely. “In exchange for that antidote?”
I knew the answer—knew it based on the way Judd had said my name, the number of times I’d seen Nightshade, the time he’d spent watching me.
My mother fought, tooth and nail. She resisted whatever it was you people wanted from her, whatever you wanted her to be.
I looked from Dean to Judd. “He wants me.”
I stood on one side of a two-way mirror and watched as guards escorted the man I’d identified as Nightshade into the room on the other side. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his body. His hair was mussed. A dark bruise was forming on one side of his face.
He didn’t look dangerous.
He didn’t look like a killer.
“He can’t see you,” Agent Sterling reminded me. She looked at me, her own eyes shadowed. “He can’t touch you. He stays on that side of the glass, and you stay here.”
Behind us, Judd placed one hand on my shoulder. You won’t put me in the same room as Scarlett’s killer, I thought. Not even to save Briggs.
I tried not to think about Briggs and instead focused on the man on the other side of the glass. He looked older than he had in my memory—younger than Judd, but significantly older than Agent Sterling.