Not yet.
Five steps forward, blade and eyes gleaming. Closer. Closer. The flat of the blade presses against the side of your face.
Without order, there is chaos. Without order, there is pain.
You smile.
They left you all day in this room, thinking that you were Lorelai. They left you, roaming free in a room with your own shackles, under the belief that the threat of retribution—to you, to Laurel—would keep you in line.
They were wrong.
You surge forward as the broken shackles fall away. You grab the knife and plunge it into your tormenter’s chest. “I am chaos,” you whisper. “I am order.” You press your lips against his and twist the blade. “I am pain.”
Holland Darby and his wife were brought in for questioning. Neither one of them said a word. At my suggestion, Agent Sterling brought in their son. The teenagers among us were relegated to observing—in this case, from behind a two-way mirror.
“Devastation, resignation, fury, guilt.” Michael rattled off the emotions on Kane Darby’s face one by one.
I looked for some hint of what Michael saw, but I couldn’t sense even a trace of emotion churning in Kane Darby. He seemed somber, but not on guard.
“Two bodies were found in a hidden room beneath your family’s chapel.” Agent Sterling mimicked Kane’s manner: no muss, no fuss, no frills. No beating around the bush. “Do you have any idea how they came to be there?”
Kane looked Agent Sterling straight in the eye. “No.”
“Lie,” Lia said beside me.
“We’re looking at one male victim and one female victim, killed approximately ten years ago. Can you shed any light on their identities?”
“No.”
“Lie.”
I stared at Kane’s familiar face, pushing back against any warmth the six-year-old inside of me still felt for the man. You know who they are. You know what happened to them. You know what happened in that room. Why your father built it. Why he built the chapel.
Why there were shackles on the walls.
Kane had told me that Lia would be safe at Serenity Ranch, but that I wouldn’t be. I wondered now if I would have ended up down below.
I am my father’s son. Kane’s voice rang in my memory. I made my choices long ago.
I’d seen parallels between Kane’s emotional control and Dean’s. Dean had known what his father was doing to those women. At the age of twelve, he’d found a way to stop him.
You got out, Kane. But you didn’t stop your father. Didn’t stop it—whatever it was. You didn’t leave town. You couldn’t.
“He might talk to me,” I told Agent Sterling over the audio feed. After a few more questions to Kane, she excused herself from the room.
“He won’t talk to anyone,” she told us, observing my mother’s ex from behind the two-way mirror. “Not until we identify the bodies. Not until we know who they are. Not until this—all of it—is real and he reaches the point of no return.”
Kane Darby had been keeping his father’s secrets all his life. Devastation. Resignation. Fury. Guilt. The last two were the emotions we needed.
“What are the chances the FBI lab can ID the bodies?” I asked.
“With little more than skeletal evidence and no DNA to compare it to?” Agent Sterling returned evenly. “Even if they come up with something, it will take time.”
I thought of today’s date—and yesterday’s. I thought about the fact that it was still unclear how this—any of it—was related to the Masters. I thought about my mother, shackled. The way that corpse had been shackled.
And then I thought about the corpse, the bones peeking out from beneath its fraying flesh. The face that didn’t even look like a face.
I paused. The face. I could see Celine Delacroix in my mind’s eye, her posture regal, her expression wry. I can take one look at a person and know exactly what their facial bones look like underneath the skin.
My mind reeled. What were the chances that Celine could do the reverse? That, given a picture of a person’s facial bones, she could draw the face?
“Cassie?” Agent Sterling’s tone told me this wasn’t the first time she’d said my name.
I turned to catch Michael’s eye. “I have an idea, and you’re really not going to like it.”
We sent Celine photographs of our victims. And then we waited. Waiting was not one of the Naturals program’s collective strong suits. Within an hour, Agent Sterling was out working the case again, but the rest of us were stuck twiddling our thumbs at the hotel. Waiting for Celine to put her skills to the test. Waiting for the truth. Waiting to find out if our efforts would lead us any closer to my mother.
“Dean.” Of all of us, Lia was either the best at waiting or the worst. “Truth or dare?”
“Seriously?” I asked Lia.
Her lips tilted upward ever so slightly. “There’s a certain tradition to it, don’t you think?” She sat down on the arm of the couch. “Truth or dare, Dean?”
For a moment, I thought he would refuse to answer.
“Truth.”
Lia looked down at her hands, examining her fingernails. “How long are you going to be mad at me?”
You don’t sound vulnerable. You don’t sound like the answer could break you.
“I’m not mad at you,” Dean said, his voice cracking.
“He’s mad at himself,” Michael clarified loftily. “Also: me. Definitely me.”
Dean glared at him. “Truth or dare, Townsend.” Those words weren’t issued like a question. They were a challenge.
Michael offered Dean a charming, glittering smile. “Dare.”
For almost a minute, the two of them were caught in a staring competition. Then Dean broke the silence. “Agent Starmans is downstairs patrolling the perimeter of the hotel. I dare you to moon him.”
“What?” Clearly, Michael had not been expecting those words to exit Dean’s mouth.
“The term mooning arises from the vaguely moon-shaped form of the human buttocks,” Sloane volunteered helpfully. “Although the practice dates back to the Middle Ages, the terminology was not common until the mid-1960s.”
“Really?” I asked Dean. I was a natural profiler. He was my boyfriend, and I had in no way seen this coming. Then again, he had promised the universe a significant reduction in brooding if it returned Lia to us intact.