Page 61 of Bad Blood

I thought of Nightshade, stonewalling the FBI the exact same way his grandfather was now. He’d learned the power of silence firsthand.

“Ask him about my mother,” I said.

Agent Sterling did me one better. She withdrew a picture—one I hadn’t even been aware that the FBI had. In the picture, my mother was standing onstage, her eyes rimmed in thick black liner, her face alive with expression.

“Do you recognize this woman?”

“Eyesight isn’t what it used to be.” Malcolm Lowell barely even glanced at the picture.

“Her name was Lorelai Hobbes.” Agent Sterling let those words hang in the air, using silence as her own weapon.

“I remember her,” Lowell said finally. “Used to let her little girl run wild with Ree Simon’s hellions. Trouble, the lot of them.”

“Like your grandson was trouble?” Agent Sterling asked softly. “Like your daughter before him?”

That got a reaction. Lowell’s hands balled themselves into fists, loosened, and balled up again.

“He’s getting agitated,” Michael told Sterling. “Anger, disgust.”

“Mr. Lowell?” Agent Sterling prompted.

“I tried to teach my Anna. Tried to keep her home.Safe. And how did she end up? Pregnant at sixteen, sneaking out.” His voice trembled. “And that boy.Herson. He cut a hole in the fence, found his way down to that godforsaken compound.” Lowell closed his eyes. He lowered his head, until I couldn’t make out a single one of his features onscreen. “That’s when the animals started showing up.”

“The animals?” Sloane said, cocking her head to the side. Clearly, she hadn’t foreseen that admission. Neither had I. The difference was that I knew immediately that when Malcolm Lowell saidanimals, he meantdead animals.

“They weren’t clean kills.” Lowell looked back up at the camera, a hard glint in his eyes. “Those animals died slowly, and they died in pain.”

“You thought Mason was responsible?” Agent Starmans asked, speaking for the first time.

There was a long pause. “I thought he watched.”

YOU

You’ve been chained to the wall for hours, bleeding for hours.

But really, you’ve been chained and bleeding for years. Before this place. Before chaos or order. Before knives and poison and flame.

You are the one who lay in Lorelai’s bed as a child.

You took what she couldn’t.

You did what she couldn’t.

As the seconds and minutes and hours tick by, you can feel her, ready to stop hiding. Ready to come out.

Not this time. This time, you’re not going anywhere. This time, you’re here to stay.

Night falls. The Masters return. They have no idea who you are. What you are.

They’re used to Lorelai’s dramatics.

Let them see yours.

Iwas aware, as the clock ticked past midnight, that another day had passed without answers.April fourth. Somewhere, Agent Briggs was waiting for the Masters’ next victim to turn up, strapped to a scarecrow post and burned alive.

Unable to sleep, I sat on the counter of our kitchenette, staring out into the night and thinking about Mason Kyle and Kane Darby, dead animals, and the large, lumpy shape at the bottom of those stairs.

It was a body. I hadn’t seen that at the age of six, but even with a fragmented memory, I knew it now. I’d been trying not to know it, trying not toremembersince I’d gotten back in town.