Page 36 of Lessons in Power

For Henry and Vivvie.

I broke through the door into a room filled with unnatural stillness. People were huddled in groups. I could hear someone crying.

Multiple someones.

“Tess.”

I turned toward Henry’s voice. He was here. He was whole. I took a step toward him.

Henry’s fine.My brain struggled to process.They all are.No one was hurt. No one was screaming.

Henry made it to my side, his stride long and the expression on his face as intense as I’d ever seen it. Something gave inside me.

“Shot.” The first word I managed to form was the same one John Thomas had said to me. “Someone shot him.”

Henry reached for my shoulder. He squeezed it. “I know.”

Someone shot John Thomas Wilcox.

Henry knows.

“You know?” The words came out in a whisper.

“Everyone knows,” Henry told me, his voice taut. “I am so sorry. I know your families are close.”

Close?My brain struggled to parse what he was saying.Sorry?

Sorry that I had been the one to discover the body? Sorry that I yelled and yelled and no one came?

“Dead.” I meant to ask questions, but that was all that came out. “He’s dead, and—”

“You don’t know that,” Henry cut in.

Yes. I do.

“Tess.” An added layer of strain entered Henry’s voice. I followed his gaze down to my hands.

Blood. John Thomas’s blood on my hands. Dead. He’s dead—

“Tess,” Henry repeated, his voice soft, “what happened? Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said, and somehow, staring down at my bloody hands, Henry’s touch warm through my clothes, the dam broke, and words came rushing out at warp speed. “Someone shot him. I found the body. I yelled for help. I tried—”

Henry ducked to capture my gaze. His mint-green eyes held mine. “Someone shotwho?” he asked.

“John Thomas Wilcox.” I stared at him, my brain processing the fact that Henryhadn’tknown about John Thomas, that he’d been talking about something else.

Someone else.

I heard the sound of sirens in the distance. I stared past Henry to a flat-screen television on a nearby wall.

A reporter was talking into a camera. I couldn’t hear her—couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t feel anything, not my arms or legs, not my tongue in my mouth. But as shock set in and darkness bit at the corners of my vision, I could make out the words on the ticker tape going across the bottom of the screen.

Someone shot him, I’d told Henry.

His reply had been hoarse.I know.

I stumbled backward, my hands looking for purchase against the wall as I absorbed the message on the ticker tape. When I’d saidSomeone shot him, I’d been talking about John Thomas Wilcox.