Page 46 of Sullied Saints

But who avenge us.”

We’re all silent for a moment. “I’m going to take that as, ‘up for interpretation’,” Dirk speaks up.

“Uh-huh,” Dean hums doubtfully. “She thinks she’s doing nothing wrong and she’s going to kill him,” he concludes, earning him sharp looks from all of us.

“You got that from the poem?” I ask, even though I’d been leaning towards the same conclusion.

“Well, not just that. But what else will she do with him? He’s too dangerous to her to be kept free. And it’s likely she holds the original Cocooner, Caleb—who Needler killed—as some kind of paramour. That could be the vengeance she’s talking about. Rather than anything Needler has avenged.”

“I think the more important question,” Howie says, “Is what will she do if we don’t give her what she wants?”

***

“You want to spare her life… Care to guess what she’d do with yours?”

Needler frowns at me. I rarely come in twice in one day.

“She’s demanding you be handed over,” I say, and watch him process this slowly. Irritated by the lack of reaction when the station has been in a tizzy about this revelation for the last two hours, I press, “Care to venture a guesswhy?”

“What’s the point? You aren’t going to hand me over.”

“She’d kill you,” I say flatly.

Tristan only shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” I breathe. “What else could she do? You’re a threat to her and the little army of basement dwellers she’s racking up! Plus, you killed Caleb, her tutor, and just about everything else to her! If she doesn’t want you in here, locked away from her, that’s the only alternative.”

Lips tightening briefly, Tristan tilts his head. “Aren’t I marked for death, anyway?”

I stiffen, some of my bravado dissipating. “No…”

“Eleanor. You have my confession. Multiple murders, premeditation, torture. Of course I am.”

I blink, stepping back. To hear it from him makes it feel real, like it could actually happen. Sooner than later. “Tawill has agreed to delay your transfer again. We can give you leniency, we can get you just a life sentence…”

He scoffs. I step up, slamming my hand on the glass, leaving it there. “You need to save your own life!”

“Why? What’s it worth?” The flatness, the acceptance in his voice, scares me. “Maybe more if you hand me over to her. But that’s not how you do things.”

My hand slides down. “What about her? She could as easily be sentenced the same way.”

Tristan dismisses this, half-turning away. “She’ll choose life. Most murderers will claim not guilty to save themselves, and most lawyers can argue their way out of a death sentence.”

“Then you can choose life too! Tell us how to catch her!”

He stares at me. “Do you remember Sharna Wells?”

I shift. The woman who tried to shove cyanide down my throat in an old office building, the one who Needler saved me from right before we… I clear my throat. “What’s she got to do with this?”

“If she had lived,” he begins, diplomatically skirting the reality that he threw her out a window, “Would you have been more likely to kill her yourself, just because she’d intended you harm?”

“I would have had her arrested and justice served that way.”

He spreads his hands. “Exactly. Your stance didn’t change.”

I feel like pulling my own hair out. “For God’s sake Tristan! Why the loyalty to this madwoman? Don’t you have any respect for your own life? The sister you remember is not who she is now. Who she is now is Cocooner.”

“As much as I’m a different person to the boy she grew up with,” he says. “And she’s not so different.”

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