Page 94 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

The sound of the motor changed, going down to a low sputter. That was not a good sign.

Next to her, Will and his restless legs got a little more frantic. The first time he kicked her, she ignored it,because they were all doing the best they could out here. The second time, she glared at him.

“That actually hurts,” she said.

And got that gun jammed in her back again, in the very same spot. Which Kate fervently hoped she lived long enough to complain about. She would welcome the opportunity to attend to the ugly bruise that she could already feel spreading across her lower back.

“Sorry,” she threw back over her shoulder to her mother. “I can see how us talking will really put a crimp in your execution schedule.”

Once again, Tracy came in close. Gun in the back, mouth at her ear.

“This isn’t an execution, Katie. This is a simple ritual. I don’t understand why you’ve never been able to grasp this.”

“I don’t know. Possibly because it’s crazy?”

Another jab. Harder.

“All your father and I ever wanted was a simple life. You took that from us.”

“You want to take myactuallife, Mom,” Kate said. She braced herself for that jab, but even when it came she couldn’t seem to stop. “I think even you would have to agree that’s worse, right?”

“Your life was ours,” Tracy said, and she didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound particularly unhinged, or as if—given a black-and-white movie and a railroad track—she might start twirling a mustache. She sounded absolutely matter-of-fact. Completely devoid of the knowledge that what she was saying was, at the very least, a little outside the mainstream. “Ours to make, and ours to take.”

It was amazing how clear everything became at gunpoint.

Because while it was true that both of her parents were manipulative and deeply unwell, obviously, they weren’t actually trying to make the people around them feel crazy. They didn’t think that they themselves werecrazy. Her parents had always believed that Kate was theirs to do with as they wished. It wasn’t an act. It wasn’t put on. They had moved all the way out into the literal middle of nowhere so they could do what they pleased. With themselves, with their child, with their own lives.

Kate had always assumed that because she had fiercely believed that there had to be something other than the world they showed her, they must have known better themselves. But maybe they didn’t.

It was odd, the things a person could find comforting when she was about to be executed.

Her mother was a true believer. It was possible everyone else in the family was. Maybe that was why Will had always struggled so hard. And maybe the thing that was wrong with Kate was that she couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything simply because she was told to believe in it.

Kate had never trusted the things she couldn’t see. She wasn’t wired that way.

In her whole life, there was one person who had promised that she could trust him and then proved it.

She was trusting him now, in fact. But Kate knew the danger of free-falling into blind trust. She knew where it led.

She was looking at it.

“You are my only child,” her mother was saying, in the kind of tone Kate assumed regular mothers used while chatting to their happy, run-of-the-mill daughters about delightfully bland normal things, like a grocery list. Or what to wear to church. Or something else Kate couldn’t even imagine, because what the hell did she know about normal?

“What I hope for you, more than I could possibly tell you, is that you walk through this ritual and find yourself cleansed,” Tracy said. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you, Kate.”

“Does it work if you swim through the ritual? Or do you need to stagger around in the snow? I wouldn’t want to face my unworthiness the wrong way.”

Another jab. And that one felt like the muzzle of the gun hit bone.Ouch.

Tracy hissed in her ear. “Nothing would make your father more proud than if you proved yourself to be one of us after all.”

And this time, Kate said nothing as her mother sat back, presumably to ready the final details for this exercise.

Kate scanned the water around them. Dark, forbidding. Swells too high and relentless, and only the light every now and again of the far-off land that was Grizzly Harbor.

Up above, the night was cloudy, and off in the distance, she couldn’t really see much of anything. Because there was nothing but the sea.

If she and Will went over the side of this boat, there was zero chance that they could be swept to safety. Or swim to it.

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