Page 36 of Bad Blood
The Masters can get to anyone, anywhere.
“Today is April second.” I forced myself to say the words out loud, standing in front of the evidence wall in the basement.
4/2. The first of four Fibonacci dates in April.
“April fourth is next,” I continued. “April fifth. April twenty-third.”
“Cassie.” Dean came up behind me. I’d been down here since we’d returned home. I’d barely blinked when we’d gotten word that Mason Kyle was dead.
“You need to sleep,” Dean murmured.
I didn’t reply, staring at the victims on the wall. I thought about the fact that for each string of nine victims, a Pythia had given the go-ahead. She’d deemed an acolyte worthy to kill, because if she didn’t, the pain would start all over again.
You choose abuse survivors. You choose fighters. And you make them sentence others to die.
“Cassie.” Dean stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the wall. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
I can, I thought,and I will.
“Look at me.” Dean’s voice was familiar—too familiar. I didn’t want comfort. “You’ve barely slept since Laurel went missing. You don’t eat.” Dean wouldn’t let up. “It ends now, Cassie.”
I pretended that I could see through him. I knew this wall well enough that I could hold each and every photo in my mind’s eye.
“When we discovered that my father had a copycat, I withdrew. I beat at a punching bag until my knuckles were bloody. And do you remember what you did?”
Tears threatened my eyes.I knelt in front of you and wiped the blood from your knuckles. I pulled you back from the edge every time you went too far.
Dean latched one arm around my torso and the other around my knees and lifted me into his arms, physically prying me away from the wall. I could feel his heart beat in his chest as he carried me toward the basement door.
Drop me, I thought, my body going stiff as a board.Just drop me. Just let me go.
Dean held me close as he carried me all the way to my room. He sat down on the end of my bed. “Look at me.” His voice was gentle—so gentle, it undid me.
“Don’t,” I choked out.
Don’t be gentle. Don’t hold me. Don’t save me from myself.
“You think what happened to Laurel is your fault.”
Stop, Dean. Please don’t make me do this. Please don’t make me say the words.
“And you’ve always believed, deep down, that if you hadn’t left your mother’s dressing room that day, if you’d just come back sooner, you could have saved her. Every time the police asked you a question you couldn’t answer, what you heard was that you weren’t enough. You weren’t enough to save her. You weren’t enough to help them catch the people who did it.”
“And now they’re hurting her.” The truth burst out of me like shrapnel, exploding with deadly force. “They’re torturing her until she gives them what they want.”
“Permission,” Dean said softly. “Absolution.”
I rolled away from him, and he let me. Days’ worth of exhaustion caught up to me in an instant, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I let myself sink into my mother’s perspective. “It’s not that I don’t have a choice,” I said softly, not bothering to tell him that I wasn’t speaking for myself anymore, that I was speaking for her. “I always have a choice: Do I suffer, or does someone else? Do I fight it? Do I fight them? Or do I play the role they’ve cast me in? Do I have more control, more power, if Imakethem break me or if I play the Pythia so well that they stop thinking of me as a thing that can be broken?”
Dean was quiet for several seconds. “Against the seven of us,” he said finally, “you will always be powerless.” He bowed his head. “But against any one of us, you hold the cards.”
I thought of Nightshade, dead in solitary confinement. “If I say you die, you die.”
“But first, one in our number has to ask.”
The Pythia passed judgment, but she didn’t bring the cases. One of the Masters had to present an issue for her to rule on—and before making a decision, she was tortured. If enough of the Masters opposed her answer, she was tortured again.
“You chose me because I was a survivor,” I whispered. “Because you saw in me the potential to become something more.”
