Page 66 of Bad Blood
You surge forward as the broken shackles fall away. You grab the knife and plunge it into your tormenter’s chest. “I am chaos,” you whisper. “I am order.” You press your lips against his and twist the blade. “I am pain.”
Holland Darby and his wife were brought in for questioning. Neither one of them said a word. At my suggestion, Agent Sterling brought in their son. The teenagers among us were relegated to observing—in this case, from behind a two-way mirror.
“Devastation, resignation, fury, guilt.” Michael rattled off the emotions on Kane Darby’s face one by one.
I looked for some hint of what Michael saw, but I couldn’t sense even a trace of emotion churning in Kane Darby. He seemed somber, but not on guard.
“Two bodies were found in a hidden room beneath your family’s chapel.” Agent Sterling mimicked Kane’s manner: no muss, no fuss, no frills. No beating around the bush. “Do you have any idea how they came to be there?”
Kane looked Agent Sterling straight in the eye. “No.”
“Lie,” Lia said beside me.
“We’re looking at one male victim and one female victim, killed approximately ten years ago. Can you shed any light on their identities?”
“No.”
“Lie.”
I stared at Kane’s familiar face, pushing back against any warmth the six-year-old inside of me still felt for the man.You know who they are. You know what happened to them. You know what happened in that room. Why your father built it. Why he built the chapel.
Why there were shackles on the walls.
Kane had told me that Lia would be safe at Serenity Ranch, but that I wouldn’t be. I wondered now if I would have ended up down below.
I am my father’s son. Kane’s voice rang in my memory.I made my choices long ago.
I’d seen parallels between Kane’s emotional control and Dean’s. Dean had known what his father was doing to those women. At the age of twelve, he’d found a way to stop him.
You got out, Kane. But you didn’t stop your father. Didn’t stop it—whateveritwas. You didn’t leave town. You couldn’t.
“He might talk to me,” I told Agent Sterling over the audio feed. After a few more questions to Kane, she excused herself from the room.
“He won’t talk to anyone,” she told us, observing my mother’s ex from behind the two-way mirror. “Not until we identify the bodies. Not until we know who they are. Not until this—all of it—isrealand he reaches the point of no return.”
Kane Darby had been keeping his father’s secrets all his life.Devastation. Resignation. Fury. Guilt. The last two were the emotions we needed.
“What are the chances the FBI lab can ID the bodies?” I asked.
“With little more than skeletal evidence and no DNA to compare it to?” Agent Sterling returned evenly. “Even if they come up with something, it will take time.”
I thought of today’s date—and yesterday’s. I thought about the fact that it was still unclear how this—any of it—was related to the Masters. I thought about my mother, shackled. The way that corpse had been shackled.
And then I thought about the corpse, the bones peeking out from beneath its fraying flesh. The face that didn’t even look like a face.
I paused.The face. I could see Celine Delacroix in my mind’s eye, her posture regal, her expression wry.I can take one look at a person and know exactly what their facial bones look like underneath the skin.
My mind reeled. What were the chances that Celine could do the reverse? That, given a picture of a person’s facial bones, she could draw the face?
“Cassie?” Agent Sterling’s tone told me this wasn’t the first time she’d said my name.
I turned to catch Michael’s eye. “I have an idea, and you’re really not going to like it.”
We sent Celine photographs of our victims. And then we waited. Waiting was not one of the Naturals program’s collective strong suits. Within an hour, Agent Sterling was out working the case again, but the rest of us were stuck twiddling our thumbs at the hotel. Waiting for Celine to put her skills to the test. Waiting for the truth. Waiting to find out if our efforts would lead us any closer to my mother.
“Dean.” Of all of us, Lia was either the best at waiting or the worst. “Truth or dare?”
“Seriously?” I asked Lia.
