Page 33 of Twelve
“This isn’t you.” Her mother backs away, frightened, but the girl called Sadie—the girl who used tobeSadie—knows the truth.
After all, her mother was the one who told her, all those years ago—Pretend it’s not you. Whatever happens, pretend that it isn’t happening to you.
Sadie is good at pretending.Liais better. After all, she’s pretended to be Sadie all these years.
“I love you, Mama.” Lia can make that sound and feel true without having to worry about whether or not it still is. “Even though you’re planning on telling him everything I tell you, even though you’ll stand back and let him put me in a hole in the ground, even though you’ll watch me starving and dying of thirst and look straight through me until he gives me permission to exist again—I love you.”
Her mother is wearing a bracelet made of thorns—penance. She removes it, tries to force it around her daughter’s wrist.
Lia lets her. As the thorns bite into her flesh, she lets her eyelashes flutter. Her face visibly softens. She dons the Sadie mask. “You did well, Mama.” The words are gentle, and they sound true-true-true. Lia is leaving tonight. She knows now that no one will be coming with her. She can feel the last bit of Sadie flickering inside of her like a candle, ready to die.
She lets Sadie caress the side of her mother’s face, one last time.
“Your faith is pure.” Lia knows how to sell a lie, and nine-tenths of it is telling people exactly what they want to hear.
“This was a test?” Her mother is breathless. Questions can’t be lies, but Lia hears the hesitation, the uncertainty. Some part of Mama has always known what the leader does to those, like Sadie, whom he calls blessed.
But the others? They aren’t like Sadie, aren’t likeLia. They don’t know when someone is lying, when the leader is spitting falsehoods. They can’t lie nearly so convincingly themselves.
This is the truth: there is blood on Sadie’s hands, onLia’s. One lie—the right lie—can doom a man. She wishes a lie could save her mother.
He’s going to kill you someday. All of you.
Lia won’t be here to die. “It was a test,” she confirms gently. She leans forward, touches her forehead to her mother’s. “Tell me you love me.”
It’s Lia who turns, not Sadie. It’s Lia whose hair her mother is brushing. She’ll always be Lia now.
“I love you, Sadie.”
It would be easier, for Lia, if that were a lie.
“Worst thing about this case.” Dean sat at the end of my bed. It had taken three days—and Briggs calling in a favor—for my boyfriend to get twenty-four hours of leave from Quantico. Given that Briggs had also had to grease the wheels to excuse Michael’s better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission trip to Maine, I was starting to suspect that someone at the FBI Academy was going to be read in on the Naturals program fairly soon.
“The worst thing about this case…” I took my time to feel the weight of the words. “The worst thing is knowing that Mackenzie could have died because I got it wrong.”
I’d left a vulnerable twelve-year-old alone with a killer whose specialty was exploiting vulnerabilities. I knew better than to make assumptions. I knew how easily one wrong mental turn could lead even the strongest profiler astray.
And yet…
Dean took my hand in his and turned it over so that he could trace his thumb along the lines of my palm. “Are you sure that the worst part wasn’twhyyou got it wrong?”
Being a Natural didn’t make a person infallible. I knew that, but I’d started working with the Bureau young enough that I also had a healthy amount of experience under my belt. Normally, when I made mistakes, they were smaller.
Normally, I self-corrected.
I didn’t need to turn too much of my profiler’s eye inward to know why it had been far too easy for me to see a psychologist as the enemy. I’d thought from the beginning that the woman didn’t—and couldn’t—understand what Mackenzie had been through.
Just like the Bureau psychologist I’d been assigned when I was a teenager had never understood me.
“You think I should see someone.” I let my fingers curl slowly into a fist, and Dean cupped his hand around mine.
“I think it might help.” His lips brushed, white-hot, over my knuckles.
As much as I’d fought to ignore my own scars, I’d never tried to make Dean forget his. I had never—and would never—pretend that the worst moments of his life didn’t matter. I knew and accepted thatBehavior, Personality, Environmentwasn’t a one-time calculation, that everything we did and experienced became a part of us.
I knew that the things that happened when we were young had the longest to burrow in.
Without our particular childhoods, none of us would have been Naturals. Lia wouldn’t have been Lia without growing up in the cult. Sloane had always had an affinity for numbers, but isolation had turned them into a coping mechanism. Michael’s sensitivity to emotions developed as a survival skill, and Dean understood killers because he’d been raised to be one. I’d long since accepted the role that my own childhood had played in making me a Natural profiler.
