Page 89 of Dangerous Deviance
“I don’t know what to do,” I said in a quiet voice, my chest shaking. “I’m so lost.”
“You’re not lost,” Julie said. “For the first time in your life, you’re on your own. No sister to worry about. No Skyline Shift principles to learn. No sexy man to obey.” She giggled. “You can do your own thing. No one is stopping you.”
But what was I supposed to do? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure that out. And now, I was hallucinating a vision of my dead sister. That couldn’t have been a good sign.
But maybe itwasjust a way to cope. I had been so busy taking care of Julie after our parents died, I had never really dealt with their deaths either.
Their deaths had been an accident. But hers? I knew it wasn’t.
I focused my gaze on her. “Who killed you?” I asked.
“Bates,” she said.
Relief flooded through me in a hot wave. “I thought for sure you were going to say I killed you,” I muttered.
“I wouldn’t have let you.” She smiled then, as if it were a little story of the past. “I failed a test. As part of training, one of the other students fought me, then cut me up. Bates’s orders.”
Which made sense, especially why she would have been in the trees right off of the campus.
“Listen,” she said, breaking through my thoughts. “You’re out here because Wil thought it was best for you, right? He wants to make amends to you by giving you your freedom.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good guy,” I said. “I thought you wouldn’t like him.”
“But he helped you find me.”
I scoffed. “I would think finding you dead in the bushes hardly counts.”
“But still, you found me.” She shrugged. “He helped you bury me too, right? Even gave me one last joy ride on the way there.” She winked.
“Yeah, because driving so fast your bones fly to the floor of the car, that’s a real joy ride.”
She laughed. “What I’m saying is,” she leaned forward, “He cares more about you than he lets on. He might even love you.”
I thought about Wil, how once he knew something was going on in the woods, he decided to keep me even closer to him than before. Sure, that might have been to make sure that I wasn’t a suspect, but I knew, deep down, that he wanted to protect me too. How when I attacked him, he restrained me, but he didn’t punish me for doing what I was trained to do. In fact, he had brought Dr. Mercia to me. Insisted that the other women were safe at the Dahlia District. Let me go, even when he knew I had been programmed to kill his family.
“They’re going to have to take down the Skyline Shift,” Julie said, looking at her nails. Then she straightened and tossed her hair behind her shoulders. “Bates keeps sending more and more of us, and at some point, he’s going to unleash the entire army. So either the Adlers go in blind, and maybe, if they’re lucky, they burn it to the ground. Or,” she shook her head, “what’s more likely, they die trying.” She paused, then tapped on her chin. “Or you help them.”
“Why should I help them?” I asked, though this time, there was no anger in my voice. I was truly asking. “I can’t just go around following the strange voices and hallucinations in my head.” I shrugged. “After all, you’re dead.” My chest ached at those words, but they were true. “For all I know, you’re just Bates in disguise.”
“You should help them because you want to,” she said, smiling. “Remember, you’re not listening to your sister’s voice. This isyouspeaking to yourself. And I know you. I am you.”
I didn’t know if she meant that we shared blood or that she was a figment of my imagination. I reached forward to squeeze her hand, but I was too far away. My eyes flicked down to the tree trunk, finding a sapless spot to push myself off of the bark, but when I looked up, she was gone. I was on my own again.
The Skyline Shift was a long way away. I needed to find the road. I didn’t have a car, but I knew what Julie would do. If I had found out that she was hitching a ride, I would have panicked and lectured her until we both fell asleep. I would have killed to give her one of those lectures again. And maybe I couldn’t kill to bring her back, but I could kill to prevent deaths like hers from ever happening again.
I had to find Cassandra and make sure that I could help her. I would see if the women at the Dahlia District were okay, and find Dr. Mercia. We could all end this together at the Skyline Shift.
Finding a purpose—whether it was protecting my sister, trying to find her, or helping Wil and his brothers take down the Skyline Shift—wasn’t an issue anymore. I knew what I had to do. And I was doing it because I wanted to. I owed it to myself.
CHAPTER 24
Wil
A long line of cars trailed mine, our men armed and ready to fight. My brothers too. Even Ethan was keeping an eye on Muro’s headquarters. Still, I stared out of the windshield, clenching the steering wheel with my fists. We were about to infiltrate a training base for undercover soldiers, women who had been manipulated into thinking that we had killed their loved ones. It was a death trap. But the main object was to take down Bates, then destroy the camp. With the women freed, Muro wouldn’t be able to fight us like he wanted. Eventually, we’d be able to fight this, man to man.
In the end, we had gone without Gerard’s permission, lying to our men in hopes that they realized that what we were doing was right for the family. War was brewing.
I had to make this right for Ellie.
