She hadn’t even been mad at Asher when he’d apologized, his chipmunk cheeks tear streaked and pale after realizing she’d been spanked. She hadn’t been mad because she’d known it had been her fault for not lying when he’d asked for her secrets.

Lying had always been their language, their code, their shibboleth. Had she so easily forgotten the patterns of it? They didn’t communicate with what they said but rather with what they kept hidden. It was in the pauses, the unspoken words, that the truth could always be found.

Can’t say I ever talked to the man.

She didn’t want to think about exactly what Cash had been saying in the spaces between his lies.

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER TEN

IZZY

The alarm on the phone went off again. Quinn Thomas. 4 Baker Street. 12:00 p.m.

It was fifteen minutes until noon now, and Izzy glanced out the window before turning to Mia with a raised brow. “Is it safe to go out?”

Mia pushed to her feet and crossed to the sink. There were still flakes falling—Izzy could see that from the table—but they were large and powdery, gentle instead of the hail of an hour earlier.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Mia said, and Izzy refrained from groaning at the idea of the cold despite the fact that she was getting itchy just sitting in the kitchen, staring at notebooks full of words she couldn’t decipher.

They moved quickly through the process of layering up, and after they were both satisfied most of their skin was covered, they pushed through the door. The icy air sought all the cracks in their defenses: the slips of skin exposed by a rucked-up sleeve, the moisture in their eyes, the gaps between their scarves and the napes of their necks.

“Don’t you have to lock the door?” Izzy yelled. The wind had picked up even from that morning’s trek to the cabin. If Twist had been alive to make his appointment, there was no way Quinn Thomas would have flown out in this weather.

“We don’t lock doors,” Mia shouted back, starting toward the sidewalk that would lead them into town, even though it was buried.

“It’s almost like you didn’t just have someone murdered on your tiny arctic island,” Izzy mumbled, the words loud against the pocket of silence between gusts. “You know . . . and with the killer still probably running around, locking doors would just be foolish.”

“Your sarcasm would be more effective if I could hear it,” Mia tossed back over her shoulder. “And we don’t know it was murder.”

Izzy rolled her eyes, but it was in vain as Mia had already started down the hill. Any attempt at a witty comeback was curtailed by the wind.