“But the killer will find you, right? Or really, the Rose Killer will find me. And when that happens, you’ll kill him or her. Like you did with that corrections officer, Frankie.”

My sister, still staring at me: “Okay.”

“Afterward, I’ll give you what you want, Shana. What you’ve always wanted.”

“How do you know what that is?”

“Because I’m your sister. Who would know better than me?”

My sister staring at me. Myself staring back. I’d been honest with D.D. before. The trick to dealing with my sister was to never fool yourself. The relationship would always be dependent upon what was in it for her. I would like to think she would help me out of love. But far more likely, she would keep her promise to get the one thing I could give her, at last, at very long last.

Slowly she nodded again. “Pinky swear,” she said, and her voice sounded rough, not at all like herself.

“Pinky swear,” I promised back. Then I smiled because the childish promise, with its hint of sisterly cahoots and summer days and girlish innocence, nearly broke my heart.

“Any second now,” I said steadily, “there’s going to be an outside disturbance. When that happens, Officer Maria is going to be distracted. I need you to ambush me. Take me down and out. Then jam a chair under that doorknob and kill the lights.”

My sister, still staring at me.

“They’ll get in, though, right?” I continued. “Guards train for this kind of thing.”

“They’ll take out the window. It’s bulletproof glass, but you can still hammer out the frame.”

“How long?”

“They’ll alert a tactical team, grab gear, get in place. Five to seven minutes.”

“Then we need to be quick.”

“Adeline—”

But she didn’t get to answer, because at that moment, the sound of shouting came from the corridor, followed almost immediately by a shrill siren. Officer Maria turned her head down the hall. And my sister leapt across the table and drove against me with her shoulder. One second, I was sitting in a chair. The next, both the chair and I fell back. I heard the crack against the wall, registered the pressure of my sister’s interlaced fingers pressing hard against my windpipe.

But of course, I didn’t feel a thing.

More shouting. Much closer. Officer Maria yelling, though it was hard to hear her above the din of the prison’s alarm. Then the room went dark as Shana hit the light switch. She slammed a chair beneath the doorknob then flipped the table up in front of the window, further obstructing the view. Five seconds, ten? My sister moved even faster than I’d expected.

I was already sprawled on the floor behind the flipped-up table, hastily grabbing my right shoe.

“Quick,” I gasped, still breathless from my fall. “Hold out your wrists.”

“Adeline.”