“Your eye,” I whispered and reached out to gently touch the greenish-yellow bruise around his right eye. My lip quivered as I tried to imagine the scene he’d described, being attacked while utterly defenseless in an environment where the authorities didn’t care what happened behind closed doors. He probably never would have told me so, but he had to have feared for his life. Hearing the awful truth about what had driven Trey to flee Northern made me feel even sicker about having to tell him my news. “Is that how you ended up in the infirmary?”

“The eye was the least of my problems,” Trey joked, but I could tell that he didn’t think any of this was funny. I appreciated that he was trying to make light of it for my benefit, but I wasn’t in the mood to dismiss either of our plights as humorous. “None of it was serious enough for me to have been sent to an outside hospital, which I’m sure was intentional. And then, on Monday, that big envelope of contracts was delivered with my mail, and I had a note from the office saying I could expect a visitor on Thursday. Then I kind of pieced it together; the beatdown was a warning. But this time I’d be expected to either agree to everything or be ready to negotiate. Saying no thanks was not an option.”

This was a different kind of terrifying from the visits from ghosts and predictions for deaths we’d been dealing with since the fall. Everything I knew about Mr. Simmons suggested that he was ruthlessly greedy and selfish. He was a man who had cheated on his wife while she was enduring devastating fertility challenges, a man who’d made empty promises to a young woman who believed his lies. He’d relied on a team of attorneys to handle his personal business when he was too much a coward to own up to his responsibilities. Mr. Simmons and the power that his vast wealth afforded him, as well as his apparent lack of a conscience, scared me. It was one thing to be afraid that spirits on the opposite side of reality might threaten our safety, and quite another to know that a very alive, very capable man just a few miles away could inflict whatever kind of pain he wanted on us with little likelihood of repercussions.

It hadn’t escaped my attention, or Trey’s, back in November, when we were first sentenced by Judge Roberts to separate boarding schools, that Trey’s operated much more like a minimum-security prison than mine. Now it seemed obvious that Mr. Simmons had had a say in that.

“But he can’t just make you donate an organ. That’s extortion!” I exclaimed. “Besides, you’re not even old enough to sign contracts.”

Trey picked at his chewed-down fingernails. “My mom knows all about it. They sent her copies of the contracts too. She wants me to agree to whatever they want—the testing part, at least.” He fell silent for a moment, obviously hurt by the position his mother had taken. It was hard for me not to butt in with my opinion that Mrs. Emory’s encouraging Trey to cooperate with the Simmons family was a deep betrayal. “I get it, you know? It’s not fair to my brother that they’re selling the house. There won’t be any money for college, for me or for Eddie. I could change all that. But it’s not even the kidney, you know? I wouldn’t think twice about the surgery if it were for someone else, like you, or my brother. I just don’t want to take orders from him.”