“So help me God,” I said slowly, clearly, when Cate looked up at me. “If you go back on your word, I will tear you apart. And I won’t stop, not ever, until I’ve destroyed your life and the lives of every single person in this organization. Believe me, you may not always keep your promises, but I do.”

She nodded at me once, and there was something almost like pride in her eyes.

“Understood,” Cate said, and we did.

They kept Liam in the bedroom at the other end of the hall, in a room painted a soft blue. The kind of color you’d only find in the sky just before sunrise, maybe. It might have been a nursery once. There were clouds painted on the ceiling, and the few pieces of furniture left seemed too small for an average adult.

Liam sat on the tiny bed with his back to me. At first, as I shut the door behind me, I thought he was staring out the window. As I came closer, I saw he was actually fixated on the wrinkled sheet of paper in his hand.

The bed dipped as I crawled across it, wrapping my arms around his chest from behind. I pressed my cheek against his, letting my hands wander until they found his steady heartbeat. He shut his eyes and leaned back.

“What are you looking at?” I whispered.

He handed me the paper wordlessly as I moved to sit beside him. Jack Fields’s letter.

“You were right,” Liam said after a moment. “You were so right. We should have read it. We would have known not to bother.”

It was the dead way he spoke, so flat, so coated with grief, that made me crumple the letter and throw it across the room. He only shook his head, pressing a hand over his eyes.

I fumbled with the inside pocket of his jacket, where I had stashed Chubs’s letter all those days ago. Liam watched me pull it out, and sagged beside me.

“He told me he didn’t write it for them,” I said. “He wrote it for you. He wanted you to read it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Yes, you do. Because when you get out of here, you’ll want something to say when you see him again.”

“Ruby.” Now he sounded angry. His arm dropped from around my shoulders, and he stood up. “Do you really think that if he lives, they’re going to let us see him? Do you think they’re even going to let us stay together? That’s not how these people work. They’re going to control our every move, right down to who we see and what we eat. Trust me, it’ll be some precious piece of luck if we even find out if he’s alive, never mind if they’ve brought him in for training.”

Liam paced the room once, twice, three times, and it felt like an hour had passed before I worked up the nerve to open Chubs’s letter myself.