“Do you really think,” I echoed his own phrasing back to him, “that your brother is dead?” That was what he’d led me to believe back in the caves—he’d talked about accidents, about dropping dead, about predators.

Gabriel’s face went blank.

“Or do you think,” I continued, “that he has Bella?”

* * *

Gabriel didn’t give me an answer. He split the second we got back to the house.

“I’ll send Jude and Free out,” Bales told me. Cady’s father seemed to know that he couldn’t fix this—or me.

“Don’t,” I said abruptly. “I want to be alone.”

“I find myself doubting that, Kira,” Bales said gently.

“Please.” That was all I could manage—and all it took for him to leave me to my own devices. The file I’d taken from the sheriff’s office was heavy in my hands. It had my picture in it. It had my mother’s. But a file that thick? There had to be more.

Police described the abuse as intermittent but severe. They think you used to take refuge in the forest to escape.

Something wet and cold brushed the back of my hand—NATO. When I looked down at him, his tail started to wag.

“Go away, NATO.”

If Jude’s hound had been capable of smiling, he would have beamed at me—right until Saskia appeared between us and bit his nose. NATO yelped and backed up. After a moment’s contemplation, he darted forward again to lick Saskia’s face, then took off running before she could respond.

“That wasn’t very nice,” I told Saskia. I wondered if she could tell from my tone that I wasn’t feeling very nice, either. Looking at her, I saw her the way she’d looked when we’d found her, bone-thin and bleeding. Someone had dumped her in Cady’s yard because they knew that Cady wouldn’t turn away a stray.

My fingers tightened around the police file in my hand. My file. Something unnameable inside me cracked slowly open, something dark and cavernous and ugly.

I read the file.

The writing was detailed. The pictures were worse. My initial medical exam had been intensive. The doctors had documented my injuries, old and new. I’d always thought that the scars that marked my body were from the forest. According to what I read, some were.

Some weren’t.

That truth was like a shard of glass ground into my stomach. Everything inside me threatened to come up. I’d known—of course I’d known—that whatever family I’d had before was probably either dead or didn’t care much if I was. I had to have ended up in the forest somehow. But part of me—the stupid part, the hopeful part, the part that hadn’t looked for answers—had wanted to believe that I was normal once.