Cady had blamed herself for what had happened with Ash. She’d given up the man she’d loved in penance. It was sick and twisted and wrong, but I’d been to the dark place, too. I knew what it was like to push people away because you couldn’t stand to be comforted. I knew what it was like to hurt the people you loved when the person you really wanted to hurt was yourself.

“What else?” Ness said suddenly.

Cady shook her head. “There is nothing else.”

“What else don’t I know?” Ness asked, like Cady had never spoken. “What else aren’t you telling me?”

The answer was nothing, and I knew, in the part of my gut that could feel danger like the vibration of a tuning fork struck against metal, that nothing was the wrong answer. Ness didn’t want to hear it. And if we made her hear it…

My gaze went to Saskia. She wasn’t straining against Cady’s hold anymore. She was still, and there was something wild in her eyes.

“Bales couldn’t find even a hint of what happened to my son,” Ness said, the pace of her words deliberate and slow. “Not even a rumor. People don’t just disappear, Cady. Not like that. Not him.” Ness let her finger rest on the trigger. “Did he get out?” The question reverberated off the walls. “What happened to him? What did he go back for?”

“I don’t know,” Cady said softly. Saskia lowered her head slightly.

Ness’s finger shook. I stopped breathing, stopped thinking, every muscle in my body preparing to fight. On the ground, Jude stirred, and like a veil had been lifted from her eyes, Ness shifted the gun from Cady to Jude.

I held up my hand. It shook, but I held it up. Stay, Sass. She’ll hurt you. She’ll hurt our family.

Jude groaned and sat up. “I suppose,” he said, his voice groggy, “that there are worse places to wake up than inside a tree.” Then he registered the rest of his surroundings. “Oh.”

Oh as in Oh, someone is pointing a gun at me.

Oh as in even Jude couldn’t see the bright side of this.

“Tell me my boy got out,” Ness said. The words were for Cady’s ears, but she was looking at Jude. Cady’s boy. “Or tell me that my son died there. Tell me something.”

She was going to pull the trigger. If Cady couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, she was going to shoot. And if I tried to stop her…

I can hear the gun going off. I can see the blood.

“He got out.”

At first, I thought Cady was the one who’d told Ness what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t until Gabriel turned toward me that I realized that I was the one who’d spoken.