I couldn’t fight a gun—not with claws and teeth, not with every instinct I had. All I could do was this. I could keep my hand up. I could keep Saskia from attacking. I could keep Ness’s attention on me.

“Ash got out.” I repeated myself, my voice louder this time, steadier. If Ness Ashby wanted to shoot someone, she could shoot me. She could listen to me telling her what she wanted to hear, realize that I was lying, and shoot me.

“Kira.” Cady saw what I was doing. More than that, she saw that it might work.

“Everyone wondered how I survived,” I said, willing Ness to listen, willing her to aim at me and not Jude. Not at Cady, not at Sass—at me. “A little girl, all alone in the woods for weeks.” A few days ago, I might not have sounded so close to it—so sure. I waited until I was sure that I had the whole of Ness’s attention, and then I lied. “I wasn’t alone.”

I bent down and pulled up the leg of my jeans, revealing the deep, ridged scars around my ankle. “There was a trap.” If I could just keep talking, if I could just keep saying things that were true, maybe I could distract her from the one thing that wasn’t. “I saw a wolf caught in one, early on. Later, it was me.” My mouth tasted metallic. The memory smelled like rust—like blood. “Somebody tipped the police off about my mother’s body. Someone told them about me.” I swallowed. “Someone found me dying in that trap and let me go.”

“You’re a bad liar,” Ness said, her voice low.

Survival wasn’t just about being the fastest or the strongest or the one who refused to die. When it came to confrontations, survival was just as much about bluffing, about pretending strength, when you had none.

“Some people,” I said, my voice humming in a way that didn’t sound small or scared or human at all, “don’t want to be found. Ash chose to go back in. Is it so hard to believe that he might have chosen to disappear? That something might have pulled him to check in on Cady, year after year?”

One second I was standing there, and the next, Ness had me backed up against the wall, the barrel of the gun digging into my throat.

Good. Let her shoot me. Let her kill me. I could hear Saskia snarling, hear Cady and Jude trying to keep her under control.

It won’t last.

“You expect me to believe,” Ness said icily, “that my son disappeared in the depths of a South American jungle eighteen years ago, but that he just happened to reappear, years later, in the woods on the outskirts of a nowhere little town, to save you?”