I pause, allowing her words to fully pass between us—this is the closest we’ve ever come to talking about our family tragedy in person. “You don’t have to say anything. These last three years have been hard for both of us. I’m disappointed in myself, too.”

She snorts. “Wow. Perfect Shayna is disappointed in herself? Break out the champagne—we’ve got remorse.”

Her anger is a slap, and I recoil, stunned. “What?”

“You don’t get it,” she says, emotion wrapping her words. “Seb was never my boyfriend; this is not an act of domestic violence. We went out on one date. Before he kept me here in the catacombs.”

Angela draws her knees to her chest while I stare, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand.”

She focuses on the skeletons across from her. “I met him a month ago, but he’d been watching me for some time before. I thought he was a part of the internship, too. Agreeing to dinner was supposed to be for networking—I don’t know. The next day, when the shooting happened at the Sorbonne, he found me in the library, hiding behind a shelf. Told me he would keep me safe. Instead he brought me here. He’d been waiting for the right time to make his move, I guess. I escaped when he went to the hospital where he works part-time.”

Fear slinks down my chest, cold along my limbs. Goose bumps ignite the skin of my neck as I fill in the blanks between sentences. She was kidnapped. Beaten. Terrorized. I want to leave this space, disappear somewhere, to burrow away from her words and what she endured. The raw skin of my eyes burns with new wetness.

She clears her throat. “He knew you and I only had each other. He did his research, too.”

“But why didn’t you come and tell me all this? Why wait until we were trapped underground and I was followed? Why not go to the police?”

Angela grunts. “Seb took my passport. He told me he framed me for a friend’s death, so if I did escape, I couldn’t leave France or ask for help.”

“Manu? The cops would have listened.”

She pauses at the name, confirming my guess. “They wouldn’t have. I tried to come to you the first day you arrived. Waited until I saw a light on in my apartment, but a homeless man tried to grab me, recognized me. Seb paid him, probably. Each day, the man waited out front, then followed you wherever you went, hoping to find me again. I knew as long as we weren’t together, we would be safe, so I never approached you. I had to trust you would find me.”