“Angela.” My voice breaks. Pleads. Strains from how much I need her to say it’s all right, that she does forgive me, after three years of shouldering my unrelenting guilt alone. When I first saw her whiteboard message, the need rose so strongly, the sudden possibility of it gripped me to the point where I almost collapsed onto her floor. The cruelty of that hope slams back into me now. I can feel my heart hardening, because otherwise it would break.

A pebble lands on my arm. It’s come loose from the dirt ceiling.

This isn’t happening.

I crane my head to my rear pants pocket. Seb shoved my hoodie into a yellow opera bag when he brought us here, just like the one I saw at the Leroux crime scene, but he didn’t remove any other clothing. From my back pocket, the tip of something pokes out. The moose photograph. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re unlovable—undeserving of love, or otherwise. My mother’s words ring in my thoughts, her creased, narrow chestnut eyes so concerned. I promised her I wouldn’t.

Calm down. Compter jusqu’à dix. Start over.

“Angela, I’m sorry for . . . for everything. For Mom and Dad. For what you’ve gone through here alone, but we need to focus. After you cut yourself loose, where did you go?”

She swallows with a loud gulp. “Home. I used the spare key I hid in the lobby and grabbed some cash I kept in my apartment for emergencies, wrote the message on the whiteboard, hid the bookmark to my blog post for you to find, and the receipts. I knew you’d search everywhere and that Seb would contact you to lure you here.” The rickety breath she takes swells her lungs, bolstering her words. “He told me he’d stolen a body from the hospital morgue, dumped it in the river, and everyone thought it was me.”

The memory of rotting, waterlogged flesh fills my nostrils, and I gag picturing the thighs of that cadaver. But a quick glance at Angela’s feet confirms her ankle does have the Gemini symbol, the symbol for twins, in black ink.

“After I escaped,” she continues, “I started living in the catacombs, thinking—”

“That it would be the last place he’d look. Makes sense.”

“I started thinking about what you would do in my situation, Shay. You’re so precise about everything. But you can’t logic him to death the way you normally would. He doesn’t think in normal terms.”

“No kidding. But why mention Jean-Luc in the updates folder I found? You had me convinced that he was the one who took you.”

“I might be the better person to ask.” Seb fills the doorway. He tosses a large canvas bag to the ground, items within banging together. “Since I wrote it.”