“Maybe we should have brought Townsend with us.”
Dean’s comment got an eyebrow arch out of me. “So he could make inappropriate comments and lighten the moment? Or so he could tell you exactly what I’m feeling?”
Dean considered his answer very carefully. “The one that’s not going to get me a speech about how you can take care of yourself.”
I snorted and walked toward the front porch. As I made my way up the steps, the second one creaked.
“Gotcha!” I jump from the step onto the porch and wrap my arms around Mommy before the creaking can give me away.
“On the contrary…” Mommy picks me up and dangles me upside down. “I’ve got you!”
“Cassie.” Dean’s voice broke through the memory. At first, I thought he was worried about me, but as I processed my surroundings, I realized that he was more concerned with the person who’d just opened the front door.
“Shane,” I said, taking in Ree’s grandson’s appearance. Somehow, I hadn’t expected the house to be occupied. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to live here.”
Shane stared at me with every bit as much disdain as we’d gotten from him at the museum. “So?”
“So I’d like to look around a little,” I returned. “I don’t know how much your grandmother told you—”
Before I could finish that thought, Shane headed back into the house. He let the door slam behind him, but didn’t lock it. I took that as an invitation and reached for the doorknob.
When Shane realized I’d followed him into the house, he stared at me for a moment. “You didn’t use to be this brave.”
“You didn’t use to be so antisocial,” I countered.
Shane snorted. “You know what they say, Red: dance it off.”
Hearing my mother’s words come out of his mouth hit me like a jolt of electricity. This was real. My mom and I hadn’t just lived here. We’d put down roots. We’d had people in our lives. We’d had something to miss when we hit the road.
“You want to look around?” Shane said, his surly tone softening ever so slightly. “Far be it from me to stop you. I just live here.”
Wordlessly, I took Shane up on his invitation and began making my way through the house. Entryway. Kitchen. Small spiral staircase. I knew before I took the first step that at the top of the stairs, I’d find two bedrooms. When I came to stand in the doorway of the room that had been my mother’s, another memory hit me with the force of a tidal wave.
Nightmare. It’s dark. I want my mom. But Mommy isn’t alone.
“I don’t deserve you.” Mommy has her back toward Kane. “I told you about the kind of man my father is. I didn’t tell you that I have a younger sister. I left her in that hellhole, and I never looked back.”
I rub at the corners of my eyes. Sister? Mommy doesn’t have a sister. Just me.
It’s just Mommy and Kane and me.
I shift. The floor creaks beneath me. They turn—
The rest of the memory was less vivid. I didn’t feel it, didn’t live through it again, but I knew what had happened—knew that my mother and Kane had turned to see me, that Kane had been the one to bend down to my level, to pick me up. I knew that he’d told my mother that he was the one who didn’t deserve her.
Didn’t deserve us.
“You okay?”
I wasn’t sure how long Dean had been standing behind me, but I let my body lean back into his. I let myself feel his warmth, the way my mother had felt Kane’s.
“I knew that Kane and my mom were involved,” I said, the words like sandpaper in my throat. “I didn’t realize that he was part of my life, too.”
Kane Darby and my mother hadn’t just been involved. They’d been serious.
If you were serious about him, I thought, picturing my mom the way she’d looked in the memory, if he was serious about us, why did we leave? As I descended the spiral staircase, my stomach twisted. I felt the way I did every time I dreamed about my mother’s dressing room.
Don’t go in there. Don’t open the door.
My gaze locked on the foot of the stairs. My heart raced, but a memory never came. I just stood there, until I heard a loud crash from the kitchen. I made a beeline for the noise, but Agent Sterling cut me off. She gave me a warning look and then led the way into the kitchen herself.
Shane was standing over the sink, blood dripping from his hand, a broken glass on the floor.
Blood.
Go back to sleep, baby, my mother’s voice whispered from somewhere in my memory. It’s just a dream.
“Have an accident?” Agent Sterling asked Shane.
Shane ignored Sterling and narrowed his eyes at me. “You shouldn’t have come back here, little Red.”
“Watch it.” Dean’s voice was low and full of warning.
Shane ignored him. “The last thing Gaither needs is outsiders buying into what Serenity Ranch is selling. You should tell your little friend that,” he continued, his voice dripping with venom, “if you see her again.”
For a moment, I felt like I was watching this interaction from outside my body.
“What little friend?” I asked.
Shane didn’t answer. He grabbed a paper towel, pressed it onto his bleeding hand, then tried to storm past us. Agent Sterling stopped him. For the first time since we’d come to Gaither, she took out her badge.
“I’m with the FBI,” she said. “And you need to back up and explain exactly what you meant just now.”
Shane looked from Sterling’s badge to me and then back again. “Holland Darby is on the FBI’s radar?” It was clear from the tone of Shane’s voice that he was trying very hard not to get his hopes up.
Agent Sterling let Shane’s explanation stand.
“What about the girl who was with you?” Shane asked. “Is she FBI, too? Is that why I just got a call from a buddy of mine that she’s out there, asking to join them?”
The girl who was with you. I’d had a plan to find out more about Kane Darby. But apparently, I wasn’t the only one. All roads in Gaither led back to the friendly neighborhood cult, and it didn’t take much profiling for me to figure out which of my fellow Naturals might have decided to follow up on that lead.
On her own.
Serenity Ranch was less of a ranch than a compound, surrounded by a ten-foot-tall fence on all sides. Agent Sterling parked her car outside the main gate.
“Stay here,” she told us.
Clearly, she wasn’t thinking straight. Lia was the closest thing to family that Dean had. Before he could latch his hand around the door handle, I reached out to stop him.
“I know,” I said. “Lia did something stupid, and you weren’t there to stop her. And now she’s in there playing a very dangerous game with very dangerous people. But you need to calm down, because you saw the way that Darby was with Shane. He wanted Shane to take a swing, and he’ll want the same thing from you.”
Power. Control. Manipulation. This was the language that Holland Darby spoke. It was a language that Dean and I knew all too well.
Dean’s entire body was tense, but he forced himself to breathe in and breathe out. “Lia was seven when her mother joined a religious commune,” he said, his voice rough in his throat. “Lia’s mom was in this country illegally, and after what she’d been through, the man in charge seemed like a savior.” Dean closed his eyes. “To Lia, he was something else.”
I thought of Lia, learning to recognize deception. Lia, learning to lie.
“Lia likes high places,” Dean continued softly, “because her mother let a man like Holland Darby stick Lia in a hole in the ground for days at a time. Because six-year-old Lia didn’t have a humble spirit. Because she wouldn’t take forgiveness when it was offered. Because she didn’t repent her sins.”
Dean forced himself to stop, but my mind was reeling at the implications. As a child, Lia had gotten locked into a battle of wills with a man who dealt in power, manipulation, and control. The kind of man who benevolently offere
d forgiveness, so long as you accepted that your salvation was his to give. From the moment Lia had seen those people in town, from the moment she’d read about Serenity Ranch, she was a ticking time bomb.
Power. Control. Manipulation. Lia had known that approaching Holland Darby as tourists wouldn’t work. Approaching him as the FBI would only cause him to close ranks. But approaching him as a lost soul in need of redemption?
You’ll play his game better than he does. You’ll find out what he’s hiding. And if it costs you—whatever it costs you—so be it.
“I’m not going to take a swing at anyone.” Dean did his best to look like he wasn’t on the verge of letting his darkest self come out to play. “But I’m also not staying in the car.”
“Good,” I replied as the cult leader approached the gate where Agent Sterling stood. “Because neither am I.”
“How may I help you?” Holland Darby’s voice was pleasant and smooth, more powerful and magnetic than his son’s.
Agent Sterling didn’t so much as glance at Dean and me as we came to stand behind her. “I’m here for Lia,” she said. Her tone wasn’t argumentative. She was simply stating a fact.
“Of that, I have no doubt,” Darby replied. “Lia is a very special young lady. May I ask what your relationship to her is?”
On either side of the gate, Holland Darby and Agent Sterling stood with their arms hanging loosely by their sides. Both of them were preternaturally calm.
“I’m her legal guardian.” Agent Sterling went for the jugular. “And she’s a minor.”
If there was one thing that we knew about Holland Darby, it was that he took pains to stay just this side of the law. The word minor was his kryptonite, and Agent Sterling knew it.
You would hate to part with such a prize, but if she’s not eighteen…
“I haven’t been a minor for three months.” Lia came to stand behind the cult leader. She was dressed in a white peasant top and flowy white pants, barefoot, her hair loose and free.
“Lia.” Dean didn’t say more than her name, but there was a wealth of warning in that single word.
“I’m sorry,” Lia told Dean softly. “I know this hurts you. I know that you want to make it all better, to make everything better, but there is no better, Dean. Not for someone like me.”
A masterful liar wove truth into deception. Lia could say the words someone like me and mean them.
“I believe there is a better.” Holland Darby took the opening that Lia had left him. “For everyone, Lia, even you.”
Even you. Those two words belied the gentleness in his tone. He was already undermining her, already sowing the belief that she was less, that she was unworthy, but that he could believe in her despite her unforgivable flaws.
For a brief instant, Lia’s eyes met mine. You know exactly what you’re doing, I thought. He’s a doll-maker who likes broken toys, and you know how to play the shattered, broken doll.
Agent Sterling almost certainly saw that as clearly as I did, but she had no interest whatsoever in allowing one of her charges to play this game. “Lia, you have two choices. The first is to get your ass out here in the next five seconds. And the second choice?” Agent Sterling took a single step forward. “It’s one that you’re really not going to like.”
Lia—being Lia—heard the truth in that statement. I expected her to bait Agent Sterling further, but instead, she shrank back.
Vulnerable. Broken. Weak.
Holland Darby held up a hand. “I will have to ask you to moderate your tone.” He stepped in front of Lia, blocking her bodily from Sterling’s view. “This is a simple place, and we abide by simple rules. Respect. Serenity. Acceptance.”
Agent Sterling stared the man down for a moment, and then she reached for her back pocket—for her badge, I realized. Dean’s hand caught Sterling’s before she could pull it out. He looked toward Lia, who stepped tentatively out from behind Darby, every motion, every gesture of vulnerability a lie.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Dean told Lia. There was anger in those words, but also a message. He was telling her that he saw through her act—that he knew why she was here, and he knew that it had nothing to do with finding serenity and everything to do with finding out what Holland Darby was hiding.
Lia smiled sadly before retreating behind Darby’s form. “I hope so, too.”
The second we walked past Agent Starmans, who was stationed in the hallway, and into the hotel room, Michael scanned our faces. “You spoke to Lia,” he concluded. “Where is she?”
“She infiltrated Serenity Ranch.” Sterling addressed those words to Judd, who didn’t look any happier about Lia’s absence than we were.
“Lia infiltrated a cult,” Michael repeated. He shot an incredulous look at Dean. “And you didn’t drag her home kicking and screaming?”
“Don’t start with me, Townsend.” A muscle in Dean’s jaw ticked.
“Consider me warned.”
Judd ignored the tension brewing between Michael and Dean and focused his attention on Agent Sterling. “Is Lia in any immediate danger?”
Agent Sterling’s answer was as terse as Judd’s question. “I don’t think Darby has avoided formal charges for this long by overtly abusing newcomers before he’s had a chance to fully indoctrinate them.”
In other words, as long as Holland Darby bought the persona Lia was presenting to him—the lost lamb in need of guidance—she was probably safe.
For now.
“Will she be discreet?” Judd addressed that question to Dean.
“Discreet?” Michael repeated incredulously. “Are we talking about the same Lia Zhang here? The one who expresses her displeasure with relationship partners by threatening to duct-tape them naked to the ceiling?”
“Lia knows how this game is played,” Dean told Judd. And then he turned back toward Michael, the muscles in his neck and shoulders as tense as his jaw. “So now you and Lia are in a relationship?”
“Excuse me?”
“You weren’t ‘in a relationship’ in New York when we went to find Celine,” Dean said. “The second things got tough, you pushed Lia away.”
“I’m confused, Redding,” Michael said, taking a lazy step toward Dean. “Is talking about our feelings something you and I do now?”
Leaving Lia at Serenity Ranch had taken everything Dean had. He’d done it because he trusted her, because trusting Lia and offering her honesty in exchange for every lie was the way he’d made it past her walls. But walking away had cost him. His temper was already frayed, and Michael’s flippant tone wasn’t helping.
“You’re not good enough for her,” Dean told Michael, his voice low. “If you were even the least bit capable of caring about anyone but yourself, Lia wouldn’t have gone in alone. She did this to you as much as for the rest of us.”
“Dean,” I said sharply.
Michael held up a hand. “Let the man speak, Colorado. I do love it when he-who-has-literally-tortured-someone-in-this-room casts stones.”
“Michael.” As the person Dean had tortured, back when he was a child trying to help her escape his father’s grasp, Agent Sterling didn’t appreciate the reference.
“You should have known,” Dean told Michael between gritted teeth. “If Lia was on the verge of taking off, if this case cut too close to home, if she was itching to get out of her own skin, if she needed to fight back—you should have known.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Michael got in Dean’s face. “You think I wanted her to leave?”
For a moment, I thought Dean would de-escalate things. But then he leaned forward to speak directly into Michael’s ear. “I think you don’t know how to do anything but take a punch.”
One second, they were standing there, and the next, they were on the floor. Michael swung at Dean, who grappled for better positioning and pinned Michael to the ground.
“Stop.” The word exited Sloane’s mouth in a whisper. “Stop. Stop. Stop!”
She’d
been silent since we’d made it back, and as her volume escalated to a yell, the boys froze.
I’d never seen Dean pick a fight with Michael before. I’d never seen the two of them in an all-out brawl.
“It’s not Michael’s fault.” Sloane’s voice was barely audible. “It’s mine.” She moved backward until she hit the wall. “I saw Lia leaving. She asked me not to tell.” Sloane sucked in a breath, her middle finger on her right hand tapping against her thumb. She was counting something—counting and counting and unable to pull it together. “We’d just gotten back, and she changed clothes. She was wearing white, and Lia only wears white thirteen percent of the time. I should have known.”
“Sloane,” Judd said gently. “Sweetheart…”
“I offered to go with her,” Sloane continued, picking up the pace of both her words and her tapping. “She said no. She said…” Sloane looked down. “She said I’d just get in the way.”
You knew how much that would hurt Sloane, Lia. You knew. Objectively, I could see that Lia had been trying to protect our most vulnerable member, but Sloane didn’t know that. She wouldn’t understand it even if I tried to explain what the combination of anger, fear, and dread that Michael had seen in Kane Darby had drudged up for Lia.
Years later, it can still hit you in a moment.
Dean was wrong. This wasn’t about Michael, or what had happened in New York, or any of us. This was about ghosts that Lia had never faced.
Agent Sterling’s phone rang then, and as I told Sloane that none of this—none of it—was her fault, my brain was already processing the shift in my mentor’s demeanor. The identity of the caller was clear in the way Sterling stood, her shoulders squared to ward off emotion, her free hand dangling loosely by her side.
“I take it you got my messages about Gaither.” Sterling didn’t say that Briggs should have called her back sooner. She didn’t ask why he hadn’t. “Lia’s gone AWOL to infiltrate the local cult.” Agent Sterling set the phone to speaker—one more layer of distance between herself and Briggs. “If the man in charge is hiding something, Lia will find it. But if he realizes she’s looking—if anyone in his camp suspects she’s with the FBI—this won’t go well.”