Genevieve looked up, her body still crumpled into a ball on the floor. She reached out and grabbed me by the front of my shirt.

“Kill me,” she pleaded, the words escaping cracked and bleeding lips. “You kill me, before she does.”

I knelt there, frozen, and Locke lost it. She morphed from a teacher observing her star pupil into an angry, animal creature. She pounced on Genevieve, turning the girl on her back, pinning her to the floor, her hands encircling her neck.

“You don’t touch Cassie,” she said, her voice rising to a yell, her face so close to Genevieve’s that the younger girl had nowhere to go. “You. Don’t. Get. To. Decide.”

My brain whirred. I had to get her off Genevieve. I had to stop her. I had to—

One second Locke was on Genevieve, and the next she ripped the knife out of my hand.

“You can’t do it,” she spat at me. “You can’t do anything right.”

Genevieve opened her mouth. Locke plunged the knife into her side. I’d promised to protect Genevieve, and now …

Now, there was blood.

CHAPTER 37

Locke stood up. She kicked Genevieve’s body to the side, like the girl was already dead, even though the gasping, whimpering sounds the dying girl made told me she was not. Locke’s gun was on the floor, forgotten, but the way she was holding the knife as she stepped toward me told me that I wasn’t any safer than I’d been a moment before.

She was going to cut me.

She was going to slice me open.

She was going to kill me.

“You’re a liar,” she said. “You couldn’t do it. Do you even want to? Do you?”

She was screaming now. I took a step backward. I opened my mouth to tell her what she wanted to hear, to tell her that I did want it, to stall for time, but she never gave me the chance. Looking at me over the blade, she took another step forward.

“You were supposed to kill her,” she said. “I got her for you.”

“I’m sorry—”

“‘Sorry’ never did anything! Lorelai was sorry. She was sorry, but she had to go, and she left me there alone.” Locke’s voice broke, but the fury was still clear in every word. “You were supposed to kill the girl. It was supposed to be us, Cassie. You. And me. But you left!”

She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She didn’t see me when her wild eyes landed on mine. The blade in her hand gleamed. The blood dripped onto the floor. I had two seconds, maybe three.

“What do you mean, I left?” I asked, hoping my words would break through the fog in her brain, bring her back to the here and now. “Left where?”

Locke stopped. She hesitated. She looked at me. She saw me. She got ahold of herself, and with her voice still full of venom, she advanced. “Lorelai left. She was eighteen, and I was twelve. She was supposed to protect me. She was supposed to watch out for me. At night, when Daddy went away and the monster came out to play, she made him angry. She made him angry on purpose so he’d hit her instead of me. She said she wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” Locke paused. “She lied.”

We’d known that the UNSUB was fixated on my mother. We just hadn’t known why.

“She was my sister, and she just left me there. She knew what he was like after Mama left. She knew what he would do to me once she was gone, and she left anyway. Because of you. Because Daddy was right, and Lorelai was a little whore. She did all the wrong things, and when I found out she was pregnant with that air force boy’s baby …” Locke was completely caught up in the memory. I eyed her gun on the floor, wondering if I could reach it in time. “I thought that Daddy would kill her if he knew. I wasn’t even supposed to know, but I found out, and he found out, and he wasn’t even angry! He didn’t slit her throat, didn’t carve up her pretty little face until the boys didn’t want her anymore. She was pregnant, and he was happy.

“And then she left. In the middle of the night. She woke me up, and she kissed me, and she told me she was leaving. She told me she wasn’t ever coming back, that she wouldn’t raise a baby in this house, that our daddy wouldn’t ever lay a finger on you.” Locke’s knuckles—my aunt’s knuckles—tightened around the base of the blade. Her hand shook. “I begged her to take me with her, but she said she couldn’t. That he’d come after us. That she didn’t have any legal right to take me. That it would be too hard. She left me there to rot, and once she was gone, the only person left for him to punish was me.”

Don’t do anything else that I’ll be forced to make you regret.

You’ll only be hurting yourself.

I won’t have you sniveling on the floor like a common whore.

My mother had never talked about her family. She’d never mentioned an abusive father or an absent mother. She’d never mentioned a little sister, but now I could see their family unit: the bruises and the welts and the terror, the Daddy-monster, the little sister that she couldn’t save, and the baby that she could.

“When people ask me why I do what I do,” the woman who was that baby sister said, “I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered. I’d finally gotten out of that house. I went to college, and I spent years looking for my big sister. At first, I just wanted to find her. I just wanted to be with her—and with you. If she’d taken me with you, I could have helped! You would have loved me. I would have loved you.” Locke’s voice got very soft, and I realized that this was a scenario she’d played out in her head, growing up in that hellhole. She’d thought about my mom, and she’d thought about me before she ever met me, before she ever knew my name.

“She shouldn’t have left you there.” I braved saying the words because they felt true. Locke was just a kid when my mother left, and my mom had never even looked back. She’d raised me on the road, moving from city to city, never letting it slip that she had a family out there, just like she’d never mentioned my dad.

My whole life, we’d been running from something, and I didn’t even know it.

“She never should have left me there,” Locke repeated. “Eventually, I stopped dreaming about finding her and being a family again, and I started dreaming about finding her and hurting her, the way Daddy hurt me. Making her pay for leaving me there. Peeling her face off until no one thought she was the pretty one, until just looking at her made you scream.”

The dressing room. The blood. The smell …

“But by the time I found her—by the time I found you—it was too late. She was already dead. She was gone, and it wasn’t fair. I was supposed to kill her. I was supposed to be the one.”

My aunt hadn’t killed my mother—because someone else had gotten there first.

“When I found out that she was dead, and you were gone, when I found out that they’d sent you to live with your father’s family—I was your family, too! I thought about taking you. I even went to Colorado, but when I got there, there was this junkie at my motel. She was cheap and loose and dirty, and her hair was the exact right shade of red. I killed her, and I said, ‘How do you like that, Lore?’ I carved her up until I could imagine Lorelai’s face underneath, and God, it felt good.” She paused. “It was the sweetest, you know. The first time. It always is. And after the first time, you always need more.”

“Is that why you joined the FBI?” I asked. “Lots of travel, easy access, the perfect cover?”

Agent Locke took a step toward me. Every muscle in her body was taut. For a moment, I thought that she would hit me—again and again and again.

“No,” she said. “That’s not why I joined.”

When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered.

Locke’s words came back to me then, and I realized that she’d been telling the truth.

“You joined the FBI because you wanted to find my mother’s killer.”

Not because she was upset that my mom was dead. Because she’d wanted to be the one to kill her.

“I changed my name. I studied. I planned. I passed the psych exams with flying colors. Even once Briggs and I started working together and he brought me in on the Naturals program, no one really saw me. They only saw what I wanted them to see. Lia never caught me in a lie. Michael never saw a hint of unsavory emotion. And Dean—I was like family to him.”