HELPLESSNESS AND FEAR WARRED WITH hatred and defiance—I didn’t know what to do or say, but the longer I kept him talking, the longer I would stay alive.

“They have you on camera,” I said, grasping for anything. “They’ll know you did this.”

He laughed. “At the police station? Did you tell them it was me?” He took my chin in his hand. “You did. I can tell just by looking at you. Let me guess—they have a guy on camera who was wearing long sleeves, baggy clothes, and a baseball cap. And you thought they’d believe it was your dead boyfriend? No wonder they think you’re crazy.” He sucked in his lower lip. “And let’s be honest, you kind of are. But it does make this easier,” he said, glancing down at the box cutter. “Less messy.”

He stood from his chair and my veins flooded with adrenaline, bringing everything into sharper focus. I felt wrung-out and picked clean, but my wrists were less numb. My legs were less limp.

The drugs were wearing off.

“Why’d you come to the police station? To school?” I asked. Begged.

“I wanted you to know I was alive,” he said, and I was so grateful just to hear words issue from his mouth that I could have cried with relief. “I thought you saw me at—What’s it called?”

“What?”

“Your old school.”

“Croyden,” I said.

He snapped his fingers. “Right. You ran,” he said with a smirk. A snake smile, reptilian and cold. “And the precinct? I didn’t know why you were going. But I was—” he paused, considering his words. “Concerned. I wanted to distract you.”

It worked. “You could have killed me a hundred times before now. Why wait?”

Jude smiled in response. Said nothing. Lifted the blade.

Oh, God. “What about your family?” I whispered. Talk, Jude. Talk.

“Claire was my family.” Jude’s voice was different now. Less harsh. He swallowed and took a deep breath. “You know what they found?” he asked evenly as he moved behind me. “She was so badly mangled they had to have a closed casket.”

“Rachel too,” I said in a low voice.

It was the wrong thing to say. Jude crouched next to me, his cheek close to my ear. “Please,” he said, and grabbed my hand.

And this feeling, this terror, was something new. Like nothing I’d ever experienced—not earlier, in the trunk, or in the asylum.

“Why should I help you kill me?” My voice was barely more than a breath. Barely a whisper.

He was close again. So close. Behind me, next to my ear. “You can choose, Mara. Your one life, or two of your brothers’.” He reached around and held the blade against my cheek. Reminding me what he could do.

And reminding me of something else.

His watch, his Rolex, the same one Noah saw in his vision, was inches from my face. “Nice watch,” I whispered. Keep talking. Keep talking.

“Thanks.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Abe Lincoln,” he sneered.

“Why did you take Joseph?”

Jude said nothing.

“He’s twelve.” My voice sounded like a wail.

Jude’s stare was ice. “A brother for a sister.”

My hate grew, a formless, shapeless mass that devoured my fear. “You used to talk about football with him at my house.”

Jude laughed then, and the word that reverberated in my mind was sick.

“I had this whole plan,” he said, sounding exasperated. “I was going to bring Daniel over for a party—don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt him either. You were.”

I would’ve shaken my head, but the blade was too close. “I’d never hurt him.”

“Never say never,” he said seriously. His voice turned quiet. “I can make you do anything I want.” Then he sighed. “But someone had to go and be a hero,” he rolled his eyes. “And now here we are.”

“I’m not a—”

Jude chuckled. “You think I mean you?” he said, wrinkling his nose and moving closer. His breath was in my ear, tickling me. “You are no hero, Mara Dyer. You’d do anything to get what you want. Which makes you just. Like. Me.”

Then he moved in front of me so that I could see him. Stood up to his full height. He was broad and enormous and immovable before me. His eyes scanned my body. “Kind of a waste.” He ran the back of his hand down my bare arm, and my flesh died.

Make him talk. I grasped for words, for anything. “Why’d you take Joseph to the Everglades?”

“I told you already. And if you’re going to dispose of a body in Florida, there’s really no better place.”

But the shed—the property was owned by my father’s client. By Leon Lassiter. “Why there?”

“It was a suggestion.”

I was reeling. “From who?”

“A mutual friend,” he said, as he inspected my wrists. Turned them over. Glanced at the blade.

My family might believe that I would kill myself. After everything that happened, it was possible. But, “Why would I come here?” I asked urgently. Tell me where we are.

“You wouldn’t want them to find you at home, would you? Where Joseph could be the one to find your body? No, you’d do it somewhere out of the way. Somewhere you’d be found pretty quick, but not by anyone you knew. You took Daniel’s car tonight, by the way.”

He sounded so proud of himself. It made me want to cut out his tongue.

Jude moved behind me. Dragged my chair to the back of the room, which was when I noticed that there was, in fact, another door; it was painted the same color as the walls and there was no knob, so I didn’t notice it until he pushed it open, dragging me through.

“You know, I always thought that once I had you like this, what I would want most would be to kill you for what you did. But I wonder if there might be something worse?” His eyes slithered over my skin.

I couldn’t bear him staring at me that way. I squeezed my eyes shut.

He shook the chair and my teeth chattered. “Hey.” Shake. “Look at me.” He was right in my face and he took my chin in his hand. “Look at me.”

There was nothing I could do. I was alone. My eyes opened.

But as I stared right into Jude’s—unnaturally dark, considering the bright lights in the boathouse—words seared through me, words that weren’t mine.

“You aren’t alone in this.”

Noah’s words, spoken to me just hours before. Noah found Joseph when he’d been taken—by Jude, I knew now—when my brother was drugged and in danger. He felt an echo of what Joseph felt, and knew where Jude had taken him because Noah saw it through Jude’s eyes.

Noah heard me when I was hurt and trapped in the asylum. I trapped myself, so he saw what I saw through my eyes.

If I hurt myself now, he might see through them again.

He wasn’t in Miami, so he couldn’t save me. But I could make sure he knew the truth.

I bit down on my tongue so hard that I moaned. See me, I wished.

“Are you going to do this,” Jude breathed into my ear, “or am I?”

Blood filled my mouth and silent sobs wracked my chest. Water stretched out in front of us, black and endless. We were at the end of a dock. I turned my head to try and find anything that would give me a clue as to where I was—a sign, something—but my vision swam. From the pain? From tears?

Yes, from tears. When they cleared a little, I saw that the dock veered off to our right in a narrow path toward a grouping of blurry, faraway boats.

But no people. No one.

Jude gripped my head hard in one of his hands, palming it like a basketball. He looked down into my eyes. “You’re not motivated enough.”

I had no idea if Noah could see this. I remembered that it wasn’t just pain that made him see; there was something else. But we never figured out what.

As I spat blood out onto the dock, Jude smacked me. Not hard enough to leave a bruise, but hard enough to sting. “Do not. Do not f**k everything up. You will kill your family, Mara.” He leaned down. “Look at me and tell me I’m lying.”

See me, I begged silently. Help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me.

“Okay,” I said out loud. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do what you want.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“If you try to run, don’t forget I have the key to your house.”

“I won’t,” I whispered.

“And I could always cut the brakes on Daniel’s car. Or your parents’.”

I couldn’t breathe. A sob escaped from my throat. I was beyond terrified for them. Beyond reason.

“You control whether they get hurt, you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. He gripped my head harder. “Yes,” I moaned.

I could do anything for them, as long as they would be okay. Even this. “I’ll do it.”

Jude sliced the duct tape from my feet and my wrists. He held me by the waistband of my jeans, just the way he used to.

“Give me your hand.”

My thoughts were a roar. I could barely stand. His blade touched the inside of my wrists, tracing a vein. Then it bit into my skin. I cried out.

“Quiet.”

The blood welled and flowed and the coppery scent made my stomach roil. He drew a horizontal line of blood along my wrist, not deep. Then handed me the blade.

“Cut deeper, exactly where I cut. Then your other hand. Don’t forget what I’ll do to Joseph.”

But the line was horizontal.

Not vertical.

Not fatal.

My heart soared for all of a second.

Until I looked back at Jude and realized—

He knew.

53

JUDE DIDN’T WANT TO KILL ME. HE WANTED something else.

Something I couldn’t imagine as I freed the blood from my body, the metallic smell mingling with the salt of the water beneath us, around us, in front of us. Jude stood in front of me, holding my forearms steady as I cut, holding me up. I could not look away from the deepening gashes on my wrists. I was shaking and weak and I let out a low whimper.

“Hello?”

My head snapped up at the same time as Jude’s. My vision blurred—from dizziness, now, not tears—but a lighter shape approached us.

I tried to scream but nothing came out. I was weak and scared and I could barely see and I couldn’t even cry out for help.

Jude let go of one arm and took my face in one large hand. “Don’t even think about it.” He took the blade from me, hid it, and shifted himself so that he stood between me and the voice.

“What’s going on over here?”

The man’s voice was getting louder. Closer. I heard rushed footsteps clap on the wood to my right.

“Everything’s fine,” Jude said calmly.

Clap clap. “Do you need—”

A pause. A gasp. “Oh my God,” the stranger said.

“Everything’s under control,” Jude said, turning on the full force of his charm. He was transformed—I could hear it. If I didn’t know about the rot inside, it would have reminded me why I was attracted to him in the first place.

The man’s voice changed—imbued with authority.

“Did you call an ambulance?”

I tried to speak, to form words, but I had no voice.

“They’re on their way,” Jude said.

My vision cleared a bit as more tears fell. The man reached for something at his hip. “I can have them here in minutes. Cop,” he said.

And then something shifted beneath Jude’s expression. He withdrew the box cutter and my mind roared with terror. The cop had just turned on his radio when Jude flicked the blade open.

The man’s eyes widened. “What are you—”

Jude was going to filet him open. He twisted the box cutter in his hand just as the cop lunged for it.

And then Jude stabbed himself in the side.

I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

Neither could the cop. He wrested the box cutter from Jude’s hand.

“What in the hell—what’s wrong with you?”

Jude fell to his knees, wincing. The cop turned on the radio. “Dispatch, send backup to—”

But the man dropped the radio before he could finish his sentence. An expression of exquisite pain swallowed his confusion. Then he dropped Jude’s box cutter.

Just a few feet away.

I slumped down and crawled toward it because I was too weak or too scared to stand. Pain chewed through my nerves. My vision was edged in black and red. I crawled anyway.

“Don’t . . . bother,” Jude wheezed. He just knelt there, half bent, staring down, his head heavy and his arms limp.

I moved toward him even though everything in me was utterly repelled. I wanted to stop. I kept going. There was groaning—but it wasn’t mine or Jude’s. It was the man, the cop. I couldn’t see him or hear what he was saying or see what was happening. I had one thing on my mind and that was the blade. I reached for it but my muscles weren’t under my control; they shook and I was weak and when my fingers nudged the plastic handle, it fell through the slats of the dock.

It was over.

I was done. My legs and shoulders collapsed and I couldn’t move myself up or anywhere. My eyes were open still and I was still conscious but there was so much pain I wished I wasn’t.

I felt the vibration of a body hitting the dock. It was the cop; I could see him out of my peripheral vision. His eyes were open. Glassy. His breathing was shallow. I heard a tinny voice somewhere to my left. His radio? The only other sound was the water beneath me. The wood was rough against my cheek. I looked down. The water slapped the pylons as the tide slowly came in. It was louder than I would have expected. The moonlight lit the surface of the water. Peaceful.