Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(132)

She looks at him in disbelief. Not because she thinks he’s lying. Because she didn’t expect his candor.

“So you were outside the whole time?” she asks. “You followed me home?”

He nods.

Without thinking, she tosses the necklace toward the nearest grim altar. When his gift lands atop a rotting pile of burned offerings, Dylan flinches.

“You have every right to be angry with me.” But he doesn’t sound like he believes it, only that he thinks he should. “How much did Cole tell you about me?”

That your life hangs in my hands, she thinks. That if I refuse to keep being a guinea pig, he’ll probably shoot you dead. Right here, for all I know.

“Did he tell you that when I came to him with the first animal tests of Zypraxon, he’d squandered millions of research dollars hunting for common links between orphan diseases? That he was losing the confidence of his board and he’d only been CEO for a year. Do you know what that phrase means? Orphan disease?” She shakes her head. “It’s a disease so rare there’s no real financial incentive for a company like Graydon to find a cure for it, or even a treatment. But Cole, for some crazy reason, got it in his head that with the right amount of money and determination, and as it turned out, ignorance, he’d find some commonality between random, isolated, rare diseases and somehow develop treatments for them. His Umbrella Theory. That’s what he called it. It was complete nonsense, and he almost ruined his father’s company over it.”

“And then you came to him with a cure for something else,” she says.

“A cure?” he says. “Maybe. More like a weapon.”

“A weapon that could have saved your mother.”

“And yours.”

“And you killed four men to make it work.”

“Four willing volunteers gave their lives so we could try to make it work. We weren’t out to create a Superman pill. We wanted to formulate something that could seize on the biochemical process of panic itself and transform it into efficiency, competency, responsiveness.”

“Survival,” she whispers before she can stop herself.

He looks into her eyes, smiles slightly. Pleased, no doubt, that she’s just parroted the word he used to justify his actions the night Jason almost raped her.

“Exactly,” he says. “The strength was an unexpected by-product. And one with undeniable defense industry implications that I will admit I did use to secure funding for our further development.”

“But it didn’t work. So you decided to put my life at risk.”

“I knew it would work in you. I had a theory. I was right.”

“What was your theory?”

“Our tests used combat veterans. People who’d been through extreme physical trauma. Trauma so severe it had reshaped their neural pathways. With you, that wasn’t a concern.”

“You’re saying my life’s been free of trauma?”

“Your life is full of grief, betrayal, and loss. But the only time you were ever held down against your will was when the SWAT team saved you from this place. You’ve never been shot or even shot at, much less beaten, violated. The threat of those things has been ever present in your life, as it is in so many lives. But it never manifested.”

“Until you sent Jason to my house.”

“Yes. And we all saw how that went.”

“I don’t believe you, Noah.”

He closes his eyes at this use of his old name. What’s he trying to summon? Patience or violence?

“Which part?” he finally asks quietly.

“I don’t believe you were so confident your pill wouldn’t kill me. I think you thought I was expendable.”

“How, Charlotte?”

They’re thoughts that have only come to her in the past few days, so she’s afraid she might have trouble articulating them now, but when she starts to speak, the words come easily. Is she saddened or relieved to be saying these things? “I think you tracked me down because you knew who I was. And you hated me. You thought I’d made money off the Bannings, off your mother’s murder. You’d already lost a female subject. Maybe it was someone you cared about. Now you needed one you wouldn’t care about at all.”

“Interesting,” he says. “So naturally I spent three months getting to know you so that I wouldn’t be attached when you went lycan on me and I had to destroy you?”

“Those three months gave you everything you needed to set up your test.”

“Two weeks gave me everything I needed to set up my test. You were desperate for someone to talk to, and after our first session you rarely held back.”

“Better for you then.”

“But that’s not why I was there. Not in the beginning.”

She’s startled by his conviction, but he doesn’t rush to say more.

“Why were you there?” she asks.

“I wanted to know who you really were. You’re right. I hated you. Ever since I found out who my mother really was, what had happened to her, I hated you. I’d read your father’s crass, manipulative, disingenuous book. I’d watched every single one of those disgusting films, knowing you got a share of the profits. And I’d never believed a word you’d said in front of a camera. I thought it was all for show, all for money. Even storming offstage on your father like that. Just a teenager getting bored with her old act. And I thought deep down, you probably hated your father because you loved them more. Abigail and Daniel. Your real parents. In short, I believed everything about you that you didn’t want the world to believe.”