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Gavin paused, and then he laughed. “She’s no daughter of mine,” he said through clenched teeth, flicking the handgun with his wrist as he talked, making punctuation dangerous. “My daughters know the meaning of showing up for family.”

Silas turned slowly to face Ruth.

“Hey, Ruth. Sweetheart. I know you’re scared, and I’m so sorry. But I also know you love Mickey. I’ve seen it all summer. She loves you so much, too, you know? I’ve never seen her have a friend like you. I know you don’t want to hurt her. Just tell me where she is, and everything will be all right.”

“I’m sorry—I couldn’t—I can’t—”

Gavin raised his gun and took a step in her direction. In response, Sean tightened around her, the knife pressing into her skin. Lily couldn’t believe how brave he was. She didn’t know how or when he had become that way, or whether she wished he was otherwise. She hated how badly she needed him to be reckless.

Lily felt as much as she saw Silas’s shadow move over her spot in the dirt, pulling Gavin’s focus off Ruth and Sean, toward the open, empty woods.

“Gavin, it’s me you want. I’m responsible for your sister’s death. So let’s handle this as men, just us. Let everyone else go. All right?”

Thanks to Silas, Lily had the shot, but she couldn’t take it until someone said where Mickey was. What if she was hidden away? What if she shot him and they never found out where?

“How very caveman of you, Silas!” Gavin whooped, his frustration showing in his seams. Lily had thought of him as patient, once. “No, I don’t want to shoot you. That’s not part of the plan.”

“Are you sure? I would, if I were you.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Gavin said, using the muzzle of the gun to scratch the stubble on his neck. “I want you to hurt. But killing you isn’t good enough. I want you to suffer like I did. And if Ruth here had followed through on the one damn thing I’ve ever asked—”

“Just let them go, and then you can do whatever you want to me.”

But then there was a sound from out on the lake. A sound Lily wouldn’t trade for anything.

“Mom?”

As soon as she heard it, she pulled the trigger.





PEYOTE





“WHAT THE FUCK WAS that?” Cal asked when we landed back in the office, my wet shoes squeaking on the linoleum as I went straight to my desk to check my monitor.

Mickey was still alive.

“Seriously, Pey, what did I just watch? Did you just kiss that mark on the forehead? And I thought my thing was weird.”

I hit Refresh, lake water dripping from my hair into the cracks between the keys of my keyboard.

Still alive.

I shrugged off my button-down and wrung it out over the trash before putting the lockbox down on my desk.

“What do you want to do with this?” I asked, ignoring her look, which demanded an answer. “I have an idea, but it’s up to you.”

Cal touched the edges of the metal, ran her fingertip along the hinges.

“If we don’t give them the key, we lose the deal and get sent back Downstairs.”

“Not if my plan works.”

I expected a laugh, a glower; an eye roll at least. I expected questions I couldn’t answer, especially not in that moment, with Mickey and everything the Harrisons represented on such a precarious ledge. But instead, she just nodded. So I went on.

“We give it all to them, the films and the key. We give them the truth along with what they asked for, and let them make their own decision. Hopefully, they will decide to walk away, and the deal will be void because—if my plan works—we won’t be here.”

It was only then that I remembered my results were still in my pocket.

We have an understanding in Hell. A kind of camaraderie. A lot of people, when they first arrive, cry the same kind of cry: I don’t belong here! They do it until they realize no one is listening—no one with any kind of overruling power at least. And the people who are listening are not the kind of people you want to show weakness to. Eventually, everyone stops, and the people who said it most become the people who teach the newcomers the danger in the words, and so on.

And if you survive past that—which you have to, because death is a ticket already punched—eventually, you start taking just the teensiest bit of pride in your locale. Yeah, you think. I’m a bad motherfucker. These are my people. We, the damned.

But I have a confession to make. Even when I spoke from that place, that camaraderie, I never really meant it. There’s always been a part of me—an embryo of a thing, some tiny little molecule, translucent and barely beating—that still believes I was not a bad person. That I came here for a good reason. A valiant one.

Now I had the answer in my hand, wet but still intact, and I found that little part of me screaming. What if I was wrong, and Cal was right? What if Hell was always the end of my story? What if I belonged here?

I ran my thumb along the edge of the fold, tiny pills of wet paper trailing behind.

“You don’t want to know, do you?” Cal asked.

I shook my head. “No, I do,” I started. “It’s just . . .”

“What if it’s not what you thought?”

“Right.”