City of the Lost (Casey Duncan #1)(133)

“You don’t understand anything,” she snarls.

“Maybe,” I say. “But I think we’ll let the council decide.” I turn and call, “You get that, sheriff?”

Dalton walks out from a clump of trees. He’s pale and pressing his blood-soaked shirt to his shoulder. But he’s on his feet, walking toward Beth, and she falls back, blinking hard.

“Eric? You … you …”

“Yeah, he’s fine,” I say. “I lied. Someone else isn’t doing quite so well, though. Will’s been shot.”

“And you’re going to fix him,” Dalton says. “Or I’ll shoot you before Casey can.”





Thirteen



And that’s it. Well, no. It’s not. When we talk to the council, Beth tries to retract her confession. That’s when I bring up the trap left in the clearing with Hastings’s body. I accuse her of trying to hurt Dalton, and she can’t resist that bait, saying it must have already been there, defending herself and thereby trapping herself.

By morning, the council has sent a plane to pick her up. Apparently, they don’t trust Dalton to get her out of Rockton alive. After that? Well, I don’t give a shit what happens to her after that. I cannot forgive her for what she did to Mick, to Jacob, to Diana, and, however inadvertently, to Dalton. And there’s hurt there, too, and I’ll let myself acknowledge that. She’d become a friend, and I do not understand what she did. I do not.

As for Anders, he’s fine. Physically, at least. The rest? That’s a little more complicated. The next morning, I wake in Dalton’s bed, and I lie there, trying to figure out how to tell him that the guy who saved his life is a killer who’s been informing on him.

When Dalton wakes, he pulls me to him for a kiss, but then stops, wincing at his shoulder wound, and I take advantage of that to wriggle away and prop up on my elbow.

“I need to tell you something about Will,” I say.

He shoots upright. “Did he get worse—?”

“No, I’m sure he’s fine. But … I found out something about him last night. That file Mick had on the people smuggled into Rockton … He’d stolen it from you but added an extra entry. On Will.”

Dalton goes quiet and rubs his mouth.

“You knew,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“He’s not in your book.”

“I got rid of the page a while ago, in case anyone found it. I’d have told you if I thought there was any chance he’d killed Abbygail and the others. Or if you got involved with him.”

“Okay.” I hesitate and say slowly, “You knew his backstory, but there’s more. In order to stay in Rockton, well, there was a price.”

“Informing on me.”

I blink at him. He shrugs. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? They let him in because they wanted leverage inside my department. Knowing who the spy is made it easier for me. I didn’t tell Will anything that I wouldn’t want getting back to them. I did give him some stuff that could get me in a bit of trouble, just to monitor. After about six months, he stopped passing that along, and that’s when I knew I could trust him. I still never gave him anything that could get me kicked out.”

“Which is why you told me to keep even the murder investigation between us.”

“Yep.”

I lie back on the pillow. He stays there, on his side, watching me as I stare at the ceiling.

“How do you deal with what he did?” I say finally. “How do you reconcile that?”

“I don’t.”

I look over at him.

“Something happened over there,” Dalton says. “In the war. All I know is that the guy who killed his commanding officer just sacrificed himself to save me. That’s the person I need to focus on.”


I expect any conversation with Anders will wait until he’s recovered. It doesn’t. He wants to talk to us, and Dalton realizes he’s not going to truly rest until he does. Dalton expects we’ll do this together. I refuse. He’s the one Anders has worked with for two years. Been friends with for two years. Betrayed for two years. That’s a conversation between them.

Dalton talks to him that afternoon. I go right after. I walk into Anders’s room, and I sit on the chair by the window, and I stare out of it. He just waits until I’m ready.

“I want to know why,” I ask.

“Why I shot my CO?” he asks, his voice low. “Or why I informed on Eric?”

The answer should be obvious. Why he murdered a man is far more important than how he wronged Dalton, but he knows which one I meant. And here is the truth of why this is so hard for me. Because it doesn’t matter if I only met Anders a few weeks ago. I know him, and he knows me.

That’s why nothing ever happened between us. I understood him, and so there wasn’t that thrill of fascination and discovery that I had with Dalton. I understood Anders, and that’s what twists in my gut now, because I want to say, in light of everything, that I obviously don’t understand him at all. Like in the forest, when I kept waiting for him to turn into something else, someone else. But he didn’t.

He did exactly what I expected of the man I’d come to know. He did exactly what I would have done.