“Yes. Another chance to prove yourself.”
By erasing her too.
Those four years of calling each otherdear. Of gifts to her family, visits to Boston, cocktails—all of it had led to this. What she’d done to Crystal.
Faraday was my creation.
“When do we stop killing people, cousin?”
“This part of our career has barely started,” he said. “Who knows?”
I knew. We’d been trained for so many particulars, but always with the same result. We were hammers in search of nails.
“I can’t.”
“If Elizabeth finds out we’ve covered up for some useless incorporated brat, what happens next?”
I could barely answer. “She’ll wonder what else we’re hiding.”
He reached out and touched my wet cheek. “And you can’t even hide your tears. She’ll wring everything out of you and kill every one of us.”
I stared at the blur of rain through the windshield, wondering when I’d started crying. “Cousin, I don’t know how I got this way. But it’s not something I chose. I woke up in the hospital, and it was a different world.”
“Sacrificing Faraday keeps the rest of us alive.”
“I know, but what if too much triage turns me back?”
We reached the next stoplight, and Sebastian turned to look at me—hard, the way Frankie did at poker games, trying to see inside. Trying to judge how far he could push me.
I looked back at him, not trying to hide.
When the light changed, he said, “Okay. We lie to the family.”
A mortal Morton sin.
“Thank you,” I said.
We drove in silence until the neon glare of the Motorway Inn appeared in the pulsing blur of the windshield. He drove past the entrance, pulling the car to the side of the road.
“How’d you know she was staying here?”
“No driver’s license.” Then it hit me. “Fuck—I asked the old guy at the front desk.”
Sebastian turned in the seat to face me. “Really, Jess?”
“I was wearing a KN-95 mask, a hat. I wasn’t planning on killing her!”
But killing was always in the cards. Blood was the mother of history.
“Well, if the police think it’s an accident, they won’t care that someone came looking for her.”
I nodded, and didn’t tell him about the $100 bill.
“One more thing,” he said. “What if this goes wrong?”
If a guest came out of their room and saw a body being dumped, it was run or kill them. And I was done with murder.
“We run,” I said. “Till we get somewhere the family can’t find us.”