Tourmaline woke, leaving behind hazy dreams of the conscript to blink in the face of a stone-cold-sober reality and a shrilly ringing phone.

Anna May.

“What?” she croaked.

“I thought you were coming to church. We were going to do lunch afterward,” Anna May said, sounding disgustingly chipper and faintly irritated.

Tourmaline dropped back into her pillow.

“Remember, we made plans last night?”

She tried to think, but couldn’t remember anything except that Alvarez was back, Wayne was after her, and she liked a man her dad was going to kill. She might as well have woken up without a driver’s license and with her algebra homework undone for all the ways she felt fourteen again. “I have a migraine,” she managed. At least it was true.

“Oh-kay,” Anna May said.

“I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

“I’m sorry,” Tourmaline said, but Anna May had already hung up.

Rain fell in sheets outside the window. She crawled out of bed and went into the hall, calling through the house as she stumbled toward the kitchen. But all stayed silent. Shadowed. Had Dad even come home? When did he start considering her old enough to be left alone?

Putting her hand over her face, she tried to think beyond the building waves of pain in her head. She was eighteen. He trusted her to be at home and be okay with it. He was probably at Jason’s. She was eighteen. She was in control. The sound of the rain pricked her as if it were hitting under her skin, and she dropped her hand, squinting in the dim light to start a pot of coffee and retrieve her phone.

She found her father’s text. He hadn’t come home. He said he was at Jason’s. She tried to believe him, not to think of the blonde.

Rain drummed a steady beat on the roof, dripping thin rivulets down the glass door. She didn’t wait for the coffee to finish brewing before pouring herself a mug and popping a Tylenol. Sitting cross-legged at the table, she dropped her face into the steam coming off her coffee, basking in the warmth as she looked at the texts from Anna May asking where she’d gone the night before and whether she needed anything.

Erasing all the messages, she closed her eyes. Wayne. Alvarez. Mom. The conscript. All of it too big and too much to contain as it drilled out through her temple.

A low rumble of thunder echoed in the empty kitchen, and the sound sent a new wave of pain cutting through her brain so profoundly that she didn’t hear the knock on the door until it had faded. Frowning, Tourmaline looked up from the blinking cursor and stared at the door.

Whoever it was knocked again.

A wild hope that it was the conscript shot through her body. That he’d be standing outside on her step in the rain in that black T-shirt, looking down on her, gaze flickering between her mouth and her eyes. For a moment the thought almost expunged the pain of her headache. But it couldn’t be him. That would be insane.

Drawing a deep breath to calm her skittering heartbeat and quell the hope, Tourmaline dropped the phone and ran for the door.

A man stood on the step, tucking himself under the eaves to stay out of the rain. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his face was slick with a thin sheen of rain. He wasn’t familiar.

She had wanted it to be the conscript, but she hadn’t known just how much until he wasn’t there. Frowning, she spoke behind the mostly closed door. “Sorry, my dad’s not home right now.”

“Tourmaline Harris?”

She narrowed her eyes. The only people who came looking for her made her want to never be found.

“Do you have a minute?”

“What do you want?”

He looked surprised at her tone, but his expression smoothed instantly. “We can talk out here. It’ll just take a second.”

She opened the screen door and slid outside. Wary. The throbbing in her head faded behind razor-edge alertness. Who was this? What did he want?

The concrete step was damp under her bare feet, and she kept one hand resting on the edge of the doorframe, prepared at a moment’s notice to hop back into the house and lock the door.

“I’m Special Agent Tom Mitchell, FBI.” He held out his hand. She noticed the badge on his belt.

Her blood went to ice. A federal agent? She swallowed. Stared. The air had been all sucked out of the rainy summer morning. After Mom, it was hard enough to see the security guard at school. And with Alvarez back . . . This couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?

Tourmaline blinked, searching his face for anything to trigger her memory. It wasn’t there, but countless memories she’d wanted to put away forever waited in its place. “Are you here about Wayne?”

He dropped his hand and tilted his head. “Who?”

“Wayne Thompson. The guy whose heroin my mom got busted for? Just released? Any of this ringing any bells?”

“I’m not familiar with your mom’s case beyond the basics. That’s not really why I’m here.”

Of course not. She tightened her jaw and looked away. Even though she’d known better, disappointment pitched deep in her stomach. As if she’d expected something different after everything that had happened.

“I’m sure you’re aware this area has been going through some difficulties with heroin. Your mom.” He dipped his head in acknowledgment of the ribbon of sticky black highway that had claimed her mom. “With the interstates right here, it’s becoming more and more of a problem. I’m here—” He paused, and then corrected. “The FBI is here, as part of a special task force combating the trafficking and distribution of heroin.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

He paused again, as if weighing his answer. “It doesn’t. Per se.”

She gave him a cold look, putting her hand on the screen door to threaten going back inside.

“Maybe it does. Does it?” he asked.

That her mother was an addict did not mean she’d know all about heroin use in southwestern Virginia. “What are you saying?” But it clicked as the words left her mouth.

He was here for the Wardens. For Dad. Because he thought they were doing something with heroin.

Hayes’s warning bell tripped again. You have to start paying attention to the things around you.

He looked past her, as if scanning the house and barn and committing it all to memory. “Maybe your dad’s club needed a way to make money, and your mom got caught up in a wave a lot of folks are finding themselves in? A casualty of war. I spent eight years with the Pagans. Similar kind of thing.”

She swallowed. “The Wardens aren’t that kind of club. You think my dad would have anything to do with that after watching my mother?”

He looked into her eyes then, a sad smile pulling on his mouth, as if he were watching something he’d seen before and he knew how it would go. “I’ve seen a lot of girls like you. Saying that same thing. Wives. Girlfriends. Daughters. It’s not even that you’re lying, either . . .” He shrugged, a terrible kind of sadness still creased on his face.

Heat bloomed in her cheeks—anger and embarrassment mixing as the thought occurred to her that maybe, maybe, she was a fool here as well. That she didn’t really know. That the warnings she should have been listening to were these. But the thought was so sickening and terrible she immediately shook her head.

She wasn’t. She knew. This was all just a game to make her do what they wanted. She wasn’t about to fall for it again. “Outsider’s misconception,” she said coldly, jumping back inside. “Have a good day, now.”

The man shoved his boot into the door before she could close it.

Her heart quickened, but she glared at him as if he didn’t outweigh her by a hundred pounds and a shiny brass badge.

“I can help you,” he said. “We can talk about your mom. Talk about her sentence.”

“That’s what they always say,” she snapped, struggling to smash his foot in the door. “Until you’re sitting in a courtroom finding out they lied. I’ve had help before. I’m good for a lifetime.”

“I’m not accusing your dad of anything. I’m just trying to sort out what’s true and what’s not. Let me just . . .” He dug in his pocket and produced a business card. “Here. In case there’s anything you think might help. Or even if you need something. Anything.”

She clenched her jaw and ignored the card, pressing the door harder on his wedged foot.

He grimaced. “Just in case.” Picking up her wrist, he shoved the card into her limp hand, and with a quick tug, pulled out of the door.

Tourmaline flipped the dead bolt and watched him leave from the window, only turning away when his black Suburban disappeared down the driveway.

The card was still in her hand. Thick paper with his name and number on it. A tiny FBI seal in raised ink. She thumbed over the seal, the edges on her skin turning to pain inside her head. The truth was not what he wanted. No one wanted the truth.

Maybe not even her.

You can’t claim you didn’t know.

No. She couldn’t think like this.

In her room, she shoved the card deep in her nightstand and burrowed back under the covers. The ceiling stared back at her.

That guy—the agent—he was wrong. The CO was wrong. Virginia was wrong.

She’d know.

Tourmaline kept repeating it to herself, staring at the ceiling, head throbbing. But the more she repeated it, the less she believed. It slipped out from her fingers like a flower-painted porcelain teacup she’d taken from her granny’s hutch, something she wanted so desperately to return untouched to its shelf; but she felt it slip through her fingers as she stumbled on the way back. Belief. Shattering.

Maybe she didn’t know.

Tourmaline closed her eyes, falling into the depths of the pain in her head, and somewhere inside her circling thoughts she landed, half dreaming and half remembering her sixteenth birthday.

Mom had called from prison, Dad had gotten her a cake, and they ate it alone. No Wardens. No Mom.

That afternoon, Dad had been outside with a few Wardens, and she went out the way she normally would—seeking out warmth like a stray kitten, content to curl up in some cozy corner of the garage and be around people she knew when the rest of her life was foreign.

Dad had turned when they saw her coming.

She’d given a tiny wave-shrug and ducked her head.

He’d not smiled as deeply. But she only saw that now.

Turning his shoulder, he’d stepped in front of her and not acknowledged her.

She had been in her own world, not his, so it wasn’t something to take much note of, and she’d pulled her hands out of her jacket pockets to sit on his bike.

It was the same thing she’d done since he first put her there as a baby. Propping her up in his lap for Mom to take a picture. Lifting her up on her own when she was older, and telling her not to get fingerprints on the gas tank. Taking her for rides as she clutched the middle of the handlebars and laughed at the wind in her face. She sat quietly. Pretending to ride. Pulling the bike off the kickstand to test the heavy weight while Dad wasn’t watching. The conversation had been boring—just the soothing backing track to a life she remembered having before her mother had left. The sun was setting. The dogwood was losing its blooms.

The wind had gusted. She remembered because it took her hair and pulled it out behind her in the spring sunshine, and she’d opened her mouth to taste the hints of melting ice and mountain snow still left as the wind poured off the ridge.

And she remembered because that was when Dad’s hand had fallen gently on her shoulder.

She blinked and looked up. They all stood there quiet. Serious. No one really looking at her.

“Go inside, Tourmaline,” Dad had said softly. “And stay there.”

Her face had burned with the kind of embarrassment that she could still feel now, half asleep in an empty house with a summer rain on the roof. It was the kind of embarrassment everyone seemed to understand except her, which made it all the more embarrassing. She’d wanted to cry, right there, right then, but she’d gotten good at holding back tears.

Biting the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood, she’d stood off the bike, lifted her chin, and walked inside. Searching: trying and failing to see what she’d done. She’d never been sent away like that . . . not by her father. And the thought consumed her, choking her, that she’d done something horribly wrong and hadn’t known, while everyone else did.

Inside the house, she’d slammed her bedroom door and screamed. A scream she half hoped they’d all hear, standing out in the driveway in a place she couldn’t be.

But if they heard, Dad never mentioned it.

She’d caught sight of herself then, in the dark. In the single beam of pale spring sunshine that clung to her room when the sun had dipped beyond the window. In that pale silver light, her eyes were angry and heavy with unshed tears, and her cheeks flushed. Her body had gathered a woman’s sway to meet the road in front of it. And she’d looked . . .

Like her mother. Her mother, the Queen. Not her mother, the fallen. Like the wild woman who had both laughed and kissed with abandon. The one who had danced on the borders of everything. Where Dad and the rest of the Wardens were lesser gods, crawling on their knees to pay tribute to her hold on the fates. But that woman didn’t exist anymore, just the space she’d once occupied. That Queen had faded away to sit in United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, while Tourmaline screamed because she was alone and cut off from all she’d ever known of love and family, trying to hold the echoing space her mother had once inhabited without having any understanding of what that role entailed.

Tourmaline could see now what had happened.

She began to see it soon after that day—laid bare in the strange men she passed. But then, slowly, she saw it even in the Wardens—even the ones who understood, without Dad to remind them, that she was still a child. It was in their eyes. It was in the way they smiled—finding some joy she didn’t understand when they looked at her. A joy sometimes complex. Sometimes simple enough to make her sick.

And she knew that they knew.

Thou shalt not . . . That was when she discovered that law: when it applied to her. That was when she discovered it wasn’t her world; she just lived in it.

The rain drummed harder. Tourmaline blinked at the ceiling, reaching for sleep but fighting it all the same. She should text Dad and tell him about Wayne. Her hand pushed out, groping for the phone, but the movement sent a heavy wave of drumming pain behind her eyes. She tried to lift her head, but the white walls seemed so bright and searing that she quickly gave up.

What if she was wrong?

About everything.

Virginia would know. Virginia was the kind of girl who would know the answer to these questions.

Finding the phone, she forced her eyes open, texting Virginia to ask whether she was busy. But the pain in her head twisted and sharpened, as if there really stood a creature on her chest, gleefully poking its razored fingers in and out of her skull. And the only way to get out from under the creature was to give in to the darkness.