Cass’s body collapsed instantly, dead weight. The mist of blood hung in the air longer, drifting down with the rain as the gunshot faded. A scream lodged in my closed-off throat.

Cody lowered the gun.

He turned toward me.

“She was a monster,” he said, but the words didn’t penetrate at first. I was still in the moment of the gunshot.

I took a startled breath. I wrenched my gaze away from Cass’s body, tried to think through the fog of horror. My mind was filled with the image of the instant the bullet struck. The look on her face—she hadn’t even had time to be surprised.

“Yes. She was,” I croaked out. She was a monster. She was my best friend. She was dead on the ground and the dirt was stained dark beneath her.

“She hurt you. It was her all along. She did that to you. All that blood—how could she do that to you?” he asked, face contorted in disgust.

I worked my throat, trying to speak. “You saved me,” I whispered.

I saw it: The way I lived. The way I walked out of these woods. He didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted absolution. He wanted me to kiss his brow and tell him that I understood, that I would keep my silence, that I would save him the way he had saved me.

“You saved my life. Just like you saved me from Oscar. You’ve always been my protector,” I told him, getting slowly to my feet.

I slipped my feet out of my high heels. The tarp was cold and slick under the soles of my feet. Cass’s body lay only a few feet from where I stood. Blood still bubbled from the ragged hole beneath her chin. “Cass did this. She did all of it, but you stopped her. Do you understand?”

It took him a moment. There were freckles of blood on the knuckles of the hand that held the gun. He stared at them. “We could pin it on her.”

“She could have killed Liv. And when I found out, she was going to kill me. But you stopped her. It all fits. Simple. She’s the one who put all of this in motion. You were as much her victim as anyone,” I said. Cass’s hand shivered with the last electrical pulses of a dying body, but she was gone—her eyes empty, her blood stilled. It was just the two of us, and the gun.

He closed his eyes. His breath plumed in the air, and for a moment I could feel it, the fantasy shared between us—that we would walk out of here, and everything would be okay.

Then Cody shuddered and opened his eyes, and I saw the moment the fantasy shattered. The moment he realized that he couldn’t protect both me and himself, and made his choice. “Naomi,” he said softly. “I wish I didn’t know what a liar you are.”

I had lived twenty years and change in a body that knew how to survive when the world turned against it. All the sights and the sounds and the sensations of that day were a hopeless slurry, but survival—that, my body remembered. Without the confusion of hope and trust to muddle things, it remembered it perfectly.

I launched myself off the tree before he finished talking, knocking into him. He went sprawling in the dirt. I scrambled forward, clawing the ground before getting my feet under me.

I ran straight forward, not daring to spend the time to turn back toward the road. Distance would save me. Handguns aren’t accurate at long range. Not in the hands of an unskilled shooter. Not with the evening darkness gathering swiftly around us.

Fifty yards and I’d be safe, I told myself, and I knew these woods. Just run.

The first shot hit a tree trunk with an explosion of bark. The second zipped somewhere overhead.

The third shot was the lucky one.

People always asked me what it felt like to get stabbed. Turned out it felt a lot like getting shot. The impact first, not the pain, a punch to the back that took my legs out from under me. I collapsed as Cody tramped toward me. I lay still, facedown. It didn’t hurt. Adrenaline, I thought. The adrenaline was masking it. The pain would find me soon. It knew me too well not to find me. But maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe it wouldn’t have time.

Cody reached me. He stood over me, panting. “Goddammit, Naomi,” he said. He knelt down and grabbed my shoulder. I held my breath, which was easier than breathing, anyway. I didn’t like what that said about what the bullet might have hit.

I stayed limp as he flipped me over.

“Fuck,” he said. There were tears in his voice. It was getting harder to hold on to the world. I risked opening my eyes to slits. He was looking away, wiping at his face with his sleeve.

“Dammit,” he whispered again.

He was crouching down. The gun was in his right hand, resting on his knee. His grip on it was loose. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to leave without making sure that I was dead. And the pain was coming now, around the edges of that blessed numbness that the galloping adrenaline brought with it.

I had nothing left in this world. Not one thing to fight for. Nothing except myself.

It was enough. Somehow, it was enough.

I pushed myself up from the ground, and with the movement came the pain at last, roaring in as blood gushed from the hole the bullet had bored through me. Cody jerked. The moment of shock was all I had—and all I needed. I wrapped both hands around the gun and twisted as he lifted it to fire again.

The bullet ripped through my fingers and tore through the meat of Cody’s leg. Blood burst in a mist; I could feel it on my eyelids, taste it on my tongue. Cody screamed. So did I, a strangled yell as agony ripped its way up my arm. But the pain was mine, and it was proof that I wasn’t dead, so it didn’t slow me. I rolled. Shoved myself up on my elbows.

I half crawled, half staggered away as Cody howled in pain. I didn’t look back. I shoved the bloodied stumps of my ring and pinky fingers against my opposite arm and held my forearm tight to my body to stop the bleeding as best I could, and I barreled forward. It felt more like falling than running.

I plunged through the trees. The boulder was up ahead. I veered for it. I knew where it was without thinking. Without having to look. That dark mouth had been calling to me for twenty-two years. I had forgotten how to listen, that was all. I had forgotten the sound of her voice, but it was all around me now. In me.

The Goddess of oblivion was calling me home.

The darkness of the cave welcomed me. I slung myself beneath the stone and scraped at the soft mud behind me to obscure the slick of blood I left. Gravity won out over my failing strength and I slid down the small slope, coming to a rest on my side, staring at Persephone’s bones.

I could hear Cody moving. Limping along. He called my name. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to have left a trail of blood. He could follow it if he saw it. But I hadn’t told him about the boulder. I hadn’t told him about the cave. He might not know.

He might not know, and so I would be able to die here, die with the bones of another lost girl. And we would rest, shrouded, together.

“He killed you,” I whispered. He hadn’t meant to. It didn’t matter. He’d let her die and he’d let her be lost, all these years. The secret had stayed lodged under his skin like a splinter, and infection had festered around it. Until we found it, and pricked our fingertips with that diseased bit of wood, and the infection had entered our blood as well. Had wrapped our lives around these bones and wrapped Liv’s fingers around the knife.

That secret had driven the knife into my back. It should have killed me. Cody had no idea as he wept over my bleeding body that he’d set this in motion. Not until Liv’s guilt had driven her to go digging for that splinter, that secret, slicing open the silence. All that pus and rot came spilling out, and the secret had killed her, too.

And there were other infections, too, all spreading from that first push, the crack of Jessi’s skull against the rock.

Ethan, growing up knowing that his father was condemned for the wrong reasons, unable to bring himself to admit to either truth: the one that would have freed his father or the one that would have put him away years before. That might have saved some of those girls whose names he carried now, a talisman of his guilt.

Marcus and Kimiko, gripped with fear that they hadn’t done enough to protect Liv. That the truth would come out—or that it wouldn’t, and she would hurt someone else, and it would all be for nothing.

And Jessi’s niece. The real Persephone. Not a goddess. Not bones in a cave. Not a story we’d told, but a girl who’d loved her aunt, and who missed her. Who’d never known what had happened so that she could properly grieve.

A mistake had killed Jessi Walker. Silence had killed Liv. And the truth had killed me now. And I would be lost, too. There was no one left who knew where Persephone’s bones lay. And that seemed right. I wanted to stay here forever with her. The seventh ritual. Everything would be in balance again.

But if I was lost, Marcus and Kimiko would never know that it hadn’t been Liv’s fault. I needed to tell them.

Cody’s calls were moving away. He’d lost my trail. He’d backtrack soon, but I might have a few minutes first.

My phone was a hard lump against my thigh. I pulled it out and squinted at it, the screen blurring. There was the tiniest shred of signal. I stabbed at the screen, managed to pull up the last number dialed. Ethan. I couldn’t hold the phone up anymore. I pressed the button to call and let my arm drop, holding it propped on the ground beside my ear.

It rang twice, and then Ethan answered. His voice dipped in and out, and I couldn’t tell if it was the poor signal or unconsciousness grasping at me.

“—there? Hello?”

“You have to tell them,” I said. There was blood in the back of my throat; I coughed on it.

“Naomi? Is that you?”

“Listen. Listen.” I swallowed against the blood. “Tell them it wasn’t Liv. She didn’t do it. You have to tell them.” I tried to take a breath and choked, and a whine of pain slipped between my teeth. Ethan was talking but I couldn’t understand the words. I hadn’t explained properly, but I couldn’t think of how to tell him what he needed to know. “I have to go now,” I said.

“Naomi, don’t hang up. Tell me where you are,” Ethan said.

“It’s okay. She’s here with me,” I said. I let go of the phone; it tumbled from my fingers.

I pulled myself closer to the bones and rolled over onto my back. I shut my eyes and saw again the image of Cody above me as the pain in my back began to register. The way he’d knelt over me, horrified, grief-stricken. Like it was a thing that had happened to him.

His face swam. Blurred. Other memories crowded it. Oscar’s fingers dug into my abdomen. “You and me were meant to be,” he crooned. His fingers punched through my skin, wriggling in my innards. Then he yelped as Cody pulled him away, was kneeling over me again, face streaked with tears. Young again.

“No, please no,” he said, pawing at my neck. “Please don’t be dead.” I tried to tell him I was alive, but I didn’t believe it. My fingers curled against the bark. His face hardened. “I wish I didn’t know what a liar you are,” he said, and drove a knife into my cheek.

I writhed in pain. My breath rattled, and there was a slurping feeling every time I gasped. The stones above me fractured into light-dappled branches.

“What are you doing?” Cassidy screamed, her young voice high and furious.

“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” Olivia chanted.

“We have to! You promised!” Cassidy yelled.

The knife flashed. I raised a hand to ward it off, striking out weakly at the person looming over me, but a firm hand caught my wrist and held it. “It’s okay. We’ve got you. She’s down here!”

Memory ceded reluctantly to the present. Cass’s hand, Cody’s, Oscar’s—they collapsed into reality, brown skin and a solid grip.

I blinked blearily up at Officer Bishop. “I’m starting to think I should have just arrested you,” she told me. She pressed her palms to my abdomen, sending a fresh wave of pain through me. I coughed and tasted copper.

I had to tell her about Cody. I tried to speak, but I only coughed again, and she shushed me.

“Just keep breathing,” she told me. “Just stay awake and keep breathing. You’re going to be okay.”

For once, I didn’t mind being lied to.