Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Is he okay? He’s not dead, is he?” I heard my mouth yelp, my voice two octaves too high and my eyes seemingly incapable of blinking. “He can’t be dead.”

Only there was a jewel-encrusted dagger sticking out of Allen Cross’s chest, and his eyes were open, glassy and lifeless, as they pointed toward the recessed lights in the ceiling. The shiny white room reeked of death, a tacky mix of blood, salt air, and sweat. I could taste it, or maybe I was chewing the inside of my cheek so hard my mouth was filling with my own blood.

“We didn’t want to do that.” Dad sounded like a boss during layoffs. We regret to inform you… Meanwhile, he was wiping his bloody hands on his already bloody shorts, and it was his death blow that put a dagger in a man’s chest.

“We tried to reason with him before you got here. That’s why we came,” Mom said. “Our intel was that you and Keira would be in Rio, and we wanted to intercept you. We wanted you nowhere near Paolo Striker, or whatever he’s calling himself.”

She sounded as if her explanation mattered. They’d just killed a man.

“Then you showed up with Marcus Rey.” My dad twisted the name like a curse. Marcus’s name. The boy lying in a hospital bed. One of the only people I had any faith in anymore. My dad was cursing him. “We knew about Antonio, and we had to get you away from those boys, that family. We thought we could get Cross to back off, to stay away from you, to stop this stupid plan of his…”

“But by the time we got here, Cross was already a bottle of scotch deep. He didn’t take it well when he learned what happened to your boyfriend.” Mom didn’t roll her eyes as she said the word, but she looked like she wanted to, like I’d picked a real winner.

Meanwhile, she strangled a man with a chair leg, a senior citizen with liver spots, a friend they’d cherished for decades, a man who put Christmas presents in my stocking. She was still wearing her heels. She was barely sweating. Her husband was wiping a murder weapon of his fingerprints, and her ex-lover held my sister hostage for months and left me to dig through her blood.

And she was criticizing me?

“Are you kidding me right now?” I screeched, baring my teeth. “Marcus was poisoned tonight! He’s hooked up to tubes right now! And you just murdered your best friend!”

“You don’t know the Reys. That entire family can burn for all I care.”

Her words hit me so hard I feared they’d leave a bruise. This woman gave birth to me, to my sister. These people raised me, for thirteen years at least. How had I not seen the Mommy Dearest in her or the Darth Vader in my father? In either of my fathers. For all the harping I did about my gut, about how I was the only one who knew Keira was alive, I was so completely wrong about them. My entire life. What else was I wrong about? What else had they done?

My mother seemed to recognize the light extinguishing in my eyes, the last flicker that believed in them. Immediately, she stepped toward me, a deep frown in her forehead.

I staggered back, not letting them close.

“The Reys conspired with Urban to have us killed back then,” she said. “They would have done it.”

“If you weren’t conspiring against them first!”

“Our problem with the Reys is long and complex.” Her look was severe, as if to highlight the understatement. “They know how much we hate them, which is why they loved sending us pictures of you sucking face with their son or them hugging you in the lobby…”

I huffed. That explained a lot. Cross always suspected those photos were going to my parents. I guess he was right. Too bad I couldn’t tell him. Because he was dead.

“If you say one more bad thing about Marcus, I will walk out that door, and you will never see me again.” My voice was calm and controlled as I made a promise I truly meant.

Marcus was alone right now, because I was here. With them. I had to pray he was still safely sleeping in his hospital bed. I had to pray he was okay. Because I was busy confronting my non-dead parents who just murdered our now-dead ally.

“You’re right. We were wrong.” Dad shot my mother a worried look. “This isn’t what we wanted to happen. This isn’t how we planned to see you again. You and your sister were all we thought about in prison. Keeping you safe. Getting out to see you. We’ve missed you.”

I shook my head in disbelief, not allowing his words to land. “You’ve done nothing to give me that impression.”

“We never wanted you to pay for our crimes. We wanted you to have a life outside of this business. That’s why we left, and that’s why we tried to cooperate with the CIA. It was so hard to walk away.” A dangerous piece of me wanted to hear the regret in his voice, wanted to see the way his eyes drooped, the way his shoulders slumped. He looked so much like Keira in that moment.

“This plan of Cross’s, running around after the children of our enemies. It was going to get you killed. It’s why we had to intervene now. For you,” explained my mother, her eyes softening. “This is too much for you to handle on your own. It should never have been put on your shoulders. We thought leaving would prevent this very thing.”

My hands quivered at my sides, a burn scorching from my gut all the way to my eyes. No, no, no. They don’t mean it…

“We should have done things differently. We should have protected you more,” my father insisted, slipping a key into the shackles on my wrists, trying to release me, trying to get me to let go.

I thought back to the cemetery, their names on the tombstones, the anniversaries of their deaths, the constant fights with my sister, the battles with social services. The depression. The grief. The isolation of a girl with no parents. “Do you have any idea what you put us through?”

“We are so sorry,” Dad finally offered.

“We truly are, darling. I am so sorry,” Mom agreed.

There it was. The apology I was long overdue, the remorse that was owed to me, and it changed nothing. I didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel relief or closure or forgiveness. The hole inside of me was still fresh. Turned out “I’m sorry” couldn’t bring back my parents. The mom and dad I loved were still gone. The people in front of me now were strangers wearing their bodies as suits.

“Did you ever love us?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“Of course!”

“Yes!” they answered together.

“Then how could you let this happen to us?” I sniffled, trying so hard to hold in the tears, not give them another piece of me, but it was so hard. There was no emotional dam large enough to keep back the flood of being hit with my dead parents come back to life.

My mom and dad shared a look, then tentatively moved toward me, slowly at first, then in three huge steps. They wrapped me in a hug, four arms squeezing me tight, two faces pressing into my hair. “We love you, sweetheart,” they both whispered. “We love you so much. We do. We promise we do.”

That was when I lost it. I sobbed. It all came out. All the hatred I had for their betrayal, all the grief I had in their absence, all the fear I’d had for my sister, and all the love I had for my family. Something inside me fractured, wracking my body. I couldn’t stop crying.

And they didn’t ask me to.

They held me tighter, nuzzled me closer, and I breathed in their scent. My parents. They didn’t smell like soap or perfume, nor lotion or laundry. They smelled like them. A distinct aroma that I hadn’t inhaled since March eighth, the night they left us. It was the scent of their skin, the smell of their sweat; it was them. It was everything. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened to their whispers promising it would all work out, we’d be okay, they were back, and it was okay now. We were all right.

Then I opened my eyes and saw the dead body lying on the ground.

This wasn’t all right.

I pulled away, stepping back from them, wiping my eyes, my nose. My one-shouldered dress was too snug to serve as a handkerchief, and my father’s shirt was currently being used as a tourniquet to stop his bleeding leg.

Everything was not fine.

I gestured to Cross’s lifeless body. “He was grieving for his wife, and you killed him.”

“He came at us with a knife. You saw that,” Mom said.

“Because you killed his wife.”

“She was sick,” Dad maintained.

“You said that, but you don’t get to make those decisions. You don’t pick whose lives are expendable and who should pay for what crimes. Your choices affect people; they affect me. Horribly.” I laid it out, and for once, I heard how closely I had followed in their footsteps. I was playing God. I was running our band of misfits. I was forcing my plans on everyone. I insisted we come here. And now Marcus was lying in a hospital.

“We never wanted you mixed up in any of this.” The new crow’s feet around his eyes deepened. It was a new look, one I wasn’t familiar with, maybe desperation?

“You should have thought about us before you became criminals. You chose this life. It didn’t find you; it didn’t happen beyond your control. You started Department D.” I couldn’t absolve them of the crimes they actively, willingly committed. “You could’ve gotten out after you had kids. You could have thought about Keira and me at any point, but you didn’t. You got out because your lives were being threatened. You were thinking about you.”

It was the simple truth, and we all knew it. It was why the shackles stayed on my wrists, why I’d never be free of this. They put them there. They bound my hands, my future, with lies. No amount of I’m Sorrys could undo that.

“Let us make it up to you.” His speech was accelerating, like he could see my back turning to them. “Whatever you think about what we did, crimes we committed decades ago, you have to know this—we did not kidnap your sister, and we did not kill your friend Tyson.”

“Then who did?” I cut in, realizing that there were still so many questions they hadn’t answered. If they wanted forgiveness, they could start there.

My dad sighed so heavily I felt the temperature in the room change, chill. “We don’t know for sure.” He shook his head in embarrassment. “We know Urban took your sister, but your friend…”

“It’s either Urban or the Reys,” Mom finished for him. “Our money is on the Reys, after this stunt they pulled with Antonio. It’s why you need to get away from those boys.”

My jaw set. “Do you really think…you have any say…in who I date?” I bit off the words.

“It’s not that. It’s for your safety,” Dad said.

“Come with us,” Mom blurted, like it was time to skip to the end.

“What?” I was certain I’d heard her wrong.

“Allen was right about one thing,” she insisted. “Department D, the Reys, Randolph, they’re never going to stop coming after you and your sister. Not now. Not when they know we’re back, when they think they can use you to get to us, like they used Allen’s wife to get to him.”

I knew this already. It was why I was collecting Dresden Kids like trading cards. A lot of good that does me.

“You know that the evidence you acquired from those kids is false,” Mom went on, hearing my thoughts. “They’re setting us up. Randolph and the Reys realize that Department D is tumbling down, that the CIA is too close, that too many innocents know the truth, so they’re doing damage control. They’ve become their own client. They’ve started to manipulate the evidence, point everything at us, pin every crime, the entire organization on us, so they can walk away free and clear. You saw that news article in Boston, didn’t you?”

She tilted her head, knowing the answer. Department D planted the story in the Boston Tattler to make my family look bad—Keira and me included. The smear campaign had begun.

“That article makes me look guilty,” I growled. “It makes it look like I did something to my sister.”

“And it’s only going to get worse,” Dad said. “That was the tip of Phase One.”

“Unless we stop them,” Mom continued.

“Come with us. Let’s do this together.” Dad stood in front of me like he was offering me a free trip around the world, like I should say thank you and write their names in a gratitude journal. “Let’s bring down Department D. Our way. No CIA, no high school kids. Let’s show them how powerful the Phoenixes really are. Together.”

I half expected a locker room full of football players to burst into applause. This is our time! This is our house! We must defend it! Go team!

Only I wasn’t inspired. I was barely standing. There was a body on the marble floor. They killed a man who had sacrificed so much to help them over the years, and they killed his wife. Yet they were asking for my loyalty, my trust? But…they were also the strongest, most informed allies we’d ever get. And they were my parents. They were back. They were alive. Could I really close the door and act like that didn’t matter to me? Like I didn’t care if someone really killed them this time?

They watched as I warred with myself, my mind changing with every breath.

Then my phone rang in my pocket.

I pulled it out like I was yanking a lifeline.

It was the hospital. Marcus.