“I want to see,” Laurel said. Her little fingers dug into my cheek, harder and harder. “The blood belongs to the Pythia. The blood belongs to Nine.”

“Look!” Sloane unwound her hands from the chains. She displayed her wrists for Laurel. “No more bracelets.”

There was a pause.

“No more game,” Laurel whispered. Her hand dropped to her side. She turned to me, her expression hopeful and childish and utterly unlike the one she’d worn a moment before. “Did I do good?” she asked.

You did so good, Cassie. I could hear my mom saying those words to me, a grin on her face when I’d correctly pegged the personalities of the family sitting next to us at a diner.

Sloane made an attempt at filling the silence. “There are seven wonders of the world, seven dwarfs, seven deadly sins, and seven different kinds of twins.”

“Seven!” Laurel tilted her head to the side. “I know seven.” She hummed something under her breath: a series of notes, varying rhythm, varying pitch. “That’s seven,” she told Sloane.

Sloane hummed the tune back to her. “Seven notes,” she confirmed. “Six of them unique.”

“Did I do good?” Laurel asked me a second time.

My heart constricted, and I wrapped my arms around her. You’re mine. My sister. My responsibility. No matter what they did to you—you’re mine.

“You know the number seven,” I murmured. “You did so good.” My voice caught in my throat. “But Laurel? You don’t have to play the game anymore. Not ever again. You don’t have to be Nine. You can just be Laurel, forever and ever.”

Laurel didn’t reply. Her gaze fixed on something over my right shoulder. I turned to see a little boy spinning his sister on the merry-go-round.

“The wheel is always turning,” Laurel murmured, her body going stiff. “Round and round…”

 

 

YOU

Soon.

Soon.

Soon.

Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.

 

 

My conversation with Laurel had told me two things. First, whatever sway or position my mother held over the Masters, she was still a captive. Her “bracelets” were proof enough of that. And second…

“The blood belongs to the Pythia.” I repeated my sister’s words out loud. “The blood belongs to Nine.”

“Knock, knock.” Lia had a habit of saying the words in lieu of actually knocking. She also didn’t bother to wait for a response before sauntering into the room I shared with Sloane. “A little birdie told me there was a seventy-two-point-three percent chance you needed a hug,” Lia said. She raked her gaze over my face. “I don’t do hugs.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Lie,” Lia replied immediately. “Care to try again?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that, after the debacle at Michael’s house, she probably wasn’t fine, either, but I had the good sense to know that pointing that out would not end well for me.

“You don’t do hugs,” I said instead. “What’s your official position on ice cream?”

Lia and I ended up on the roof, a carton of white chocolate raspberry between us.

“Do you want me to tell you that your mother is still the woman you remember?” Lia asked, leaning back against the window frame behind us.

If I asked her to, Lia would make that statement sound utterly believable. But I didn’t want her to lie to me. “Nightshade told us weeks ago that the Pythia leads the Masters in her child’s stead.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. “But Laurel said they chain her wrists.”

Part queen regent, part captive. Powerless and powerful. How long could a person withstand that kind of dichotomy before she did something—anything—to reclaim agency and control?

“My little sister calls shackles bracelets.” I stared straight ahead, my grip on the spoon in my hands tightening. “She thinks it’s a game. The game.”

I fell silent.

“Well, I’m not bored yet.” Lia waved her spoon at me, an imperious gesture that I should continue.

I did.

“It was like Laurel was two different people,” I finished several minutes later. “A little girl and…someone else.”

Something else.

“She dug her fingers into the side of my cheek hard enough to hurt. She said she wanted to see my blood. And then, once Sloane took the swing chains off her wrists, it was like a switch had been flipped. Laurel was a little kid again. She asked me…” The words stuck in my throat. “She asked me if she did good, like—”

“Like she was supposed to be utterly creepy and borderline psychotic on cue?” Lia offered. “Maybe she was.”

Lia had grown up in a cult. She’d told me once that someone used to give her presents for being a good girl. Beside me, she untied her ponytail, allowing her hair to flow free as she stretched her legs out toward the edge of the roof. Change in appearance, change in posture. I recognized Lia’s method of shedding emotions she didn’t want to feel.

“Once upon a time…” Lia’s voice was light and airy, “There was a girl named Sadie. She had lines to learn. She had a role. And the better she played it…” Lia gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Well, that’s a story for another time.”

Lia didn’t part with pieces of her past easily, and when she did, there was no way of telling if what she’d said was true. But I had gathered bits and pieces here and there—like the fact that her real name was Sadie.

Lines to learn, a role to play. I wondered what else Sadie and Nine had in common. I knew better than to profile Lia, but I did it anyway. “Whatever happened back then,” I said softly, “it didn’t happen to you.”

Lia’s eyes shone with a glint of emotion, like I was catching a glimpse of darkened water at the bottom of a mile-deep well. “That’s what Sadie’s mother used to tell her. Just pretend it’s not you.” Lia’s smile was sharp-edged and fleeting. “Sadie was good at pretending. She played the role. I was the one who learned how to play the game.”

For Lia, shedding her old identity was a way of reclaiming power. Her “game”—whatever it had entailed—probably bore little resemblance to the specifics of what my mother was going through now, what Laurel had been raised to view as normal. But there were enough similarities between the two situations to make me wonder if my mom had encouraged my little sister to draw a line between “Laurel” and “Nine.”