The man stared at and into Shane for a moment or two and then bowed his head. “We must be going.”

“We’re about three seconds away from Draco Malfoy over there throwing a punch,” Michael said, his voice low. “Three…two…”

Shane punched the man. As the cult leader wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand, he looked at Shane and smiled.

It didn’t take Agent Sterling long to dig up information on Serenity Ranch. The man in charge was named Holland Darby. He’d been investigated by local authorities dozens of times going back more than thirty years, but no proof of wrongdoing had ever been established.

The earliest complaints dated to the establishment of the Serenity Ranch commune on the outskirts of Gaither more than three decades earlier. According to the files Agent Sterling had acquired, Holland Darby was a collector of drifters and strays, but over the years, he’d wooed more than a few young, impressionable locals to his side, too. Never anyone under the age of eighteen. Never any males.

That told me what I needed to know about Holland Darby. You dot your I’s and cross your T’s. If you harbored minors, you could run afoul of the law, and whatever you’re doing out at Serenity Ranch, the last thing you want is cops on your property. Your followers include both men and women, but when it comes to locals, you prefer females—the younger, the better, so long as they’re legal.

“He brought Melody to town as a test.” Lia’s tone gave no clue to the fact that this was personal to her, that Holland Darby had raised memories she kept buried deep. “Darby wanted Shane to see his sister. He wanted Melody to make it clear that they are her family now.”

The less contact Melody has with her family, the easier she is to manipulate, but the more times she looks them in the eyes and chooses you, the more certain she’ll be that they won’t forgive her. That they can’t forgive her, and that even if she wanted to leave Serenity Ranch, she could never go home.

“Clearly,” Lia said, standing up, “the Gaither Hotel is only passingly familiar with proper air-conditioning.” She pulled her hair back and off her neck. “I’m going to change into something cooler.”

Lia’s expression dared us to argue that her need for a wardrobe change had nothing to do with the temperature. Beside me, Michael watched her walk away. No matter how good she was at hiding her emotions, he was better at reading them. He knows what you’re feeling. You know that he knows.

After another moment, Michael followed her into the bedroom. I could see exactly how this was going to play out—the push and pull between them, Michael trying to bring her emotions to the surface, Lia throwing the fiasco with Celine in his face.

“I believe,” Sloane said, filling the silence, “that there is approximately an eighty-seven percent chance that Michael and Lia will end up making out or otherwise engaged in acts of physical—”

“Let’s turn our attention back to the case,” Agent Sterling cut in. “Shall we?” She fell into lecture mode. “There were dozens of complaints filed about Serenity Ranch when Holland Darby first began buying up large chunks of property on the outskirts of town thirty-three years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the complaints were baseless or manufactured—no one wanted drifters, runaways, and former drug addicts taking up residence on what used to be family farms.” Agent Sterling set those complaints aside and opened the thickest file. “Approximately nine months after the establishment of Serenity Ranch, the local sheriff’s department opened up an investigation of the group’s involvement in the murders of Anna and Todd Kyle.”

“Nightshade’s parents?” I asked. Sterling nodded. For the next hour, she, Dean, Sloane, and I pieced through every bit of evidence the investigation had managed to obtain.

It wasn’t much.

At the time of the murders, Anna and Todd Kyle were a young married couple with a nine-year-old son. Anna’s father, Malcolm Lowell, lived with them. Reading between the lines, I inferred that Malcolm was the one with money—the one who’d owned the house, the one who’d refused to sell his land to Holland Darby when the interloper was buying up all of their neighbors’. There had been some kind of altercation involving the two men. Words were exchanged. Threats were implied.

And that night, someone had broken into Malcolm Lowell’s house, butchered his daughter and son-in-law, and viciously attacked Malcolm, stabbing him seventeen times and leaving him to bleed out on the floor. According to the police report, nine-year-old Mason had been home the whole time.

Did you hear them screaming? Did you hide? The old woman at the diner had said that most people in Gaither believed that Mason Kyle had seen his parents murdered, but the report gave no such indication.

Malcolm—Nightshade’s grandfather—was the one who had called 911. By the time medical assistance had arrived, he had been holding on to his life by a thread. The old man survived. His daughter and son-in-law had not. In the aftermath of the attack, Malcolm Lowell had been unable to provide a physical description of his attacker, but suspicion had fallen almost immediately on the occupants of Serenity Ranch.

“I’ve been working on a time line.” Sloane had made use of the hotel’s complimentary notepad, ripping out page after page and laying them along the floor, scrawling a note on each. She pointed to the leftmost one. “Thirty-three years ago, Holland Darby establishes his commune on the outskirts of town. Less than a year after that, Anna and Todd Kyle are murdered. Twenty-seven years ago, the poison Master who would eventually go on to choose Nightshade as his apprentice killed nine people, completing his initiation into the Masters’ ranks.”

I followed the logic of Sloane’s calculation: Nightshade had completed his initiation kills six years earlier. The cult operated on a twenty-one-year cycle. Ergo, the poison Master before Nightshade had been initiated two to three years after Anna and Todd Kyle had been murdered.

What’s the connection?

“Scenario one,” I said. “The Master who eventually trained Nightshade as his apprentice lived in Gaither during the time of the murders. We know the Masters favor Pythias who have violence and abuse in their past—it’s possible a similar criteria is used in the selection of killers.” I closed my eyes for a moment and let the logic take hold. “The previous Master knew what Mason had seen and survived, and marked him for recruitment.”