I felt them then—the snakes.
Not real ones, but real enough.
Phantom scales sliding up my ankles, coiling around my calves, slithering higher. They wrapped around my thighs, my waist, squeezed my ribs until breathing hurt.
Tons of them.
Their tongues flicked against my ears, hissing secrets I couldn't understand.
We're everywhere. We're everyone. You'll never find us all.
I shuddered.
Hiro looked up from his phone. "Reo's personally grabbing the Eyes now with two men.”
“He’s leaving Kenji alone with the Scales?”
“His Fangs are in there.” Hiro put his phone up. “Once they have the Eyes, Reo will have a Fang check their movements in the footage to see if anything's been strange."
"Shit." I pressed my palm against my chest, trying to slow my racing heart. "This is insane."
"But good too."
I blinked. "How is this good?"
Hiro's smile was sharp—the smile of a predator who'd just caught a scent. "You're helping us catch snakes. Enough snakes will help us catch the Fox."
"How?"
"Once we trap all of them and put them in the prison my brother has below the mansion—" He paused, letting the weight of that settle. "Reo, Kenji, and I will have a verylengthyconversation with all of them."
All I could imagine was the splattering of blood.
Crimson on concrete.
Screams echoing off stone walls.
The wet sound of flesh meeting fist, meeting blade, meeting whatever tools they used to extract confessions from people who'd betrayed them.
Hiro continued, "They'll show us how to contact our father. And Kenji's hackers can use that. We can grab his location much faster."
“Oh.” The dread that had been crushing my chest shifted. Something else pushed through.
Hope.
“Good job. . .sis.” Hiro winked. "You may be helping us end the war much sooner than we thought. Instead of waiting on my father to call Jean-Pierre, we may lure the Fox out this way."
I stared at him, and the snakes around my body loosened their grip and fell away.
I put my view back on the sketchbook. “But is Mami involved or was she just able to get the Eyes to sneak her in?”
I traced my eyes over the drawing again—the intimacy of it, the invasion of it, the desperate love bleeding through every charcoal stroke.
Mami hadn't just drawn Kenji's body. She'd drawn the version of him she prayed existed underneath all that ice.
I flipped the page, and my breath caught hard in my chest. "Uh. . ."
Hiro was close enough beside me that I felt the warmth of his body along my arm as we both looked down.
