“How long did you wait after I was gone to raid my closet?” I press. “Am I going to get home and find you’ve taken over my room?”
She shrugs. “I mean, you weren’t wearing it. And if you did die, I couldn’t let your clothes go to waste.” Her tone is light, but theset of her jaw gives her away. “As for the room, I’d have given it a proper month. I’m not a monster.”
“Just an asshole,” I say, entirely unconvincingly.
Margot grins. She opens her mouth to speak, but her eyes snap to the television hanging on the wall across the room. Her lips pull into a thin line. At my questioning look, she jerks a chin toward the TV. She reaches for the remote as I twist to get a look.
“—believed to be responsible for the disappearance of at least thirteen children and teenagers from Blackridge and the surrounding areas over the past two decades. Holden is currently being held without bail. Court proceedings will—”
I snatch the remote out of her hands and kill the power. The TV can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.
“They’re saying that whatever he was doing down there was, like, a continuation of this big project he was involved in. I guess they were taking healthy cells or something from mice and transplanting them into sick ones. Almost like transfusions but not.”
“Someone’s done a deep dive in the last twelve hours,” I say.
“Not much else to do. Mom and Dad are acting like…well, like our parents, which is always weird to see them do together. Paige is ready for a fight, and you and Jasper have been surrounded by nurses, so I’ve been googling. A lot.”
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“Have you?” she counters. Before either of us can admit that no, obviously not, that Jasper is the only Griffin who has shut their eyes in the last twelve hours, she continues, “Anyway, apparently Holden’s project got shut down when they moved on to human trials. A few people died.”
“So he found new subjects,” I say, and my tongue is thick and dry.
“I still can’t believe it was him. Hiding under everybody’snoses. I mean, he was part of the searches. Telling Paige and Mom and Dad that we’d find you, that we’d find Jasper. And the whole time, he had you both locked up in his goddamn torture chamber.”
I picture him reassuring my family, swinging a flashlight around the dark forest as if he didn’t know exactly where to look. Holden claimed to not be a monster but a desperate father. And maybe, once upon a time, that’s all he was. But the moment he took that first kid, he lost all claim to any benevolent goals. Good intentions crumble under so many bodies.
“They’re still looking for…” Margot stops, her mouth twisting. “For remains. So far, they’ve got a few personal items, like a phone and some stuff that didn’t burn, but no bodies. And no one knows where Cecily is.”
“They won’t find any bodies,” I say, and I know it to be true. Someone like Holden doesn’t get away with such horror for so long without knowing how to cover his tracks.
“They have to be somewhere.”
“He runs a veterinary clinic, Margot. You think he doesn’t have a cremation chamber?” My stomach twists and lurches even as I say it, and Margot’s vaguely green look means she knows it’s true.
Margot swallows visibly. “God, I didn’t even think about that.” She shakes her head.
I lean back into the stiff pillows propped behind me. My hand drifts up to my neck, dotted with bruises in the shape of large, wide hands. Holden’s hands. My throat is less swollen than last night, but I refused the pain meds offered by the nurses, so it throbs.
I think I’ll be hesitant to put any medication in my body for a while. Won’t be able to trust what’s in the vial or pill bottle.
“You almost died on me again,” Margot says. “I really need you to stop doing that.”
“Because it was totally a choice,” I say.
Margot stiffens. “You were on your own. You didn’t ask me to come with you. I could have helped. Maybe I could have—”
“This isn’t on you,” I say. “And it’s not like I knew what would happen when I got out of bed and followed a hallucination into the woods.”
Except it wasn’t a hallucination. Like it wasn’t a hallucination that led Margot into the creek. It was Ingrid. Screaming at the top of her lungs, trying to get someone’s attention. I can’t say she went about it in the best way, but it worked. She saved all of us. And I was far too late to save her.
Margot swipes a tear off her cheek as if she’s angry at it for falling. “You scared the hell out of me, Jo. When I woke up and realized you were gone—”
I lean forward, take her hand in mine.
Her fingers curl around mine and squeeze hard. This time, she lets her tears snake all the way down her cheeks and onto the white blanket. “I know I don’t say it a lot, but I fucking love you. You know that, right? You may be moody and reclusive, but I love you. And I’m really, really glad you’re okay.”
“I love you, too,” I say. I squeeze her hand. “We’re all okay. It’s over.”
