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“I didn’t let him⁠—”

“You watched a nine-year-old boy die because saving him might get you caught.”

The sickle slashes across the wall beside his head. Heller flinches so hard the chains snap taut.

“I didn’t mean for him to die.”

“You kidnapped him!”

“He was only here a few hours.”

My heart stops. Here. “He died here?”

Heller’s silence answers. A few hours. While Mom was calling his name down every street. While I was tearing through hedges with a flashlight. While the whole town was searching, he was here. Already gone.

For seventeen years I imagined thousands of places. Ditches. Basements. Forests. Motel rooms. Vans. Every fucking nightmare my brain could manufacture. And it was here. Forty-seven minutes from my house. Thirty-three from my family’s.

Grady died in this room. My little brother’s last ceiling was corrugated metal and cheap fluorescent lights. I stare upward. Something hot slides down my cheek before I realize I’m crying.

“I never touched him,” Heller says it fast, like he’s been waiting seventeen years to say it to someone. “I swear to God. I never got the chance. He was already struggling when I left for the pharmacy. When I got back…” He swallows. “He’d finished the soup. The whole bowl. He was just lying there. So…still.”

The whole bowl. Tiny mercy. So small, it shouldn’t matter. It matters. Never got the chance.

“Where is he?”

He opens his mouth, but the side door creaks open. Every muscle in my back locks as cold air rushes in. And then I smell it. Vanilla and coffee with cloves.

I know that scent.

This night just got so much worse. And yet…I’ve never wanted her beside me more.

CHAPTER 35

Jubilee

Gage’s voice reaches me through the workshop door before I touch the handle. “Where is he?”

Low, rough, and deadly—nothing like the voice he uses to tell millions how long to proof croissant dough. I clench the door handle to keep my hand from shivering.

The door creaks open. Cold air follows me inside, carrying a handful of dead leaves across the concrete. Gage turns, and for one second, nobody says anything.

He’s standing several feet from a man chained against the back wall, a sickle hanging from one hand. His hair has mostly escaped its tie, there’s blood beneath his nose, and his intensity makes my heart drop straight through the floor. Not rage. Not anymore. Grief. His eyes are wet.

“Fucking hell, Jules.”

I shut the door behind me. “Hi.”

“You were supposed to stay home.”

“Yeah, I decided against that.”

He focuses on the tote hanging from my shoulder before returning to my face. “Jubilee.”

I look past him. A mattress. Blankets. A heater. Children’s clothes, some still folded, some still in packaging. Chains fixed into the wall.

Every joke in my head dies at once. The back of my throat goes sour, and my hand drifts to my stomach like it can hold everything in place. “Oh, God.” I turn back to him. “Here?”

His jaw clenches. That’s my answer. Grady died here. Nine years old, while his family tore apart an entire town searching for him.