“Walk,” Jack said, obviously trying to hold his temper. They pushed the twins up the stairs. I started to follow. Elodie lingered on the pyramid floor, taking in as much as she could in the short time we had. I knew we’d send people back to look—and come back to look ourselves—when we could, but it was hard to see all this and just leave.

   “It’s true,” Cole went on from partway up the stairs. “Just the fact that you think we changed. We didn’t change. We’ve always done what had to be done, haven’t we? You were too stupid to see it. We even used you to do it.”

   “Cole,” Lydia warned. “No.”

   “What do you mean?” Jack said.

   “I bet you still, after all this time, believe that what happened to Oliver was your fault. Well,” he said, correcting himself, “it was, technically. Instead of doing your job, you were kissing my sister. This one,” he clarified, nodding at Lydia, “since there are enough of my sisters you’ve kissed that we have to specify.”

   I remembered that, too. On top of the drama with Elodie and Stellan, Lydia had kissed Jack the day Oliver Saxon died.

   Jack was rigid. “Keep moving,” he snapped. We had stopped at the top of the stairs, at the small platform just inside the door, and he pushed them out and down the stairs, toward the water.

   “We could have terminated you for that. I was all for it. Lydia was nice enough not to, since she’d done it on purpose. You’ve always been too soft when it comes to the Keeper,” he chided Lydia. “You’re just lucky he’s even softer.”

   “Wait.” I came up behind Jack and squinted into the dark at Cole. “What do you mean Lydia did it on purpose?”

   “Only because I wasn’t told what was going to happen,” Lydia said under her breath. And then, louder, “Cole, that’s enough.”

   Jack was blinking down at them. Below, Stellan had stopped, too, so we all waited just above the water. “Are you telling me . . . You’re not saying you killed your brother.”

   “Of course we didn’t kill him. We—” Cole rolled his eyes at Lydia’s intake of breath. “Fine, I just let it happen, but everyone later realized it was for the best. We’d been in an alliance with some other families for years. Our brother wanted to stop it, so instead, he was a martyr. It primed the Circle for what’s happening now. And it just happened to work out that Lydia wanted to make sure the Keeper stayed around. She didn’t have him under her thumb anymore. It was easy enough to let him believe it was all his fault, then act like we forgave him so he’d have to be loyal to us.”

   Jack just stared at Cole. “You killed Oliver and let me think it was my fault. You killed Avery’s mother. You killed Fitz.”

   “Well . . .” Cole squinted into the distance. “Probably not quite yet, but . . .”

   I had to have heard him wrong.

   “Cole, no,” Lydia pleaded once more, but it was too late. It was way too late.

   “What do you mean by that?” Stellan sounded lethally calm.

   “How stupid are you?” Cole said. “How else do you think we got here? The old man can hold up to a surprising amount of torture, but everyone snaps eventually.”

   My lungs were collapsing. I couldn’t breathe. “Fitz is alive?”

   Cole shrugged. “Barely.”

   It only took a second, but I did realize what was happening. I didn’t try to stop it.

   Jack swung his gun away from his guard on Lydia. And he shot Cole Saxon in the head.

 

 

CHAPTER 15

 

Cole dropped like an abandoned puppet, falling into the water. Lydia screamed, the sound reverberating around the cavern. And she kept screaming as she abandoned any pretense of being a good hostage, throwing herself into the water by her brother. She kept screaming as Elodie emerged from the pyramid and ran down the stairs.

   I’m glad it’s this dark, I thought desperately. Seeing that would have been worse.

   Lydia took a breath, and then she screamed again. The sound was chilling, grating, scraping my nerves and my heart and my insides raw.

   Still screaming, Lydia pulled her bag out of the water and rummaged in it. I wanted to tell her, You can’t save him, this isn’t something you bandage up and come back from, but Elodie was grabbing us all, and only then did I realize that Lydia had a gun in her hand. We were on the steps—we had nowhere to go.

   Stellan recovered first and took a shot in Lydia’s direction. Her screams stopped and I thought he’d hit her, but I saw a shape swimming away under the water.

   We’d splashed in, too. “We have to take her with us. We have to get her,” I yelled, but I cut off when a gunshot reverberated in the cavern, whizzing so close to my face that I gasped.

   “Where is she? Where’d she go?” Stellan and Jack both took shots back the way we’d come, but the shooting didn’t stop. We were as likely to get hit as we were to hit her.

   “We have to go!” Elodie urged again over the screams. “We’ll catch her somewhere else!” We swam around the edge of the pyramid as fast as we could. Lydia was still screaming, and still firing, but without light, the shots were all over the place. We ran up the narrow stairs, and were almost to the top.

   I barely heard the shot before I felt it.

   I couldn’t think. I couldn’t see. The only thing was the pain, the searing, like my arm was being prodded with a hot poker, and the realization in the same second—she shot me. I’d been shot.

   I felt arms around me, pulling me. I realized I was screaming, and then I was splayed out on the ground, Elodie leaning over me with a light, her face terrified, then relaxing.

   “It’s her shoulder. It’ll be okay,” she said, from far away. “Avery.” She shook me. “I know it hurts like hell, but you’re going to be okay. We have to go.”