Julian gave Adam a look of confusion, but Adam just shrugged his shoulders before locking the door behind us.

“What if we just leave the city?” Julian suggested. “We can hop a train and get the hell out of Charleston for good.”

“I’m totally down with that,” Adam said. “I’ve never really liked it here.”

“No,” I said as I shook my head. “I’m not leaving until I do what I went there to do.”

Michael was the only one who knew that I knew about him killing my mother. Adam knew what Michael had done, but he didn’t know that I knew about it, too. And Julian was basically completely in the dark about it all. The entire thing was one giant, convoluted mess.

But I was not leaving until I exposed Lineage.

“Lisette is right,” Michael intervened. “If we all just bail now, then there’s nothing to stop Lineage from continuing what they’re doing, and more importantly, there’s nothing stopping them from following us wherever we go and still trying to get at Lisette. These people have serious money, the kind of money that can make things happen anywhere around the globe. She’d be constantly looking over her shoulder.”

“Since when did you start to care?” Julian asked.

“Yeah, I’d kind of like to know that, too,” Adam said.

Michael looked down at the floor. “I told Lisette that I’m the one who killed her mother.”

“Shit,” Adam said as he rubbed his head with his hand.

“What?” Julian shouted. “Lisette, is that true?”

“Yeah,” I said as I stared at Michael.

Julian scoffed. “Then what in the world do you still need to go back to Lineage for? If you’re trying to avenge your mother’s death, then just kill this asshole now and let’s get out of here!”

“Julian, it’s not that simple,” I said.

His face burned with anger. “And why the hell not?”

“I—I don’t really know,” I stammered. “But there’s a whole system there that did this to my mom, and Michael was just a tool they used to do it.”

“Whelp, calling him a tool was probably the first correct thing so far,” Adam said sarcastically.

“What matters now is that we keep Lisette safe,” Michael said as he ignored their comments. “We’ll stay here and take turns keeping watch on the apartment until we figure out what to do next.”

“This is ridiculous,” Julian said, shaking his head and walking into the kitchen to get the stiffest drink he could find. “We need to leave,” he mumbled under his breath.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Michael said as he walked outside.

And I found myself thankful that at least someone wasn’t barking their backtalk at me every second of every moment I existed.

16

Things were very awkward and uncomfortable in the apartment.

I tried to sit and think, and both Adam and Julian both came to sit down on either side of me. Both of them tried to talk to me and reassure me that everything would be okay. Both of them tried to hold my hand and sit closer to me. I wasn’t even paying attention to any of that right now; I was solely focused on how I was going to get my revenge before the chance was completely missed.

Eventually, thanks to the whiskey Julian pulled out from the cabinet, the two of them fell asleep. I, however, didn’t sleep all night.

In the early hours of the morning, before the sun even came up, I made a pot of coffee so that I could try to stay at least a little sharp in order to face whatever the day was going to bring. Everything had been eerily quiet all night, and I was kind of surprised that no one at Lineage would have thought to track us down at Julian’s apartment yet. I poured two cups of coffee and went outside to take one to Michael.

I didn’t see him at first, but then when I looked up, I saw him sitting on the corner of the roof, keeping watch.

“I brought you some coffee,” I said.

He leaned over to take both of the cups from my hands and set them on the roof beside him, and then he leaned over and reached down to help hoist me up.

It was chilly, and I wrapped the hoodie around me as I sipped on the steaming coffee.

“Thanks,” he said as he put the cup to his lips.

Silence fell between us before he spoke again. “They’re right, you know. If I were you, I would have just killed me by now too.”

“I can’t kill you, Michael,” I said quietly. “And I think you know that.”

He nodded his head as if realizing that we were both trapped by the same very inconvenient feelings for each other.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Why did you kill my mother?”

Michael took another sip of his coffee. His blue eyes looked heavier and grayer now. His hair had gotten longer over the past few weeks, and golden strands of it were blowing down into his eyes.

“I knew that I would have to answer that question from you someday,” he said. “I just didn’t think I would feel the way I did about you when that time came.”

I had always seen Michael as some sort of conceited monster, and now I saw him for what he truly was; a man caught in the middle of something that he hadn’t asked for.

“Your mother was a wonderful woman,” he said. “I’m not sure if you knew this, but our parents knew each other when we were kids. I can remember that there were a few occasions when we would be at the same events together, you and me. I used to be so jealous of you; you had the mother that I wanted. Pauline loved you so much. She would play with you and spend time with you; she taught you to be strong and kind. My mother didn’t care about any of that. She only cared about what our family looked like to others.”

I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I couldn’t. Not after what he had done.

“My mother didn’t deserve to die,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, she did not. And I didn’t want to kill her.”

Michael set his cup down and turned to face me. “Lisette, I know who the man is taking over as Headmaster at Lineage. He is a horrible, treacherous man that has threatened to kill anyone who got in the way of his plans. When he found out that your mother knew what he was doing, he was going to have her killed. But not just killed, he was going to do much worse.”

I furrowed my brow tightly. “What could be worse than being killed?”

“It’s not important,” Michael said as he veered back to his explanation. “The important thing is that there were two options for your mother: to either be killed or to withstand a lifetime of torture and to watch her daughter suffer as well. Your mother knew that. She knew those were her only options. She knew that there was nowhere to run that he wouldn’t come after her to silence what she had found out. So, she reached out to me.”

I felt my face pale. “What? My mother talked to you?”