Page 14 of I Will Mend You

“A battered boyfriend.”

I scoff.

He shakes his head. “And I know what triggered your rampage.”

My nostrils flare. “Did you watch it?”

“I wouldn’t invade your privacy like that. Camila told me. She thinks Amethyst is working with X-Cite Media.”

Even though I still cling to the idea of a deep fake, betrayal still sinks its claws into my chest, filling my veins with cold venom. I can’t stomach the possibility of Amethystbeing connected with the likes of Father and his deadly pornographers.

“And what do you think?” I rasp.

Jynxson falls silent the way he always does when the answer is obvious. From his point of view, it looks like Amethyst’s connection to Father goes deeper than the mere coincidence of her mother being his wife. Without that sprinkler system—the one neither I nor Amethyst knew existed—I would have been dispatched to hell in flames.

“I know Amethyst,” I mutter. “She wouldn’t sign up for anything so Machiavellian.”

“But her alternate personality might,” Jynxson replies.

“She doesn’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder. I would have met her alters by now.”

“Then she’s a sleeper agent, programmed to act when triggered.”

Something her uncle told me before we released him hits me like a truck. Shortly after he was imprisoned, Amethyst’s mother visited him at the penitentiary, wanting information on her missing daughter. She thought Clive would know because he had a working relationship with Father through his failing membership site.

Meaning, she believed Father had Amethyst. Could Father have programmed Amethyst to kill me?

No. I refuse to accept that.

I huff a laugh, wanting to blow off the suggestion, but the sound is hollow. “This isn’t science fiction.”

“Your father performed experiments on us all. What’s to say he didn’t go deeper with the Lolitas? There’s a reason the girls were taken away from us, and it wasn’t because we found their crying off-putting.”

My jaw clenches. Jynxson makes some excellent points, but the markers in Amethyst’s history indicate that she grew up withher mother—at least after the age of ten. By eleven, she enrolled in Tourgis Academy with Myra Mancini. By thirteen, she pushed her music teacher off the roof garden, after which she went through the court system, where she was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity.

I have records of her time at the Greenbridge Academy for Behaviorally Challenged Girls, followed by her enrollment at Alderney State University. Tyler and his team found articles about the disappearance of Sparrow and Wilder Reed, who were last photographed gyrating against Amethyst at a party.

“Admit it,” Jynxson says.

“Someone might have gotten to her while she was at the Greenbridge Academy. Something could have happened then. But if Father wanted me dead, he would have sent an assassin to Death Row.”

“What if he wanted your secrets?” Jynxson asks. “You have a firm that rivals the Moirai. Connections among its existing support staff. The means for him to claw back everything that was taken when you made him fall from grace.”

He makes several excellent points. Excellent, but wrong. I shake my head, not wanting to believe Amethyst would work with Father, even against her will.

“Come on. It’s not that much of a stretch,” he says. “Out of the hundreds of women sending you letters, how many of them came from your father or his agents? They could have split test over time, and refined their approaches until they honed the perfect candidate to slip past your defenses.”

Heat courses through my veins, fanning the flames of my denial. I turn to him and scowl. If I wasn’t strapped down like Hannibal Lecter, I would slam my fist into his face.

“Do you think I’d be so easily manipulated?”

“No, not easily. But how many years of data did he have on you? Field reports, observation, psych evaluations, medicalrecords, surveillance footage. Amethyst’s persona would have been irresistible. A civilian who made her first kill at the age of thirteen, imprisoned by heavy-handed parents, crying out for a hero to set her free.”

“Did you read our letters?” I snap.

“It’s my job to watch your back.”

“I’m not on death row anymore,” I snarl. “If you’re so concerned about my welfare, then help me out of this bed.”

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