Page 67 of Sacrifice

I nodded. “It’s quite a strange feeling. But I think I’ll be all right.”

“Great. Ready to go?”

I looked at Sebastian, and he gave me a reassuring smile. I nodded again. “Ready.”

I clasped my hands in my lap and waited. The director took her place behind the camera, and the interviewer, a woman with sharp eyes and a soft voice, sat across from me, a notebook in her lap.

“All right, Rose, we’re rolling,” the director said.

The interviewer leaned forward slightly, her tone gentle but direct. “Could you describe what happened to Adam Thorne on the night he died?” she asked. “What you saw and what you heard, all in your own words.”

I swallowed hard, forcing myself to breathe evenly. I had practiced this, rehearsed it in my mind a hundred times, and even repeated the same story to the police on many occasions. But now that the cameras were rolling, the words felt stuck in my throat.

I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and finally spoke up. “So much of that night is blurry for me,” I began. “One of the reasons for that is because earlier that day, Adam Thorne kidnapped me and drugged me with something that I’ve since learned is a powerful anesthetic named Propofol. It’s usually used in surgeries, so an average person wouldn’t be able to get their hands on it. But Adam owned a hospital, so it was a lot easier for him.”

“Of course.”

“When I woke up again, it was around midnight, and I was in Alderwood’s main ritual clearing with Sebastian, who had also been drugged earlier. Adam knew that Sebastian had learnedthe truth about Miranda, along with all the other illegal things his family was up to, you see. He wanted him gone, but he didn’t want to do it with his own hands, so he thought he could convince the Covenant to do it for him.”

“To kill Sebastian, that is.”

“Yes. He, along with the other Thorne family members, had been bullying my father and the Covenant elders into covering up their crimes for many years. I suppose this was just one more crime to add to the pile, in his eyes.” I paused and slowly shook my head. “But my father—and the rest of the Covenant—had no intention of hurting Sebastian. When Adam realized this, he became enraged and pulled out a gun.”

“What happened then?”

“Sebastian ran to him and tried to grab the weapon to stop him from hurting anyone. Lots of others tried to disarm him too, so there was a huge scuffle. The gun went off, and the sound scared many others in the clearing, including myself. I ran and hid behind an altar. Because of that, it was hard for me to see everything that was going on. It was also quite dark, and there was smoke in the air from the bonfire. That’s another reason why so much of that night is a blur to me—so many faces and bodies, all shouting and crying and running around in the dark.”

The interviewer nodded. “Go on.”

“By the time the dust settled, as they say, Adam was dead. I saw him lying in a pool of blood in the clearing, completely still, and I knew he was gone.” I slowly shook my head. “In all the fighting and chaos, someone had taken the Covenant’s ceremonial dagger and stabbed him.”

“But you didn’t actually see who did it?”

I shook my head again and told the same story that I’d told to the police and FBI agents at least fifty times. “No, I didn’t see who did it. Like I said, there were just too many people running around, either trying to get away from the area or tryingto stop Adam from firing the gun again. It was all a blur, and it happened so fast, too.”

The interviewer leaned forward again, looking right at me with those sharp eyes. “It’s strange, isn’t it? The police interviewed every single person who was there that night—over a thousand people—and not a single one of them claimed to have seen who stabbed Adam.”

“It sounds a little strange at first, but I don’t think it’s actually strange when you think about it. Most of the people were panicking and focusing on getting themselves and their families out of the clearing. And as I said before, it was dark and smoky. Difficult to see.”

“Butsomeoneknows who did it. At the very least, whoever stabbed him knows they did it.”

I nodded. “Yes, that’s true. But I suppose we’ll never know who it was, because no one has come forward.”

I was never going to admit the truth—that I’d seen Sebastian kill his own father by plunging a dagger into his neck while he lay pinned and helpless on the ground.

I knew he’d end up in prison for a long time, despite all the extenuating circumstances, and I couldn’t bear to see that happen. No one else in the Covenant seemed to want Sebastian to go away for what he’d done, either. Without us even asking, they’d all remained tightlipped about what really happened. Even Anaïs, gossip queen that she was, hadn’t said a single word to incriminate Sebastian when she was interviewed about the events of that night.

Sebastian had actually wanted to come clean at first, but I’d convinced him otherwise. The way I saw it, his father got exactly what he deserved in the end. On top of that, I thought Sebastian had already been punished enough by living in a sort of mental prison for the last two decades; grieving over his mother’s murder while never seeing any justice served.

In the end, he agreed not to say anything to the police, but not for the same reasons as me. He wanted to be here for me and keep me safe now that I was out in the world, and he couldn’t do that if he was serving a prison sentence.

“At first, the police suspected that Sebastian may have done it. Revenge for Adam killing his mother,” the interviewer said, tilting her head slightly to one side. “And from what we’ve seen while researching public opinion on this case, a lot of people on true crime forums still theorize it was him.”

I shook my head and peered directly into the camera. “Sebastian tried to disarm Adam, so he definitely fought him, but he didn’t kill him.”

“How can you know that if you didn’t see who did it?”

“By the time Adam was killed, Sebastian had left the fray and joined me by the altar,” I said. “My father had been shot by one of the two bullets that Adam fired, and we were trying to save him.”

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