Page 109 of Silver Secrets

Twenty-Eight

The blade plunged as she swung around, hoping beyond anything else that it would catch their captor by surprise. She aimed for the area between the edge of the mask and his chest, praying it landed somewhere vital. The sickening thought of taking a life hovered dangerously close to the edge of overwhelming her.

Their captor took a step back, the knife slashing an opening in the lower half of the mask, but doing no real damage.

In an instant, his hand came up and slammed into her cheek. Stars burst into her vision, and Gage began shouting. Her arms were pushed down painfully against her body. Sloane wasn’t going to go down without a fight. She bucked her hips, the motion enough to shift his balance. The momentum allowed her hands to break free from his grasp. Sloane knew she only had a second before he would have control of her limbs again, so she swung her hands up towards his face, latching on to the fabric of the mask where the tear had started and pulled.

Nothing could have prepared her for the way her heart would twist the instant she recognized the face.

“I don’t… I don’t under… understand.” She stammered as her breath rushed in and out of her chest. “What is this?”

“Hello, Sierra,” Courtney said as a twisted smile spread across her face. “You know what? All this time I was so afraid of what would happen if you found out it was me. But this feels right. No more secrets between us. God, I’ve missed being able to look in your eyes and call you by your real name.”

“You’re not… a man.”

She laughed. “No, I’m not. But the drugs I gave you in the cave, and the voice modifications would have distorted your reality enough that it might have seemed that way. Consider it a little insurance policy against being profiled as a person of interest.”

Somewhere in the distance, behind the ringing in her ears, Sloane could hear Gage exhausting himself trying to break free of his chains. She wanted to scream. Courtney grabbed Sloane’s face with one hand, twisting her head so that her eyes locked with Gage.

Her mind felt like it was fracturing. “I don’t understand. Please make it make sense.”

“You already know. I’ve been telling you this whole time.”

Sloane racked her brain, trying to remember every conversation she’d had with Courtney. Nothing had stood out as strange. Nothing had made her feel fearful or weary around her.

“I don’t know…”

“And here I thought your job was to listen to the things people were saying to you. I worried that I was giving you too much insight all this time, and yet, you don’t seem to know me at all. We don’t have much time, no. Not now that I’ve taken your fierce FBI protector. I imagine it’s not just her team that’s going to be sounding the alarms soon.”

“Courtney, please. I want to listen. I want to help you if I can. But you have to know that more killing is not the answer.”

“Gage tried to keep you from me. You’re my only hope. I thought the others were the answer, but they weren’t. They weren’t good enough. They didn’t listen to my commands. My parents would never accept them as his replacement.”

Sloane’s eyebrows pulled together. “Whose replacement, Courtney?”

“My brother’s! His death is why I had to do all this. To find a replacement. For my parents to finally forgive me.”

Sloane blinked slowly, pieces of the puzzle falling haphazardly in her mind. “Why would they need to forgive you?”

“I was supposed to walk my brother to school that day. Do you know my mom said she wished it had been me? That hersonshould still be there with her? And what did my dad do? He agreed with her. Told me how women are selfish, thinking only of themselves, like I had that morning. Do you know how many hours I spent kneeling on dried rice? For weeks after his death I would come home from school, forced onto my knees where my father would preach to me about a woman’s wickedness and how she had to earn a man’s forgiveness.”

Sloane looked over Courtney’s shoulder. In the time that she’d been absorbing the story, it seemed that Gage had been too. His eyes were wide and his mouth dropped open.

Get the key.

Adrenaline flooded her system. It was time for her to put a plan in place. She listened as Courtney continued to ramble, all the while calculating when she could incapacitate her long enough to grab the key from her pocket and get it to Gage.

“He was pure, and I was tainted. I repented for my sins, but it wasn’t enough for my parents. Ihadto find a replacement. I had to show them that perfection could live in a woman, too.” She laughed, her eyes looking over Sloane’s shoulder unfocused. “My dad used to say that my brother’s eyes were a sign he’d been blessed by God. Meant to live an extraordinary life. Meant to be strong. And wise. And I was the reason he was gone. Because women were selfish. I guess I’ll prove him right in that way. I want to be right so badly that I’ve spent more years than I ever thought possible searching for Adrian’s perfect replacement.”

“Why kill that girl in Virginia? Why kill someone after you’d already found me? You’d been back in Silver Springs for months at that point.”

“I wasn’t sure… I got confused. I had to make sure it was really you. And in that process, because you didn’t know who I was or what I’d done, we became friends. I thought if I took someone else, if I found someone else, it might work.” Her head shook back and forth. “But no. No. That girl was not right. She wasn’t pure. She wasn’t willing to learn to be his replacement. She didn’t quiet the voices. Not like you. Never like you. That’s why I left that picture of you with her. She wasn’t worthy, but you are.”

Sloane’s vision spun. Her legs were shaking from the adrenaline pumping through her system, but she did everything in her power to ignore it.

“What about Elias?”

“What about him?” she laughed. “He was nothing more to me than someone I could use, Sierra. As soon as I heard him talking at the shelter about his programming skills, I knew I’d need to tap into his knowledge to get into the Montgomery Defense system. It was easy enough to make it seem like he was the one trying to hack into their system. But he got back from his trip yesterday and had too many questions tonight, so I had to take care of him before you got to the shelter.”

---