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Raisa wondered if she would ever see Delaney again. Isabel was what had held them together, in a strange way.

Kilkenny would tell her that Delaney was family, and that mattered for something. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Only time would tell.

But right now, Raisa was just thankful.

Thankful that the rage-fueled fire that burned in her whenever she thought of Delaney had been put out.

Delaney had never been able to stop Isabel when it mattered.

Until she finally had.

As an FBI agent, Raisa could never condone someone taking life and death into their own hands. They had a justice system for a reason, and Raisa was staunchly against the government killing people.

As Isabel Parker’s sister, though, Raisa would thank the powers that be every night for the rest of her life that the monster had been slain.

“I don’t feel broken,” Delaney said, sounding like she was confessing something terrible. “It feels like I finally did something right.”

Raisa bumped her shoulder, and gave Delaney the one thing she’d always withheld from her. “Yeah, I think you did.”

Note Wiped Clean from Delaney Moore’s Computer

This is the Isabel Paradox.

To prove her wrong, I had to kill her, thus proving her right.

Chapter Forty

Delaney

Day Eight

Delaney had thought about killing Isabel a thousand times.

She’d thought about it while standing in line at the grocery store, and thought about it while on a run, and thought about it while watching a movie. It didn’t even have to be a film with a serial killer in it. In fact, Delaney’d had a particularly vivid vision of cutting Isabel’s throat once during a romantic comedy’s unexpected musical number.

All that planning and fantasizing, and she had never believed she could do it. Not realistically.

But Isabel had known just how to push her over the edge of anything she’d ever thought would be doable.

“I’m never going to stop, you know,” Isabel said, when Delaney went to stand up from the table in the visitation room. “I have the taste of blood in my mouth.”

Delaney stared at her.

“You know. Like a dog, when they say it breaks skin on a human,” Isabel said. “They have to put it down.”

For forty years, Delaney had worn Isabel’s attention, love, jealousy, adoration, hate, around her neck. The weight of it had pressed down on her chest so that she’d never been able to fully breathe.

As she stood on the pier looking out over the water, she finally filled her lungs to the brim.

That morning, Delaney had called her landlord in Seattle and given her notice on the lease. She scheduled a moving company to pack up her apartment and put it all in a storage container. Maybe she would come back for it; maybe she wouldn’t.

The medical examiner had finally come down with a decision in Isabel’s death.Inconclusive.

St. Ivany hadn’t seemed interested in pursuing the case further.

Raisa had been a potential wrench. Delaney should have guessed she would try to figure out who had killed Isabel—even if Isabel hadn’t sent her messages to get her curious.

But she didn’t seem like she wanted to pursue charges any further, either.

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