Cain stands, starts dressing. "She'll have questions."
"Don't we all?" I pull on his shirt, leaving my own blood-stained clothes on the floor. "The question is whether we give her answers."
"She already knows most of them. She's always known what I am."
"Then why is she here?"
"To make sure I haven't destroyed you." He pauses. "Or to thank me for saving you. With Juliette, it could go either way."
A knock at the door.
Not tentative but not demanding either.
The knock of someone who knows they're about to walk into something life-changing.
I look at Cain. "Together?"
"Together."
We answer the door as one, presenting a united front.
Juliette stands on the porch, designer coat dusted with snow, face unreadable in the darkness.
"Celeste. Cain." She looks between us, taking in my bruises, his scratches, the way we stand together like two parts of a whole. "We need to talk."
"Yes," Cain agrees, stepping aside to let her in. "We do."
She enters, and I close the door behind her.
Whatever happens next, whatever she knows or suspects or fears, we'll face it together.
The writer, the killer, and the sister who's kept his secrets for twenty years.
Outside, snow begins to fall again, covering the evidence of this night in clean white silence.
But we know what's underneath.
We know what we've done, what we are, what we're becoming.
And we're not sorry.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cain
Juliette sits in my leather chair like she owns it, which in a way she does.
Everything I have came from the Lockwood estate—the money, the property, the freedom to become what I am.
She made sure I inherited everything when she could have fought it.
She knew what I'd done and chose to protect me anyway.
"Tea?" I offer, though we both know this isn't a social visit.
"Whiskey. The good stuff Richard kept in his study."
I pour three glasses of the twenty-year-old Macallan that our adoptive father treasured more than his children.