“I live there now.” Rochelle let herself fall back so she was sitting on the floor, and the fact that her pristine white slacks were getting stained with hot chocolate didn’t seem to matter to her in the slightest. “That night, while you and I were preparing her, I wanted to tell you the truth. But I’m a coward—and I didn’t know how you’d react, either. The last thing I wanted to do was spoil your memories of your sister. She loved you so much. She thought about you all the time. All she ever wanted was to take care of you—and the idea I might ruin that memory of her in your mind . . . I couldn’t tell you because I didn’t know what your thoughts on us were going to be.”
Helania remembered back to the months leading up to Isobel’s death. How Isobel had been so very happy, so radiant, so optimistic. Unlike anything Helania had seen before.
Reaching out with her scarred palm, she put her hand on the other female’s shoulder. In a strong, certain voice, she said, “Let me tell you what my thoughts are. You were the love of her life, too, and you made her happier than I’d ever seen her.”
Rochelle’s eyes welled with new tears. And then the female put her scarred hand over Helania’s.
“I cannot tell you,” the female said roughly, “what that means to me. It’s like Isobel just spoke to me from the grave.”
* * *
Sitting on the sidelines, Boone was both having trouble catching up and feeling very proud of the two females on the floor in front of him. Surrounded by the broken shards of the glymera’s propriety, Rochelle and Helania were reaching across, literally and figuratively, the divide of misinformation and lifestyle and death . . . and finding solace in each other.
Even though he’d never met Isobel, he had to imagine she was staring down from the Fade, glowing with happiness that the two most important people in her life were finding a measure of peace.
After they embraced for a second time, Rochelle looked at Boone. “But there’s more. And this is why I asked to see you.”
Boone got up off the sofa and decided to join the not-so-tea party on the hard floor. It just felt so right to throw convention and standards away and cop a squat here in the archway, broken crap all over the place, secrets being revealed, questions being answered.
Healing beginning.
He picked up the handle of a mug and toyed with it. “Tell us.”
“It goes back to before. When the arrangement was made.”
Rochelle frowned and shook her head. “Shortly after I met you, I started to feel as if I were being watched. Followed. I couldn’t pin it down, but I would be at my parents’ house and I would look out the windows . . . and I would swear that somebody was there. It was so eerie. And then one night, I met up with Isobel at Pyre, and I felt like this male was following me as I went around the club.” She looked at Helania. “We used to go there because we didn’t have to hide our relationship. With all those masks and cloaks, we could be free. But I remember that night—we’d gone in my car because I’d just gotten it and I felt like driving. After we arrived . . . I just had this strange sense I was being trailed.”
“Fucking Syn,” Boone muttered.
“It kept up for quite a while. And then . . . Isobel was killed.” Rochelle closed her eyes. “I didn’t go back to the club after that and it disappeared. The sense . . . went away. I didn’t think about it again until . . .” She looked back and forth. “Until Mai was killed a week ago.”
Boone jerked forward. “Mai? Wait, what? You know about her killing, the second one?”
“She was our friend. Isobel’s and mine. She was the only person who knew about us.”
“She was the other female?” Helania stammered. “That night I came to your house? But wait . . . oh, of course, I didn’t recognize her when I found her because she was wearing the mask. And then in those terrible pictures after she was dead . . . I couldn’t bear to look at them on that wall in the evidence room.”
“Mai was the second death down there.” Rochelle looked at Boone. “And I found out