Cole steps inside the passenger compartment, which she sees is much more spacious than she thought.

The other two wait for her to go first. The bald one gives her a polite nod as she steps past him, as if she were any other guest. As if this were just another corporate flight on a busy CEO’s calendar.

Careful not to touch anything, she takes a seat on the leather-upholstered bench seat across from Cole. The engine starts up. The blades spin, slicing the glare cast by the house’s security lights. The other two men pile into the helicopter after her, taking seats on opposite sides of Cole.

The bald one slides the cargo door shut. Soft golden light fills the cabin from running lights along the roof and the floor. It’s insane, this juxtaposition. The distance she seems to have traveled between one world and another in no more than a few paces.

Then, suddenly, they’re rising into the air. Her heart lurches as Luke, Marty, and the rest of them disappear under tree cover. As they ascend over the valley, she wonders if the unreality of this, rising into the air this suddenly, watching the house of horrors below shrink down to the size of a child’s dollhouse, will somehow separate her from the nightmares in that basement.

No, she realizes, but the memory of Pemberton’s sobs will make the nightmares bearable.

For the first time since liftoff, she looks into Cole’s eyes.

He introduces the bald man sitting next to him as Ed Baker, his director of security. Ed wisely doesn’t attempt to shake her hand. When it’s clear he’s not going to introduce the shorter guy in spectacles to his left, Charley says, “And who are you?”

The man just stares at her.

“This is Mark Hetherington. He’s also with my security team, but he has a background as a registered nurse, and when it’s appropriate and you consent, he’ll take a sample of your blood.”

Now Cole’s staring at her, too.

“Will you allow me to do that, Charley? Will you allow me to take a sample of your blood?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

Cole smiles, taps the briefcase Mark now holds on his lap. Mark pops it open. She glimpses thick foam padding with indentations holding several different vials. They look empty, but she can’t be sure. Mark opens up a second compartment within, removes a thick file folder, and hands it to Cole. In turn, he hands it to her.

“Let start with this,” he says cheerfully. “I think you’ll be very interested in what’s inside.”

40

“I’m not really good at flipping pages right now,” she says.

Her voice sounds like someone else’s—something between a growl and a whisper. They seem to be heading east, toward the Arizona border, over mountainous terrain that will soon yield to the Anza-Borrego Desert.

The cabin is surprisingly quiet given the size of the rotors overhead: a floating, padded cell.

Cole reaches across the space between them, presses a button just over her shoulder. A pin-spot light clicks to life, shining a bright halo down on her lap, revealing the bloodstains on her jeans, the loose flaps where Pemberton sliced the legs. Cole’s nose comes within inches of hers as he withdraws. Kissing distance, almost. She’s not sure if he genuinely wants her to read the file, or if he wants to show her he’s not afraid, that he trusts her not to tear his arm off.

With all the effort she can manage, she opens the file without ripping it in half. Finds herself staring down at a page printed with large side-by-side photographs, one of a toddler-aged boy who strikes her as immediately familiar. The other’s Dylan. The resemblance between the two is undeniable; they share not only Dylan’s sculpted chin but also his relaxed, attentive gaze.

“I can summarize the contents if you like,” Cole says, “but the file’s yours to keep.”

She tries to nod but can’t manage it. It’s sinking in suddenly, what the page before her means, and maybe if her veins weren’t enflamed with impossible strength, she’d feel like an idiot for not having seen it sooner.

Of course Dylan didn’t pick the Saguaro Wellness Center at random. Didn’t even pick Scarlet, Arizona, at random, and now, it’s clear, most certainly didn’t pick her at random. Why didn’t she see it the other night when she was journaling about all the victims? The boy who was whisked off to a foreign country. Given a new life so different from hers. Or so she thought.

“Lilah Turlington,” she says. “He’s her son.”

“Yes. The Bannings killed his mother and her boyfriend just like they killed your mother. After their disappearance, he was taken out of the country, given a new identity.”

“The uncle. The one who works in gas pipelines.”

“Exactly. Dylan was protected from things you weren’t. But given my experience of him, I don’t imagine it was a very pleasant upbringing.”

She gently slides the picture page to one side; sees what looks like the records of Dylan’s military service Kayla couldn’t find. References to kills and assassinations with the word CLASSIFIED stamped across the top, which seems pathetic. The word should be red, but instead it’s black and white, which means these documents are photocopies made by someone who wasn’t supposed to have them. Too dense to read through now. But it’s something. Far more than she expected out of the guy sitting across from her.

“And what’s your experience of him?” she asks.

“Dylan was one of my father’s last hires before he passed away. When I became CEO, Dylan came to me with video evidence of animal testing he’d done on a new drug. He’d been trying to advance antianxiety medications beyond what he called the realm of alcohol in a pill. He was searching for a compound that suppressed certain panic responses in the brain that can lead to paralysis and other fear responses he deemed . . . ineffective.

“Given what I’ve just shown you, it’s not a mystery where this obsession came from. I know you were very young, and I know you weren’t involved in any of their murders, so I’m not sure how much time you spent researching the details of their crimes, the statements Abigail has made in prison.” She nods weakly. “Then you’re probably aware Abigail Banning told authorities and several journalists that Lilah Turlington froze up when they attacked her boyfriend. That they almost bungled it, and there was a moment when she could have got away, maybe even saved Eddie Stevens. But she was paralyzed by the shock of it all. Two perfectly nice people she thought were fellow backpackers sharing a campfire suddenly turning on her boyfriend with a rock. She froze.”

“Abigail lied about a lot of things.”

“Even so, the story seems to have had a particular effect on the man we know as Dylan Cody, born Noah Turlington in Asheville, North Carolina.”

“I knew him as Dylan Thorpe.”

“Indeed. It’s been hard to keep track of everyone’s name of late.”

“I only have one, and it’s Charlotte Rowe.”

Cole smiles nervously, nods. “Of course.”

“These animal tests. What did they show?”

“In two hundred of them, Dylan matched prey and predator in a contained environment after dosing the prey subject with Zypraxon. In only five of them did the predator survive.”

“What did you do? After he showed you these tests?”

“I made arrangements to begin human testing. On willing volunteers.”

“I’m going to assume this trial was off the books.”

“It was.”

“How did it go?”

“Not well.”

“How not well? Is that explained in this file?”

“It went so badly I shut down Project Bluebird six months later. Pulled all Dylan’s funding and denied him access to his labs.”

Bluebird. The word lances through her. The bird in the cage. The bird waiting to be set free. The bird she almost killed as a child. Anyone who knows her story would know the symbolism, and Dylan picked it as the name for the most important work of his career.

“So, very badly. What happened to the subjects? These willing volunteers?”

“Charley—”

“I thought we were trusting each other,” she says.

While none of the men across from her reaches for a weapon, they stiffen at her volume; this subtle reminder of what she’s capable of, and how they’re trapped in a confined, airborne space with those skills.

“They tore themselves apart,” Cole answers. “Quite literally. We called it going lycan.”

He lets her absorb this. Lets it sink in—how much danger Dylan put her in by giving her the drug without her consent. The possibility of being raped by Jason Briffel was the least of it.

“We conducted extensive psychological profiles on each man to determine what his fears and phobias were. We tried to avoid asking the question directly, because we didn’t want them to anticipate the tests that lay ahead. Once the profile was complete, we took them to a secure location and set them loose in a kind of obstacle course, where they were presented with different physical variations of their greatest fears. For some it was confined spaces; for others it was the possibility of drowning. A snake in an unexpected place. We called it the Fear Matrix.”