Selene’s Reviews > Twelve > Status Update

But Briggs and Sterling’s twins were expected to make their arrival early—and that meant any day. “I vote yes on the onesies,” I declared. “All in favor?” Sloane asked formally. I leaned back against Dean, and Lia leaned against me before we all chorused in unison, “Aye.”

There were nine and a half weeks left until Michael and Sloane would be home. Nine and a half weeks before I could look at Dean and know he wasn’t leaving the next day. Three years until Mackenzie would join the program. Who knew how long to find the brothers.

Lia won’t be here to die. “It was a test,” she confirms gently. She leans forward, touches her forehead to her mother’s. “Tell me you love me.” It’s Lia who turns, not Sadie. It’s Lia whose hair her mother is brushing. She’ll always be Lia now. “I love you, Sadie.” It would be easier, for Lia, if that were a lie

This is the truth: there is blood on Sadie’s hands, on Lia’s. One lie—the right lie—can doom a man. She wishes a lie could save her mother. He’s going to kill you someday. All of you.

“I love you, Mama.” Lia can make that sound and feel true without having to worry about whether or not it still is. “Even though you’re planning on telling him everything I tell you, even though you’ll stand back and let him put me in a hole in the ground, even though you’ll watch me starving and dying of thirst and look straight through me until he gives me permission to exist again—I love you.”

Whatever happens, pretend that it isn’t happening to you. Sadie is good at pretending. Lia is better. After all, she’s pretended to be Sadie all these years.

“I don’t have visions.” Truths get more potent the longer you keep them from your tongue. There’s years of power in this one. “I never have. He doesn’t have them, either. He’s a liar. I’m a better one, and I will literally rip his eyes out of their sockets the next time he comes to my bed.”

“For the record…” Lia managed to pull Mackenzie’s attention away from the killer’s corpse. “When he said that what he tried to do to you—what he did to the others—wasn’t a pleasure?” Lia spat in the dead’s man direction. “He lied.”

But in Quentin Nichols’s line of work, he had to know what to say, how to manipulate a target, how to defuse a dangerous situation… Or how to blow it up

NEVERMIND, ITS THE CRISIS GUY