If my question surprised her, she didn't show it. She blinked once, resting the barrel of her handgun against her knee, and shrugged. "I only know who they were."

My heart plummeted through the floor. "They're dead?" I whispered.

"If they're lucky."

Ciar's eyes flicked between us. I felt his unasked questions, but I couldn't look away from Tilda.

"Okay," I said slowly. "Who were they?"

"Jaelyn Thomas. Vanessa Edwards. Carrie Porterfield. Sofía Lopez. Anna Jeffries."

She recited them the same way I'd gone over the blond-haired, gray-eyed women so many times. Monica Jensen. Amanda Blecher. Crystal Harris. Valerie Kunath.

"Did Clarissa give you those names?" I asked.

She laughed. It bounced off the walls as her head fell back, a loud cacophony of insanity, and I wondered for the first time how reliable her mind was.

"Clarissa," she spat. "Clarissa was useless. She still is. Look what she's done for you."

I frowned. Yes, Clarissa had abandoned me in a time of need—on several occasions if I was honest—but she obviously knew her job. I had seen it in her face almost as often as I'd seen analytic stoicism; she cared about those women.

Tilda shook her head. "I wasn't working with the FBI, but I knew she was watching me. She always cared too much. Which is why she should have—"

She broke off abruptly, almost like she'd realized her temper had gone too far. When she spoke again, her voice was eerily calm, like the steady draw of water out to sea before it came crashing back in a tsunami.

"They were normal women," she said. "Women like me. Women starting families."

I remembered Donovan's hands on Valerie Kunath's swollen belly. "They were pregnant?"

A tiny incline of her head was confirmation enough.

"Where are they now?"

She shook her head, a frown marring her face.

"What about the others?" I leaned onto my hands and knees, an inch away from crawling across the splintery floor to shake the answers out of her. "Amanda, Monica, Crystal, Valerie?"

"They're safe," she whispered.

I froze. Safe? I'd expected another shrug, or maybe a confirmation of Donovan's involvement, but safe meant that she knew exactly where they were.

"Tilda, did you take those women?" I tried to imagine her lurking around Charlestown, stalking Donovan like a crazy ex-girlfriend and plucking the lookalikes that followed her out of his life.

She stared at me, something missing from her eyes, and suddenly it didn't seem so far off.

"I had to. They needed me." She smiled softly. "Just like you do."

I squinted. "Why do I need you?"

She looked hurt. I bit my lip; I hadn't meant it like that.

She turned to Ciar instead. "Do you remember the year we didn't talk?"

He let out a short, sharp bark of laughter, the handcuffs clanking as he tensed and hit the end of their length. "You mean the year you called me up after months of nothing and convinced me to give up my kidney?"

Her mouth tightened. "He was going to be the father of my child. I couldn't let him suffer."

"Come on, Tillie, you weren't even pregnant yet. Not even trying."

She didn't answer, only blinked. Something in that steady gaze made him stiffen, shifting his weight so he could lean toward her.

Her eyebrow quirked just the slightest bit upward.

"Fucking hell, Tillie," he whispered. "Why the hell wouldn't you say anything?"

"Because Donovan didn't want anybody to know. He had an image. We weren't married."

"So you hid away?"

"I didn't leave the house. And I didn't question anything, because he was so good to me. He brought me everything I needed, he waited on me hand and foot, he took me to appointments. I thought he was going to be the best father."

My mind whirled in dizzying circles, trying to catch up. There had been another pregnancy? One that Ciar hadn't known about?

"It was a boy," she said. "Michael. He was beautiful."

A boy? Everything in the nursery had been pink. No hint that another child had ever existed.

"Donovan took me down to Provincetown once I'd recovered. He proposed, and I said yes because—"

Her voice broke.

"Tilda, what happened to Michael?" I asked.

She went deathly still, her eyes zoned in on nothing. That catatonic stare chilled me, knowing that whatever was underneath was too unspeakable to repeat.

"He looked just like Donovan," she finally said, her voice so faint that I had to hold my own breath to hear. "Do you know how valuable a blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy is in some countries?"

My breath escaped in a soft rush, as if it had been knocked loose.

"Yeah," she said, watching me realize. "When we got home, he was gone."

"Somebody took him?"

"Somebody." Her chuckle was full of irony. "Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Donovan was the perfect distraught father. We cried together every night. And then things started appearing. Things we couldn't afford. I don't know if he thought it would ease the pain or what, but all it did was make me wonder.

"And then I caught him poking holes in his condoms a month later. He never saw me. But that's when I realized nothing was an accident."

She snorted with enough force to make me jump.

"He was such a fucking idiot. I would have said yes if he asked to try again. I never would have suspected a damn thing if he hadn't snuck around behind my back."

"Wait." With a loud groan from the floor, Ciar shifted, searching her face with enough intensity that even I had to look away. "You knew it was his when you came to me the second time?"

She stared right back, unmoved.

"Do you have any idea what I went through while we waited for that damn paternity test to come back?" he growled. "I spent the weekend freaking the hell out because I thought I was gonna be a father, and you knew it wasn't me?"

"I wanted it to be you," she hissed, crawling partway out into the space between us. "If there was a chance, any chance, then it meant maybe I could get away. If he found out it wasn't his—if I could go to him and say I was having your baby—then maybe he'd let me go and leave me alone. Because he's not the kind of person who just backs off and leaves women alone."

I slapped a hand over my mouth as a wave of nausea slammed me. I remembered her face in the engagement pictures, so happy and plump and nourished and glowing.

She really did have everything.

And Donovan had taken it all away. Sold their son? It seemed impossible, and yet the drastic change in her left no doubt in my mind. The weight she had lost mirrored my own in the wake of her death. Something monumental had shifted.

Ciar and I exchanged a glance, and it only took a second to see that we both believed her. I had seen the depths Donovan was willing to go to when he'd cornered me in my darkroom, and Ciar had seen them in his eyes when he'd stared down the security camera the night of the bonfire. I already knew he had no qualms about selling information to terrorists. What was the life of a child to him? Or the life of its mother?

A tiny gasp escaped my lips as the pieces started falling together. "You weren't the first."

"No." She lifted her chin, looking almost proud. "And I wasn't the last. He broke us all. But you know what?"

She sighed, her eyes fluttering closed, and relaxed back against the wall.

"I broke him right back." A tiny smile, the smallest drop of water fighting her ocean of sadness, struggled for room on her face. "After me, they were all blond. Gray-eyed. In a way, he did love me. It made them a lot easier to find."

"Where did you take them?" Ciar asked.

"Away." She shrugged. "Some of them were fine. Some of them were pregnant. But they all know too much to be safe going back home."

I frowned. "And you managed all this, all on your own?" It didn't seem possible that she had not only outsmarted someone the FBI had been after for years, but also whisked four women to safety without leaving a hint as to their whereabouts.

"Of course not. The only reason I'm alive is because I got really, really lucky." She tugged the right leg of her pants up, revealing the beginnings of a surgical scar that ran from her ankle and disappeared under the fabric well up her calf. "The hacker community is cutthroat and divided right down the middle. Those who do it for good, and those who do it for gain. Do you have any idea how many people come running when you say you know who Codec is?"

"Codec?" Ciar echoed.

"Donovan's alias," I said, remembering my first conversation with Clarissa.

"An underground group fighting human trafficking helped me set everything up. I joined them when I recovered. That's where the women went." Tilda glanced at the window over our heads. "They're safe."

Beside me, Ciar let out a shaky breath. "I saw your body..."

Tilda took a deep breath, an inhale that seemed to last forever. Her eyes sank deeper into her skin, the circles under them matching the gray of her irises.

I glanced at Ciar and immediately regretted it. He watched her with a pain that wasn't his; it was hers, but he felt every last bit of it in his soul nonetheless. If he could have reached out and swept it all away, he would have.

Finally she turned to me. "Do you remember Maria?"