“That year I spent with my brother, Tony. He was twenty, I was twenty-two. We were in for almost the same amount of time, they started him early. Had him doing local jobs in Southern California all through high school, put him in the US military at eighteen. He was just finishing up his two-year contract with the Marines that year. But he was in love with this girl.” I look over at both of them now. “Not a Company girl. And he wanted out, so he applied to the SEALs, thinking if he could just hang on to the military affiliation, the Company might let him have a life.”

“Did it work?” Harper asks.

“I f**king blew his head off three months ago. What do you think?”

“Why did you kill him?” Sasha asks.

“It was a job.” Tet’s answer comes out so fast it surprises even me. “Years eight and nine were spent running a shadow government in San Pedro Sula, down in Honduras.”

“So,” Sasha interrupts. “You weren’t just killing people. You were helping too, right?”

I want to lie to her so bad. Harper’s watching me, a little bit of hope in her eyes. “No,” I say, choosing to tell the truth. “I wasn’t in San Pedro Sula to fix things, Sasha. The government down in Honduras is as corrupt as the cartels.”

“And year ten. When I was turning sixteen, what were you doing then?” Harper redirects to the more recent years. The years that changed everything. The only years that matter right now.

I stare at her as I recall that day. It was confusing for me. It’s confusing for me now, but I’m trying to be honest, so I tell her the truth. “Looking for you, Lionfish.” She sighs at the name. It’s been tainted by the words in the journal, so I soften her hurt with more truth. “I did show up that year. No plane ticket that time, but I showed up anyway. You guys stayed pretty close to Anguilla, so I knew where to look.”

“We went to Tahiti that year, and the next two after.”

I shrug. “I know that now, but I did my best.”

“Did you want me that year?” she asks, a little bit of hope spilling out with her words.

Again, I want to lie. But I don’t have it in me to put up the pretenses. Besides, she’s gonna find out the truth sooner or later. “Not enough to admit it.”

“But you do now, right?” Sasha chimes in. “You want her now, even I can tell that.”

I look over at Harper, but she’s shaking her head and putting up her hand, shutting down the talk of her. She may or may not want to know more about that, but right now she’s on a mission for other information. “And the years between then and now? You said you were in some European country last year. But it sounds to me like that’s not your territory.”

“It’s not. But I’ve been on special assignments since then.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Harper says, pissed off. “So your tally, James? What’s your final tally?”

“Too many to count.”

She throws the notebook at me and jumps down off the Hummer hood, but I grab her wrist before she can escape, pulling her close until I can secure her by her shoulders. And then I lean into her ear and go in for the kill. “What’s your tally, Harper? How many have you killed? Do you even know?”

Sasha blows out a long breath like she can’t believe I just went there.

Harper shakes her head. “I’m not a killer. I don’t know why they tell you those things. I’m not a killer.”

“I am,” Sasha says, trying to break the tension. “I got four, James. When they came to blow up my grandparents’ ranch. I got four.”

I have to smile and appreciate that. “I know, Smurf. I heard. How many, Harper?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she tries again, clearly nervous about the new direction this conversation is taking.

“You probably don’t. You probably have no idea. Because you left the ship. You left them all there to die and never looked back. So how could you know?”

She turns her back, head still shaking.

“You can judge me if you want, but the truth is, Harper, we’re all killers here. Even you, baby. And your tally puts my first year to shame. Because you got thirteen souls, right out of the gate.”

Chapter Eight - James

Thirteen. I can almost hear the echo in her head.

She leans over to swallow down the bile before it comes up.

She knew. She knew she had to have killed some of them… but… thirteen. Yeah, that surprised everyone.

“What’d you use?” I ask as I put a hand on her shoulder and instead of shrugging me off, she lets it stay. Her body is hot and it feels like touching fire. “Because it certainly did the job.”

“Visine,” she says calmly. “Several bottles of Visine in the water pitchers at dinner. There were a lot of guests on the ship that night. Too many for me to pick out my new husband. So I poisoned them all.”

Clever. “Well, then you and I are more alike than you know. Because the poison you used is actually one of my calling cards.” I look over at Sasha. I think she’ll appreciate this little factoid. “The active ingredient in Visine is tetrahydrozoline.” I look back over to Harper. “I told you under the pier last week I had a little blue octopus in me. And the active poison in the blue-ringed octopus is tetrodotoxin.”

“Tet,” Sasha says with a smile. “That’s why you’re called Tet?”

I nod, but my eyes are still on Harper. “You used my calling card, Harper. Because when I want to kill someone for personal reasons and not get in trouble, that’s the way I have to do it. My assigned poison is tetrodotoxin, not Visine, but it’s got tet in the name and that’s too close.”

This changes everything. Everything I’ve been told over the past year is tainted with the view that they might think I killed all those people for Harper. How the f**k am I still alive?

The blackout, James, Tet whispers in my head. They know you’re confused. They know you’re missing time.

And that—that makes me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Harper snaps at me. “I killed thirteen people and you’re laughing? Is my father even alive?”

“Do you care?”

“Of course I care!”

“As far as I know he is. I have not spoken with him for a very long time.” I’m the one who turns away now. Because this will require a lot of thinking on my part. The problem is suddenly a puzzle. Who is who? How does it all fit together? Who is calling the shots? Why was I really sent to the beach? What the f**k happened in those hours I lost?