Betrayal. You don’t know it until you feel it and once you do, all you can do is envy your past self. Because there’s something they don’t tell you about traitors. You have to love them before you can ever hate them and when it comes time to hate them, you probably love them too much to let yourself do it.
So instead, you hate yourself. You hate how you didn’t see it coming. You hate that you ever trusted them to begin with. But most of all, you hate the fact that you still love them, even though you know you shouldn’t.
“Push upwards against my hand as hard as you can.”
I did as Doctor Hughes said, holding my hand out in a fist and shoving it up into her palm. The movement made my back burn. “Push, Morgan,” she said again.
I looked up at her. “I am pushing.”
It wasn’t a protest. It was a fact, and that was the part that scared me. If Doctor Hughes shared my concern, she didn’t let it show. She just pulled up her clipboard and made her notes. She did this a lot—saying nothing and writing everything.
This drove Dad crazy. “How’s she doing, Doc?”
Dad had become a continuous presence, looming over my shoulder with his arms crossed and an expression that dared anyone to step within a five-foot radius of his daughter. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to mind. It was nice to have someone watching my back all the time.
Doctor Hughes took a moment before answering him, which I knew could only bring bad news. I braced myself, feeling the muscles in my shoulder moan. Two surgeries down, three to go. “You’ll recover,” she said, finally. “I expect you to regain full use of your arm, but there will be permanent complications.”
Yeah. Permanent complications. No kidding.
“What kind of complications?” Dad asked for me.
Doctor Hughes looked right at me as she answered. “Stiffness, mostly,” she said. “It will happen a lot at first. It will probably lock up during exercises and, as you know, when you wake up it will feel sore.” I did know. It sometimes took hours for me to move my arm in the morning. I had to eat breakfast with my right hand, which only resulted in shaky spoons, milky pajamas, and far less cereal in my stomach than originally anticipated. “Eventually your muscles will heal again and the effects of the cut will fade, but that will take a very long time. Years. Decades, even.”
Doctor Alex tucked her clipboard under her arm. Dad nodded like it was exactly what he expected to hear. I don’t remember what I did. Probably nothing. I did a lot of that in the days following the death of William Kidd.
“Do you have any additional questions while we’re here?” she asked. Dad shook his head, but she wasn’t looking at him. She made it very clear that she was talking to me when she asked, “Morgan?”
Questions? Yeah. I had a lot of questions. Like when had it all gotten so hard or how long my friend had been planning on stabbing me in the back. I wanted to know why Will hadn’t talked to anyone and who had told him that he wasn’t supposed to. I wanted to know who had done this to him, I wanted to know why, and I wanted to know why he had let himself fall into that trap.
Questions weren’t the problem. The problem was getting answers.
“Morgan?” I looked up from the grey speckles tile, met with those big brown eyes and dark hair that bounced. Will had loved it when Doctor Hughes’ hair bounced. “If you have any questions, now is the time to ask.”
And so I asked the only one that I knew a doctor could answer. “Can someone my age have heart attacks?”
Dad shifted and I knew that I had somehow caught him off guard. That he thought his daughter’s heart attacks were something that he should probably know. That he was wondering how many other things he had forgotten to notice over the past few months.
But these things didn’t show in his expression and Doctor Hughes didn’t show anything either. Doctors and spies are a lot alike in that way, I realized. They have to control their emotion. Hide it. I had to if Will would have made a very good spy.
But he had fooled some of the best minds the country had to offer. He had fooled my dad. He had fooled me. Something in my gut told me that William Kidd would have made an excellent spy.
“Heart attacks are possible at any age,” the doctor informed me. “But at your age, they’re highly unlikely. Do you feel as though you’ve experienced a heart attack?”
She fiddled with her clipboard again, rustling through the stack papers. They were all mine, I had to remember. Notes from surgery. Medical histories. Medications. I wondered why so many people had papers about me and if that was going to be something that just kept adding up. Were my files just going to keep getting bigger and bigger? How many papers had people kept about Mom before she died? How many papers had people kept on Will?
“Mags,” Dad said, jarring me from my thoughts. “Talk to the doctor.”
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head clear. That was a mistake. Heads lead to necks and necks lead to shoulders and mine was currently stitched up in all the wrong places. “What were we talking about?”
“Do you feel as though you’ve experienced a heart attack?” She asked again.
“Oh,” I said, recalling the conversation. “Right. I don’t know—I mean I think that’s what it might be. I think that’s what they’re supposed to feel like.”
“The doctor nodded, flipping to one final page and staying there. “And how might that feel?”
Even just remembering the feeling made me want to swim away. That drowning feeling that I had felt when they told me my mother was dead. When a woman was after us in Romania. When one of my closest friends tried to kill me. It was a bad thing that happened at bad times and I knew that if I thought about it, it would come creeping back. That I would lose control right there in front of Doctor Hughes and that this time, no one would be there to put me back together. “A box,” I blurted. “It feels like I’m being shoved into this—this box, sort of. It’s this tiny box that I barely fit in and then it starts filling up with water and I can’t breathe and I can’t move.”
I waited for a response. Maybe a look of doubt or a protest, but nothing came. She just waited patiently for me to continue like she’d heard it all before. “Sometimes the water is so cold that my fingers start to lose feeling,” I continued. “If I’m in there long enough, I start to lose my legs too. One of these days, I’m going to lose all of myself, but the worst part is the loss of control, I think. It’s like I’m on autopilot. I’m on autopilot in my own head.”
This time, the doctor nodded like she knew exactly what I was talking about. “Any history of mental illness in the family?”
I shook my head no, because as far as I knew, we were all healthy. But Doctor Hughes wasn’t asking me. She was asking my father who, to my surprise, answered, “Yes.”
I turned to look at him, meeting his gaze just in time to see him look away. His shoulders rolled forward. He looked at the doctor—just at the doctor. He wouldn’t look at me. Something told me that he couldn’t. “Her grandmother has a history.”
His arms were crossed. His words were cautious. I knew that he wasn’t lying, but for some reason I couldn’t make myself believe that he was telling the truth. I had been with Grandma more than I’d been with anyone else in my life. I saw her nearly every day of the school year. We spent the summers together. Not once had she showed any signs that she, too, might be drowning. Or maybe I just hadn’t been looking. “Why?” he asked, his voice dripping with skepticism.
But she had gotten all she needed from him and was now looking straight at me. This was our conversation, and she was going to make sure that everyone in that room knew it. “What you just described are not symptoms of a heart attack,” she said. I would’ve felt relief, but it wasn’t the end of her sentence. “But they are the symptoms of a panic attack.”
“A what?” Dad and I said at the same time.
“A panic attack,” she repeated. “I don’t have enough information to diagnose you and I’m not a trained expert in the field, but you’re describing panic attacks to a T.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“They’re one of many possible responses to excessive or disorderly anxiety and”—she looked me up and down, everything she wanted to say slimmed down into one look—“I’d honestly be surprised if you weren’t triggered at this point.”
I looked back to my father, who was able to meet me this time. Neither of us said anything. Heck, neither of us were sure what we were supposed to say. What did panic attacks do? What triggered them and could we stop them? Could someone who had panic attacks still be a spy?
But even through the silence, Doctor Hughes heard our questions. “They’re usually pretty manageable,” she assured us both. “I’ve known many agents who have learned to control them. A lot of time soldiers and doctors get them too—it’s a part of a high-stress job. In fact, even a few of your classmates have gotten them over the years. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“So I’ll still be able to—”
“Yes, Morgan,” she said. “Don’t worry. The CIA isn’t going to kick you out of school for getting panic attacks—that is, if you actually are experiencing them. We aren’t sure yet, remember? I can call a few friends and we can check and see what’s going on, okay?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No ma’am.”
She looked to my father, then back to me. “I’ll be back in another hour to change your bandages,” she said, flipping her clipboard under her arm once more. “If you need me between now and then, you just holler in any given direction and I’ll get here as fast as I can.”
I nodded and Dad said, “Thanks, Alex,” before she popped through the curtain and vanished. It was like some sort of one-woman magician’s act.
All of a sudden it was just Dad and I in that tiny space. That was the way things had been for the past few days. Sometimes Grandpa Joe would stick his head in to make sure all was well, but he was usually busy with whatever was happening outside of the infirmary. Occasionally Grandma would make the drive up from the Gallagher Academy and give Dad a chance to get some sleep, but mostly it was just Dad and I. Together. Silent.
“Has anyone gotten a hold of—”
“No one knows where his parents are, Mags,” he said before I could even finish. “They haven’t called in for months, because they don’t care if anyone knows where they are. To them their boy is alive and well.” He sat down in the chair that he kept at the end of the bed, eyes locked on me.
I felt him watching me—watching the stiffness in my arm as I sat back in the bed. Watching the way I couldn’t look up anymore. I knew that, despite my best efforts, Dad saw what Will’s death had done to me. I knew that he saw how it tore me apart and I knew that he probably hated me for it. Hated me for being so weak. For continuing to trust a traitor, even though he was long gone. God knows I hated me.
“Maybe they’re better off for it,” he added.
I nodded, scratching at the back of my hand. The skin there was raw and red, but I couldn’t help it. I kept scratching. Kept trying to claw away the itch of his final breath on my skin. It was like a ghost, lingering there on my skin. Like a shadow I just couldn’t shake.
“How’s Bill?” I asked, desperate to get my mind off of his other half. His missing half.
“Better,” Dad told me, but I was too tired to try and tell if it was the truth or if he was just telling me things I wanted to hear. “Still in critical condition. Whoever they are, they gave him a good beating.”
“So he wont be talking anytime soon, then?”
Something changed in my father’s expression just then. A new darkness fell over him as he leaned forward, elbows on knees, and I knew that he really wanted me to hear what came next. “Listen to me, Mags,” he said. “Bill isn’t even breathing on his own yet, okay?”
It wasn’t a statement. It wasn’t an update. It was a reminder. A reminder to not get my hopes up. A reminder that, at this point, neither William had left dock twelve alive. “Does he know?” I asked. “About Will?”
“We don’t know.”
I found myself hoping that he didn’t. I prayed that Bill didn’t find out about his best friend until it was absolutely necessary or at least until he made a recovery. Because if Bill knew that he was coming back to a world without Will, he might not have a reason to wake up.
Then again, who was to say he’d be wrong? Bill had always followed Will, so why did this time have to be any different? Really, could anyone blame him if he chose to leave?
Again with the questions. So many questions. No answers. They just kept flooding my mind, each one rolling over the last until they came falling out. “Who shot him?” I asked. I hadn’t really meant to ask it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.
My mind raced back to the dock. It felt like I’d been there so many times. In my dreams. In my reports. The scene repeated itself, set on an endless loop of agony, over and over and over until I felt like someone was carving at my brain. But there was one part—one part that I couldn’t quite see again. One part that I couldn’t quite figure out.
“It was one of his people,” Dad said for probably the hundredth time. He leaned back in his chair with ease, balancing it on two legs instead of the usual four. “I told you this Mags. Will was a hitman who failed to kill you and when hitmen fail to kill their targets, they end up dead. Usually by the hand of their own.”
There was a type of confidence with his words. The type of nonchalance that came with familiarity. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that he knew the inner workings of the assassin business, but I did know better. Zachary Goode was no killer. Of that much, I was sure.
“I ran after the guy and tried to get information out of him,” he continued. “But he was good. Gone before I could even get there.”
My heart leapt. “You—you didn’t see them?”
He shook his head.
Suddenly I felt the world shaking again. The slice in my shoulder burned bright. Even with the certainty in his voice, I felt like Dad was wrong. Completely and totally wrong. It hadn’t been one of Will’s guys to take him out. Will didn’t have guys. Will had been desperate. Gone. He wasn’t a part of a team. “I saw Mom.”
There was a sudden bang as chair hit tile. Dad looked like he was about to choke on his own spit, but he managed to stop himself. “Come again?”
I knew how stupid it sounded. I knew what her records said. Mom was dead. Plain and simple. Except I had seen her. I was sure of it. Mom had been the one to shoot Will. “It was Mom,” I whispered, so low that I wasn’t sure he could hear me.
But of course he had. That’s the thing about superspy parents. They not only have superspy hearing, but they also have parent hearing. “Mags,” he said. “Stop. We’re not doing this.”
“It was her, Dad,” I said, suddenly so much louder than I thought I would be. “It was her. She was at the right angle and she was just far enough away and I saw her in the tree line—”
“Mom’s dead, Maggie,” he said, his voice cold. He looked like he had aged forty years in thirty seconds. “Don’t kid yourself.”
“Mom has something to do with this!” I yelled at him. I hadn’t meant to yell, but I guess I thought he’d hear me if I did. Sometimes yelling was the only way to get him to listen. “I mean, why was there a hit on me in the first place? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Jesus, you sound like Bex.”
“You mean like when she told you that Mom wasn’t flying the plane?”
His eyes snapped up to me and I could tell if he was angry or just desperate. The two are so easily confused. “How did you know about that?”
“I heard you, Dad,” I said, not sure how it was possible for him not to know by now. “I hear everything.”
“You should have told me,” he hissed. Then, louder, he said, “You should have told me as soon as you found out about that. I could’ve helped you—I thought we were telling each other everything nowadays, Mags.”
“Oh, you mean like how you told me about Grant?”
He closed his eyes. As if by closing his eyes he could stop hearing it all. Stop listening to me. I couldn’t let my father stop listening to me. Not again. “The last time you saw Grant, you were three,” he said, teeth clenched. “Why would I tell you about—?”
“Because he’s got something to do with Mom,” I screamed. One look from him and I knew I was right. “Doesn’t he? These cases are related, aren’t they? That's what Will said, too—”
"Will was a traitor, Maggie," he told me. As if I needed the damn reminder. As if I could even think about the boy without that last memory of him clouding up all of the others. "Don't you ever forget that William Kidd was a traitor."
"I can't forget that," I spat. "But that doesn't change the fact that he was right, wasn't he?"
A second can make all the difference in a person’s life. Especially when they’re trained in the art of detecting features of expression. A second was all it took to see my father cut his eyes at me and cut away again. A second was all it took to spot the crease in his forehead before it disappeared. It only took a single, fleeting second for me to see that Dad knew something that I didn’t.
“What?” I said. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
But there was a reason he wasn’t telling me—justified or not. I couldn’t expect him to change that now, so I let my mind retrace the last few months. The last year. However long it took for me to collect the puzzle pieces, filing through memory after memory. Dinners after ops after bad hair days, sorting through the irrelevant stuff to get to the bottom of it. To what really mattered. Mom announced MIA. The fights with Dad. Townsend Squared moving the case to MI6—wait.
Natasha Azarov.
“Why was Grandpa Joe looking into the disappearance of Natasha Azarov?” I asked Dad. I wasn’t quite sure why that was the biggest question on my mind. Maybe that name had just showed up too many times for it to be coincidence anymore.
Judging by the look on Dad’s face, I was right, but like the good spy he was, he didn’t let much else show. “Your Mom and I worked with Natasha back when you were seven,” he told me. “When she went MIA, Joe and I wanted to help. That’s it.”
But that wasn’t it. Not by a long shot. “You’re lying to me, Dad.”
“You’re way out of line, young lady.”
Young lady. Ha.
I felt that anxiety rise up in me again, stuffing me into that tiny little box and letting the hose run. No. Not now. I was so close. I couldn’t deal with this right now. My mind jumped back to the closet in Romania, squeezed up against Luke Collins—the boy with the tail.
Or was he?
“They weren’t tailing Collins,” I muttered to no one in particular.
But since Dad was the only one in the room, he was the one who heard me. “Maggie, don’t do this.”
I heard the footsteps. The sounds of searching. Finally, I heard that voice. “We need the boy,” I repeated, new meaning placed upon the words. “They weren’t looking for Collins. They were looking for Matt.”
“Stop this.”
Yeah. Matt. They had been looking for Matt. “Matt, Natasha, Ellie, Grant, me,” I said, listing off the names of people with targets on their backs. Just the ones I knew about. The list had gotten so long. When had it gotten so long? “Do you know what all of those people have in common, Dad?”
“Morgan Ann—”
“You.” The word was fat and heavy, sitting on top of the silence and weighing it down. “It’s you, Dad. They all know you. You and Mom.”
Dad stood up this time, red rising into his face as he shook his head. “Stop. Just stop.”
“Why did Aunt Liz really come to teach at the Gallagher Academy this year?” I asked him. I guess I didn’t really need him to answer. I think I had known for a while now. Ever since Ellie had vanished. “It was for protection, wasn’t it? You put Aunt Liz under the safest roof in the country because she has a target on her back, too.”
“Listen to me, little girl,” he spat. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so furious with me before. Maybe not at anyone. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what you’re talking about. Quite letting these ideas run wild in your head.”
“But Dad,” I said, unable to even let the fear of a father scorned stop me. For the first time in months, I felt hope welling up inside of me. I felt the high that came with cracking the case. I felt alive. “If Mom knows this, then she’s got a plan. She could have been at that dock—she could’ve been the one to—”
And then I stopped, because suddenly I didn’t want to be right. Suddenly, my mother had killed one of my closest friends. Suddenly, I wanted to puke. “What if she’s alive?” I whispered, not sure I wanted an answer.
“Your mother is dead, Maggie,” he said. “Aunt Bex found a body. She’s gone.”
“But Dad, I saw her—”
But I didn’t get a chance to get my sentence out, because Dad kicked his chair, sending it flying across that small space and underneath the turquoise curtain. He spun on me, fire in his eyes, and I knew that I had crossed the line. “You mother is gone Morgan, okay? She’s dead, and she left you and me and Matt behind and we just need to deal with that. You can’t let some shock-induced, dim-lighted daydream make you believe that she’s here because she’s not. Cam. isn’t. here! Have I made myself clear?”
My eyes started to sting, either with rage or with grief, but I wasn’t sure which. Maybe it was both. I looked up at my father. The man who would chase me to the ends of the earth. I couldn’t help thinking about who else had made that same promise once upon a time. “Crystal,” I whispered.
When I spoke, the flame in Dad’s eyes seemed to fade. Slowly, he faded back into reality, looking at me like he’d broken something. Maybe he had, I thought.
He straightened out the blankets on my lap and checked the cup next to me for water. “I’m sorry,” he said, so, so quietly.
“It’s fine,” I said back, but I felt a tear land on the sheet. I couldn’t help it.
“No, that was—I’m sorry. Can I get you anything?”
“Could you just—” I tried to look up at him, but I couldn’t. “Could you give me a minute?”
He stared at me for a long time, probably trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. I wished Mom were there. She was always so good at sorting us out when we got like this. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”
He fiddled with his hands as he walked towards the curtains, curling them into fists and uncurling them one finger at a time. When he pulled aside the curtain, he saw the chair sitting there, tipped over on its side. He picked it up, set it where it was supposed to go and then looked back at me. “I love you.”
I nodded, able to look up at him for just a second. God, why was it so hard to look at people all the time? “I love you, too,” I said, managing a smile for the briefest moment.
When he left, I felt safe using my good hand to cover my mouth, catching the sobs as they came. My best friend was dead. My mother was dead, and if she wasn’t, she had let us thing she was for a year. God, I had seen her. I was sure of it. I was so sure.
Maybe it had just been a trick of the light. Maybe it really had been one of Will’s guys. It was so hard to tell.
No. It was Mom. It had to be.
But it didn’t make any sense.
Maybe it would if anyone would tell me what was going on. God, what was going on? Why did I have a target on my back? Who else had a target on their backs. Dad? Grandma, Grandpa Joe? Who else was going to die before the year was up?
My shoulder burned and I remembered that I hadn’t been far from being an addition to that list. If someone hadn’t shot Will, I’d be dead—if Mom hadn’t shot Will, I’d be dead.
Mom. It had been Mom.
But no. I didn’t know what I was talking about. Don’t listen to Morgan because she’s clueless. A mental disaster. She falls apart on ops and gets her best friends killed. Sometimes, when she’s really feeling crazy, her Mom talks to her.
The numbness started to take over again. The absence was stronger than it had ever felt before. Soon enough, I stopped crying because soon enough, it stopped making me feel any better.
God. This was enough. I’d had enough. No one was going to listen to me? Fine. Who was I to say anything at all anyways? There was nothing left to say, so I just wasn’t going to say anything at all. I couldn’t.
I let my head fall back onto the pillow. My fight was gone. My strength gone. I just wanted to curl up and sleep forever. Maybe it wasn’t Bill they had to worry about. Maybe it was me. Maybe I’d be the next one to follow Will.
I squeezed my eyes shut, begging for sleep to take me away. Begging for my world to go black for even just a few hours. Yes. Sleep. I needed to sleep. God, I was so tired.
I would sleep. Give everyone else time to recharge. Give myself time to heal. I would go to sleep, but when I woke up, there would be hell to pay.