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warily.
    “The usual,” Jackie said. “Your daughter is grilling me to make sure my loyalties lie with the family instead of my true and everlasting love, Markus King.”
    Julia nodded. “Good for her.”
    “Oh, shut up.”
    Julia’s cell phone rang, and she scrambled to pull it out of her pocket.
    “Hello?” After a pause, she glanced at Jackie and Crys. “I’ll be right back,” she said, leaving the room.
    Crys began to put out the contents of the shopping bags. Three bags of potato chips, a large package of M&Ms, a variety of frozen meals, and two plastic containers of sushi. She eyed the sushi with equal parts disgust and gratitude.
    Her mother was trying to make her happy. With convenience-store sushi, but still.
    “So you really had no choice back then,” Crys said quietly to Jackie. “You
had
to do what he said, like . . . like some kind of puppet.”
    “It didn’t feel like that,” Jackie said without a pause. “At the time, when I was doing those things, it felt like I had free will. Like I
wanted
to be doing them. But looking back at it . . . I know I didn’t.”
    Absently, Crys pressed her hand against her ribs, still bound with bandages and sore from where one of Markus’s minions had kicked and beaten her, all while Farrell looked on without stopping him.
    Ugh.
The absolute last person in the world Crys wanted to spend any time thinking about was Farrell Grayson. He was a rich kid from a family of Hawkspear members, known for his misdeeds and arrests more than anything else. He wasn’t a nice guy even before he was a society member, even before he received his marks. But now he was really bad news. He’d recently tried to get close to Crys—but only because Markus had ordered him to. Crys had been poking around the society, trying to find out secrets about Markus and her father in case it might help save Becca.
    And, unfortunately for her, before she found out that every time his lips moved it was either because there was a cigarette between them or he was lying, she’d really started to like Farrell.
    Crys was ashamed at how easily he’d been able to manipulate her, which was why she’d kept the details of their brief associationmostly to herself. But even now, if she were honest, she still found herself wanting to make excuses for everything Farrell did and all he lied about. She’d catch herself blaming what he’d done on his marks—after all, they were the same marks Jackie once had, before her aunt became pregnant with Markus’s half-immortal child, when they’d become null and void.
    But despite all that, Crys always came back to the one sure thing she knew about Farrell: Some of the things he’d done were unforgiveable.
    “I’m going out on the balcony,” Jackie said, thankfully pulling Crys out of her unwanted memories. “I need some air.”
    Crys offered her a bag of potato chips. “Hungry?”
    “No.” But she grabbed them anyway and left the kitchen just as Julia returned.
    “I found something, Crys,” Julia said. “You’ve been hiding things from me.”
    Her stomach sank. What was she in trouble for now?
    “What?”
    “This.” Julia pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. Crys recognized it immediately: the flyer advertising a photography show at a nearby gallery, which she’d thrown away when she’d cleaned out her purse earlier that morning. “Andrea Stone. She’s your favorite photographer, isn’t she?”
    Andrea Stone was known for her portraits. She traveled the world to find her subjects, none of them models or professionals. Real people with interesting faces, wrinkles, moles, warts, and all. Her work had been featured more than a dozen times on the cover of
National Geographic
, and Crys had every issue in her personal collection.
    Favorite photographer
was putting it mildly.
Primary inspiration
and
idol
? That was more like it.
    “I’m surprised you know that,” Crys said quietly, taking the flyer from her.
    “Maybe I know