She stepped forward. “Wouldn’t be grateful if what?”
“Just tell everyone to go, okay?” Panic made my voice rise.
“You want them to go?” She stabbed a finger toward the door. “You want to disappoint them and tell them you don’t give a shit that they care about you? Do it your damned self.”
Pen crossed her arms and gave me her best probing stare. The one she normally used on the teenagers she counseled at the school. I was used to interrogating hardened perps who lied as easily as they breathed, but Penelope Griffin had her own methods for applying the screws to stubborn teens—and recalcitrant best friends.
I could feel my temper unraveling. If I didn’t end this soon, I would attack her and say things I didn’t mean but wouldn’t be able to take back. “Fine,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.
I pushed past her, but she grabbed my arm.
All pretense disappeared from her expression. “What are you hiding?”
Cold fear swam under my skin. She had the look in her eyes. Pen wasn’t an Adept, but sometimes she had scary intuition. Maybe it was a skill she’d honed after years of studying human nature, or maybe the ability to read people was what had led her to psychology in the first place. Regardless, that look told me she wouldn’t let me out of that room until I came clean.
I looked her directly in her eyes. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit.” She laughed in my face. “You think I don’t see it?”
My gaze strayed toward the door. “See what?”
“The drinking, for one.”
Frowning, I looked at her. “Please. It’s not that bad.”
She pursed her lips. “Denial, defensiveness. Something’s been eating you for weeks.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she slashed a hand through the air. “And don’t blame it on the moons again. This started before that. After Danny’s accident.”
“Gee, Pen, maybe I’m still dealing with the fact he almost died. Ever think of that?”
“Try that misdirection bullshit on someone who’ll fall for it, Kate.”
I closed my eyes. I’d been soaking in my secret for weeks. Marinating in guilt until my fingertips were pruney. That was the problem with lies. The only cure for the guilt that came with them was to tell the truth. But the consequences of coming clean were usually worse than the guilt, which is why you lied to begin with.
I’d planned to keep lying to Pen when she walked into the room. But when I opened my eyes and saw the determined tilt of her chin and the hardness of her eyes, I knew that lying to her face would cause more destruction than coming clean.
She was inviting me to jump off the cliff, and I was too exhausted to keep clinging to the edge. “I cooked.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I cooked, Pen.”
Her mouth worked open and closed for a moment. “Wh—when? Why?”
“When Danny was in his coma. With Volos.” My heart should have been pounding and my palms swampy, but they weren’t. I was too numb.
“But—You mean you let Volos cook, right? He said he could cook the antipotion. You were just going to pick it up. Not cook.”
I shook my head. “When I met him at the old brewery, he admitted he couldn’t finish the potion. He—” I cleared my throat because it suddenly felt clogged. “Without knowing who cooked the recipe for Gray Wolf, he couldn’t finish it. So, I—I read it. And then after Bane hexed John with Gray Wolf, I had to do the final processes to finish the antipotion alone.”
The sounds of music and laughter from the living room crept under the door to fill the silent space growing between us. Pen’s normally dark complexion was pale, and her eyes were showing too much white.
The silence shouldn’t have gotten to me. I’d used it as a tactic against criminals for years—too long to fall for it myself. But Pen’s silence wasn’t some sort of interrogation tactic. I’d shocked her, and now that the words had left my mouth I wanted to snatch them back and push them back down into the dark place inside me.
I swallowed and crossed my arms. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Her numbed expression hardened. “What do you want me to say, Kate?” She sounded soul-tired.
I blinked. All these weeks of hiding this secret, I’d played out what would happen when I was discovered over and over. Fired from the force, shunned by friends and family—the works. But never in all that time had I imagined what would happen if I came clean, much less what I’d want to hear.
While I grappled with that, Pen rubbed at her eyebrows. “Christ. Why couldn’t you have told me this yesterday? Or a month ago?”
That brought me up short. It wasn’t the complaint so much as the lack of something in her voice. “Why don’t you sound more surprised?”
She crossed her arms and leaned back against the door. “Because the instant you told me, everything made sense. Plus, for real, Katie, this job’s been a kick in the ass all the way. It was only a matter of time until you had to use magic.”
I blinked. “This isn’t about the job.”
She arched a black brow. “No?”
“I did it to save Danny.”
“Who was in a coma because of that fucking case.”
Pain punched me in the chest. It was one thing to see the disappointment in her face, but something else to hear damning words come from the one person I’d hoped would understand. “Screw you.”
“You have a lot of fucking nerve being mad at me,” she said, her voice rising. She pointed a finger toward the shut door. “There are thirty people out there ready to celebrate your abstinence from magic and you choose now to tell me you’ve been lying to us for weeks?”
Confusion kept me silent for a few moments. I had expected anger, sure, but I had not expected to be bitched at about my timing.
“Why the hell do you think I told you I didn’t want a party?”
She threw up her hands. “Well, that’s just fucking fantastic.” Pushing away from the door, she began pacing at the foot of my bed. I crossed my arms and watched her, cursing myself all the while for not bringing a bottle of hooch into the room with me. When she finished her debate with herself, she stopped and speared me with an ultimatum-glare. “You’re going to have to play along.”
My mouth fell open. “What? You can’t seriously expect me to go through with this.”