“Are you okay?” I asked. Emily had been Thea’s best friend.
“I don’t do vulnerable,” Thea retorted. “It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.” She paused. “Bex didn’t want you to tell me, did she?”
“Not exactly.”
I could practically hear Thea shrugging that off—or trying to. “Just out of curiosity,” she said lightly, “exactly how many Hawthornes are having meltdowns right now?”
“Thea.”
“It’s called schadenfreude, Avery. Though really, the Germans should come up with a word that more precisely captures the emotion of getting petty satisfaction out of knowing that the world’s most arrogant bastards have itty-bitty feelings, too.” Thea wasn’t as cold as she liked to pretend to be, but I knew better than to call her on it where Hawthornes were concerned.
“Are you going to call Rebecca?” I asked instead.
“And let her avoid my call?” Thea replied tartly. There was a beat. “Of course I am.” She’d let Rebecca go once. She wasn’t going to again. “Now, if that’s everything, I have an empire to build and a girl to chase.”
“Take care of her, Thea,” I said.
“I will.”
CHAPTER 19
Oren waited until I was off the phone with Thea to make his presence known. He stepped into view, and I forced my brain to focus.
“Anything yet?” I asked him.
“No luck tracing the courier service, but the team I sent to the rendezvous point where Toby was supposed to meet Eve reported in again.”
The memory of two words rang in my mind: shots fired. “Did you figure out who placed the nine-one-one call?” I asked, holding on to my calm the way a person dangling over a forty-foot drop holds on to whatever they can reach.
“The call was placed from a neighboring warehouse. My men tracked down the owner. He has no idea who placed the call, but he did have something for us.”
Something. The way Oren said that made my stomach feel like it had been lined with lead. “What?”
“Another envelope.” Oren waited for me to process before he continued.
“Sent last night via courier, untraceable. The warehouse owner was paid cash to give it to anyone who came asking about a nine-one-one call.
Payment came with the package, so it’s likewise untraceable.” Oren held out the envelope. “Before you open it—”
I wrenched it out of his hands. Inside, there was a picture of Toby, his face bruised and swollen, holding a newspaper with yesterday’s date. Proof of life. I swallowed and turned the picture over. There was nothing on the back, nothing else in the envelope.
As of yesterday, he was alive. “No ransom demand?” I choked out.
“None.”
I looked back at Toby’s bruises, his swollen face. “Were you able to find out anything about the family of David Golding?” I asked, trying to get a grip on myself.
“Currently out of the country,” Oren replied. “And their financials are clear.”
“What now?” I asked. “Do we know where Eli and Mellie are? What about Ricky? Is Constantine Calligaris still in Greece?” I hated how frantic I sounded and the way my mind was jumping from possibility to possibility with no segue: Eve’s half-siblings, my father, Zara’s recently estranged husband, who else?
“I’ve been tracking all four of the individuals you just mentioned for more than six months,” Oren reported. “None were within two hundred miles of the location of interest when Toby was taken, and I have no reason to suspect any kind of involvement from any of them.” Oren paused. “I also did some checking into Eve.”