“We’re not a couple,” Libby insisted. “This isn’t my life, Ave. It’s yours.” She looked down, her hair, dyed black with rainbow tips, falling into her face. “And experience has taught me that I am utterly deficient when it comes to love. So.” Libby thrust the cowboy hat at me. “I am not in love with Nash Hawthorne. We are not a couple. We are not dating. And he is definitely not in love with me.”
“Avery.” Oren announced his presence. I turned to face him, and my pulse jumped.
“What is it?” I asked. “Toby?”
“This arrived by courier in the dead of night.” Oren held out an envelope with my name written across the front in elegant script. “I screened it—no trace of poison, explosives, or recording devices.”
“Is it a ransom demand?” I asked. If it was a ransom demand, I could call Alisa, have her pay it.
Not waiting for a reply, I took the envelope from Oren. It was too heavy to just be a letter. My senses heightened, the world around me falling into slow motion, I opened it.
Inside, I found a single sheet of paper—and a familiar golden disk.
What the hell? I looked up. “Jameson!” He was already on his way to me. We were wrong. The words died, trapped in my throat. The person who kidnapped Toby wasn’t after the disk.
I stared at it, my mind racing.
“Why would Toby’s abductor send that to you?” Jameson asked. “Proof of life?”
“Proof that they have him.” I didn’t want to be making the correction, but this wasn’t proof of life. “And the fact that they sent it,” I continued, steeling myself, “means that either the person who took Toby doesn’t know what the disk is worth…”
“Or they don’t care.” Jameson laid a hand on my shoulder.
Toby’s okay. He has to be. He has to. The disk burning my palm like a brand, I closed my fist around it and made myself read the accompanying message. The paper was linen, expensive. Letters had been scripted onto it in a deep blood red.
A
RE
ANCE
A R
“That’s it?” Jameson said. “There was nothing else?”
I checked the envelope again. “Nothing.” I brought my fingertip to the writing—and the red ink. My stomach twisted. “That is ink, isn’t it?”
Blood red.
“I don’t know,” Jameson replied intensely, “but I do know what it says.”
I stared at the letters scattered across the page.
A
RE
ANCE
A R
“It’s a simple trick,” Jameson told me. “One of my grandfather’s favorites. You decode the message by inserting the same sequence of letters into every blank. Five letters, in this case.”
My heart brutalizing the inside of my rib cage, I tried to focus. What five letters could go after A or RE and before ANCE?
After a few seconds, I saw it. Slowly, painstakingly, my brain ticked off the answer, letter by letter. “V. E. N.” I took a sharp breath. “G. E.”
Venge. Completed, the message was anything but comforting. “Avenge,” I made myself say out loud. “Revenge. Vengeance.” Decoded, the last line seemed more like a signature.
My eyes flashed to Jameson’s, and he said it for me. “Avenger.”
CHAPTER 13
I texted Grayson and Xander. When they met us in the circular library, Eve was with them. Wordlessly, I held up the disk. Hesitantly, Eve took it from me, and the room went silent.
“How much did you say it was worth?” she asked, her voice a jagged whisper.
I shook my head. “We don’t know, not exactly—but a lot.” It was another four or five seconds before Eve reluctantly handed the disk back to me.
“There was a message?” Grayson asked, and I passed the paper over. “They didn’t demand a ransom,” he noted, his voice almost too calm.
My chest burned like I’d been holding a breath for far too long, even though I hadn’t. “No,” I said. “They didn’t.” The day before, I’d come up with three motives for kidnapping. The kidnapper wanted something from Toby. The kidnapper wanted to use Toby as leverage.
Or the kidnapper wanted to hurt him.
One of those options seemed much more likely now.
Xander craned his neck over Grayson’s shoulder to get a closer look at the note. He decoded the message as quickly as Jameson had. “Revenge themed. Cheery.”
“Revenge for what?” Eve asked desperately.
The obvious answer had occurred to me the moment I’d decoded the message, and it hit me again now with the force of a shovel swung at my gut. “Hawthorne Island,” I said. “The fire.”
More than two decades earlier, Toby had been a reckless, out-of-control teenager. The fire that the world presumed had taken his life had also taken the lives of three other young people. David Golding. Colin Anders Wright. Kaylie Rooney.
“Three victims.” Jameson began circling the room like a panther on the prowl. “Three families. How many suspects does that give us in total?”
Eve moved, too, toward Grayson. “What fire?”
Xander popped between them. “The one that Toby accidentally-but-kind-of-on-purpose set. It’s a long, tragic story involving daddy issues, inebriated teenagers, premeditated arson, and a freak lightning strike.”
“Three victims.” I repeated what Jameson had said, but my eyes went to Grayson’s. “Three families.”
“One yours,” Grayson replied. “And one mine.”
My mom’s sister had died in the fire on Hawthorne Island. Billionaire Tobias Hawthorne had saved his own family’s reputation by pinning the blame for the fire on her. Kaylie Rooney’s family—my mom’s family—was full of criminals. The violent kind.
The kind who hated Hawthornes.
I turned and walked toward the door, my stomach heavy. “I have to make a call.”
Out in one of Hawthorne House’s massive, winding corridors, I dialed a number that I had only called once before and tried to ignore the memory that threatened to overwhelm me.
If my worthless daughter had taught you the first damn thing about this family, you wouldn’t dare have dialed my number. The woman who’d birthed and raised my mother wasn’t exactly the maternal type. If that little bitch hadn’t run, I would have put a bullet in her myself. The last time I’d called, I’d been told to forget my grandmother’s name and that, if I was lucky, she and the rest of the Rooney family would forget mine.
Yet there I was, calling again.
She picked up. “You think you’re untouchable?”
I took the greeting as evidence that she’d recognized my number, which meant that I didn’t need to say anything but “Do you have him?”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Her rough, throaty voice lashed at me like a whip. “You really think I can’t get to you, Miss High and Mighty? You think you’re safe in that castle of yours?”
I’d been told that the Rooney family was small-time, that their power paled compared to that of the Hawthorne family—and the Hawthorne heiress. “I think that it would be a mistake to underestimate you.” I balled my left hand into a fist as my right hand’s grip on the phone went viselike. “Do. You. Have. Him.”