Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
STERLING
“ I don’t think there’s anything here,” I said finally. “You don’t remember this place, do you?”
Forrest’s shoes scuffed on the dirt floor, moving closer. The heat of his arm was welcome as he wrapped it around me. “I don’t,” he said, “None of this is familiar or means anything to me.”
“Then why would your father send us here?” I asked.
Forrest made a sound deep in his throat but didn’t answer. “Someone’s going to find us,” he said finally.
The light on my phone went out, and I realized it had gone dead. “I hope so,” I said.
Forrest’s arm tightened around me, pulling me down into his lap as he sat on the damp earth and leaned against the stone wall.
“You’ll get too cold,” I protested.
“I’m fine.” He held me close, and I let out a breath, absorbing his body heat.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a jerk all these months,” I whispered.
“You don’t owe me an apology,” he said. “I deserved all of it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “but I’m still sorry.” And I was. Not for being angry and hurt but for letting it go on so long. We might not get out of this cellar, and I’d wasted so much time. This man cradling me in his arms wasn’t a villain. He’d made a mistake, and he’d apologized. For so long, I’d said I wanted him to go away, to live a horrible, painful life without me. I’d wished for all sorts of vengeful things.
That was before.
And now?
Now, what I really wanted was Forrest. Not his misery or his abject apologies. Just Forrest. Preferably alive and not dead of exposure and starvation in an abandoned root cellar.
“We’re going to get out of here. Griffen will find us,” I said.
“Yeah, he will,” Forrest said. “And I bet it will be soon.”
I didn’t think either of us believed it.
The light on Forrest’s phone went out.
“Did it die?” I asked, hating the way my voice shook in the dark.
“No, but it’s getting there. I don’t want to lose the light completely.”
He had a point. I hated the dark. And this wasn’t regular, household dark, tinged with a faint glow from power buttons or night-lights. This dark was pitch fucking black, the walls closing in, cold and damp. I wished I’d given up the search earlier and saved my own phone battery. Today was my day for crappy decisions.
“You said you looked at it,” Forrest said into the quiet dark. “The liner of the peppermint tin. Where we found the key,” he clarified.
“I did,” I said. “I swear I did. I know the light in my room isn’t as good as your kitchen, but I looked with a magnifying glass. I should have seen it.”
“But what if you did look,” Forrest said, “and there wasn’t anything there?
“How?” Realization unfurled inside me, and my stomach turned, “You mean—what if the code I found was a decoy? What if this wasn’t sent by your father?”
“Could someone have added that code to the peppermint tin after you brought it back to Heartstone?” he asked.
My mind raced over the possibilities. “Who? I had it with me almost…” My voice died on the word almost .
Almost was a window of opportunity. My room didn’t have a lock. I’d never really needed one. As a kid, I always jammed a chair under the handle when my father had his sketchy business friends stay at Heartstone. And later, we didn’t have any visitors at all, and no one was interested in going into my room.
I’d thought of Heartstone as a safe place. Hawk and Griffen had worked hard to make it so.
“Who do you think it could have been?” I found myself asking, not wanting to give voice to the names floating in my head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know your family as well as you do. I can’t see Tenn or Royal having anything to do with something like this. They love you, and they’re so proud of you. I don’t know your other siblings as well, but the only people I can think of are Ford and Brax,” Forrest said, proving yet again that he was as smart as I thought he was.
Those were the names I’d been trying not to speak. And, of course, between the two of them, I wanted to assume it was Brax. My childhood tormentor, my nemesis. I wanted him to make the most sense because, though we weren’t close, I didn’t want to think Ford would ever do anything to hurt me.
But someone had. And it wasn’t a childhood prank this time. I was getting colder by the second, as was Forrest. Could we really die of exposure in July? I shivered in the cold, damp air of the root cellar and understood that we could. It wasn’t freezing down here, but it was cold enough that the temperature would probably get us before empty stomachs or dehydration, especially once night fell.
I knew how hypothermia worked. It killed faster than anyone thought.
Griffen and Hawk were in a race against time, and I’d made it very difficult to find us.
“Why?” I let myself breathe, trying to sort it out in my head. Trapping us down here wasn’t going to get anybody any closer to Alan Buckley’s fortune. And if the code written on the liner had been added later, at Heartstone, it definitely couldn’t be the Learys who’d set us up to be locked in the root cellar.
“Who has to gain from getting you out of the picture?” Forrest asked. “Anyone aside from your siblings? What happens if one of you dies before the terms of the will are up? What happens to the money your father left you?”
“I think it goes back into the trusts that fund the Manor,” I said. I hadn’t really thought much about it, not planning to die in the next five years. Showed what I knew. “I think the result is the same as if Griffen kicks us out or we stay away from Heartstone for more than two weeks in a quarter. Anything left to us goes into the trusts for the house.” I let out a long sigh. “But to be honest, I was pretty drunk the day Harvey played Dad’s video will. I could have missed some of the details.”
“How much time do you have left?” Forrest asked.
“The quarter just started,” I said. “And I’ve only been away two nights. I have twelve days. If whoever locked us in is planning on waiting out the terms of the will, I’m pretty sure we’ll be dead by the time they come back.”
A dark thought, but it occurred to me that I might not be the target. What if this was about Forrest?
“Does anyone want to kill you?” I asked, struggling to imagine it.
“Not until I find my father’s money,” he said in a wry tone. “At the moment, I’m worth a lot more alive. But from that perspective, so are you. I don’t think this is about my father’s money. I think that was just a way to get to you.” He paused. “Whoever did this was living at Heartstone or working there. Any chance one of the maids or Billy Bob is susceptible to a bribe?”
I rolled that idea around in my head. “They could be,” I said, not liking the idea that April or Kitty might have set me up to die. Ditto for Billy Bob, cousins who could fix anything and worked for Savannah.
“Isn’t there a nanny now?” Forrest added.
Paige. No, not Paige. She was quiet and lovely with Stella and the boys. But if it wasn’t one of them, or one of Hawk’s team—inconceivable—that left me with Ford and Brax.
I really didn’t want to think it was Ford. I wanted to pin the blame all on Brax’s smug, snotty face. He’d hated me since we were children, but this—this was beyond sibling rivalry. This was murder. Couldn’t he just tear up my drawings or steal another doll? Did he need to lock me underground and starve me to death in the dark to make his point?
I sighed, not wanting to believe it.Yes, my family was unbelievably fucked up. But underneath that, they were my family. Would one of them really go so far as to try to kill two people for an inheritance?
I’d rather it be Brax than Ford, but the truth was I didn’t know Ford. Not really. He’d betrayed all of us over and over, caused Griffen to lose everything and be exiled from his home, and sold Finn to kidnappers in a business deal. Who knew what else Ford had done that we hadn’t learned about? Since he’d been home, he’d been so withdrawn. I wanted to think I could trust him. But the truth was…I didn’t know. A wave of grief hit me. I was in the cold dark, trying to figure out which of my brothers would murder me and the man I loved. If I’d known how quickly our time would run out, I wouldn’t have wasted so much of it.
“Forrest.” I choked out his name. “I’m so sorry… I’m so sorry… We’re going to die down here, and it’s my fault. I was impatient… I didn’t want to wait, and?—”
“Sterling, stop,” he said, stroking his hand down my hair, his fingertips chilled where they grazed my skin. “I’ll try again at the door in a little bit,” he promised. “We aren’t going to give up. We’ll find a way out.”
I let his words sink in, wash over me.
A few minutes later, Forrest nudged me off his lap and turned on the light on his phone, sweeping it over the floor.I could see by his expression he’d had a new idea.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“A rock with a sharp edge and some weight to it. Something I can use to chop away at the door. We’re surrounded by stone down here. There should be enough to use as an ax and break through the door. I’ll go at it where the lock is bolted in,” he said, aiming his light at the dark circle of metal on the underside of the door.
The wood was thick, but I wasn’t going to argue. We were out of options. At least Forrest had a plan. Searching in the thin beam of light, I found a sharp-edged, good-sized rock with some heft to it.
“Here,” I said. “Take this one. I’ll hold the phone.”
Aiming the beam of light at the bolt Forrest thought secured the doors, I braced as he swung, the rock skidding off the dense wood, taking a shaving of splinters along with it. Not much, but he’d left a mark. He swung again, angling the rock to cut deeper, gouging the door around the bolt. A third swing, punctuated by a deep, reverberating thump and the rattle of metal on metal.
He had to be getting tired as he swung, over and over, his knuckles scraped and bleeding. “Getting there,” he muttered, taking a moment to breathe and study the shallow groove in the door beside the bolt.
“Do you need another rock?” I asked, wishing I could do something, anything to help. I was half Forrest’s size and had none of his muscle. If he got tired, I would take some swings, but putting me in at this point was a waste.
“No, this one has some life left in it. I’ll get it, Sterling. Don’t worry,” he said and swung his arm again, putting his whole body weight behind the rock in his hand.
The door lifted at his strike and kept going, rising up and open. Forrest fell forward, catching himself in the open doorway, the rock tumbling to the ground by my feet.
Fresh, warm, humid air flooded into the root cellar, and from above, I heard a familiar voice as Callum Leary leaned in and said, “You two need a little help?”