Chapter Thirty-Eight
THIRTY-EIGHT
Rocky
I’m a battlefield of raw opened wounds. There’s no suturing them back together. There’s no medic waiting in the wings. There’s only pain on pain on pain—and only three people in this entire godforsaken universe can staunch the bleeding.
I grip the phone in my fist.
It’s not only about what I just found out. It’s that Hailey is back to being unresponsive. She’s lying on her side, her head in Phoebe’s lap, who strokes her platinum hair. Hailey mutters, “I wasn’t in the backseat. I’ll never know…I’ll never know who I am…”
I can handle the trauma of my childhood. But I can’t watch my sister fade away like this—I can’t fucking do it anymore.
I start dialing a number I know by heart. Putting the phone on speaker, I lift it up to my mouth as the line clicks. “It’s me.”
“Beds and pillows?” Addison asks, a phrase that means is it safe and sound? Her voice is tensed, full of worry. She knows we’re pulling the rope this weekend, and it’s too early to be calling.
“No beds and fucking pillows,” I grit out, my lungs on fire. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get in your car and drive to my coordinates. We’re in a storm shelter on the Konings’ property. And before you tell me you can’t—before you say you’re not going to step foot in Victoria—you need to know your daughter is having a mental breakdown. She’s not sleeping. She’s hallucinating. Because she doesn’t know who she is. So if you love her at all, if you have even a semblance of care for her, you will come here. You will come here right fucking now and give her what she needs. And if you don’t—you will lose her. You will lose me. You will lose every last one of us. Got it?”
I don’t think I’m breathing. My fingers are numb on the cell. My eyes blister. My heart is in my esophagus, waiting for a response to the ultimatum I just threw down.
There’s no real reason she should agree to come here other than maybe she does love Hailey. Because there’s a good chance she loses us anyway with the truth.
“Bray,” she breathes out, and hearing my name from her—one I never really cared for, one that I didn’t realize had any greater meaning—it nearly breaks me from the inside out. There’s a long pause. My eyes sear as I fix my gaze on Phoebe. She mouths, I love you .
It settles the tortured parts of me. The pieces that threaten to crack. I blink for a long second and then Addison says, “Send me the coordinates.”
I do. She’s a half hour away, she says. Then we hang up. “Trevor,” I say to Nova. “We have to find my brother.”
“I’m not a guest,” Nova says. “I can’t waltz into the mansion and look for him, Rock.”
“I’ll go.” Jake pushes forward with the flashlight. He touches my shoulder and tells me, “I’ll search for him on the grounds and then in the house. Stay here with Phoebe and your sister.”
I nod stiffly in thanks.
He nods back, then climbs the stairs, disappearing into the night. I scrape a hand against the back of my neck.
“How do you know Addison won’t lie?” Phoebe asks me, caressing Hailey’s head.
“Ol,” Nova calls out, and Oliver goes to his brother. Nova is unzipping a first aid kit out of the side pocket of his backpack, and he immediately grabs his brother’s wrist to check out his badly banged-up, bloodied hands.
I look back to Pheobe. “I don’t know if she’ll lie. But I believe she loves Hailey enough to offer the truth.” This all banks on a mother’s love of her daughter.
Have Addison and Elizabeth manipulated their daughters? Yes.
Have they also loved them throughout their lives? Yes. I believe both can be true in some twisted, crooked way, and it’s the only hope we have.
“Get down,” Nova tells Oliver hurriedly. “Go.”
Oliver shuffles down the stairs with bandaged knuckles, and Nova points his shotgun at a figure at the top of the shelter.
“Whoa, whoa.” Everett Tinrock appears, still in a tux, and he raises his hands at Nova. “It’s just me. I got a call from Addy. She said to meet you all here. She’s on her way with Beth.”
“Let him in,” I tell Nova.
“Let me in?” Frown lines crease his forehead. “Were you thinking of not letting me through?” Nova shifts out of the way on the stairs but never drops the shotgun, allowing Everett to pass with tenser confusion.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asks me between his teeth.
“You have the footage of Claudia?” I ask.
“I have it,” Nova tells me. “Everett dropped it on the shoreline. I picked it up earlier tonight. It’s already on a hard drive and saved in the cloud.”
I stare down Everett. “So you made good on that, at least,” I say with an inferno amassing in my chest. Or maybe it’s been there all night. I feel it. On the verge of exploding.
Everett scans the storm shelter. Let me be very clear. He’s only looking at the people. At Oliver and his bloodshot, wounded gaze—a boy who has never broken. At Nova and the barrel of his gun—a boy who has never betrayed. At Phoebe and her rage—a girl who has never disobeyed.
At Hailey and her psychosis—his so-called daughter.
“What happened? Hailey?” His voice is edged with paternal worry. He steps toward her. I put a firm hand on his chest and back him all the way up against the wall.
“Brayden!” He grips the nape of my neck, since I’m shirtless, to thrust me back.
I thrust him forward. “Who are we?!” I shout, pinning him against the concrete wall. “Who the fuck are we?! And don’t lie. Because we know things. She knows things. So we will catch you in your own fucking web. Tell us the truth right now.”
He’s staring past me. He’s watching Hailey mutter to herself. His jaw tics. His throat bobs. He’s upset. This is upsetting him. Good. Join the fucking club. “She needs help, Brayden.” He fixes his narrowed gaze on me. “Let’s get her to a doctor.”
“We’re not leaving here without the truth. The entire truth.”
He sucks in a sharp breath. “That’s why you called your mother.”
“Is she my mother? The woman who gave birth to me?”
Everett loosens the bow tie at his neck. He’s tugging at his white collar. He unclips the Patek Philippe watch on his wrist. Like it’s all bothering him. It’s all too heavy as he controls his breathing. As he tries to control his skidding, flailing pulse.
I learned from him.
I learned everything from him.
“She’s not your mother.” Everett gets it out in the quietest breath. “Not in that sense.”
“What was my mother’s name?”
“Josephine Wolfe.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “And my father?”
“Christian Wolfe.”
Pain and wrath ball up in my throat. I swallow them down. “How did they die?”
“Their car crashed into the river.”
“Did you have a hand in killing them?”
“Did I…?” His brows jut up. “No, not…” He gets choked up. He’s caught on my eyes, as if he’s crawling backward. Into the past. “We were following their car. Addy and me.”
“Why?”
“Because we knew what was going to happen that night.” Everett curls his grown-out hair behind his ears. “The four of us were working a job in Victoria. Me, Addison, Elizabeth, and Varrick.”
“You’re friends with him?” I question.
“ Were ,” Everett spits out in distaste. “He went rogue.”
“Oh, he went rogue? How fucking convenient. Place the blame on the friend who got cut out of the circle.”
Hurt flares in his eyes. He clutches my shoulder like I’m ten and he’s about to lecture me. I rip his hand off me.
His chest collapses, but then he steels himself on instinct. “You know us. You’ve known what we do. We entrusted you six with thousands of felonies that could send us to prison, and how many times have you ever seen us put a hit on someone? With your own two eyes, son. Tell me the number.”
Zero.
I grind my jaw.
Everett slides a hot hand across his neck. “He doesn’t operate how we do. If he did, he fooled us—”
“He fooled you?” I say with thick doubt.
“I’m not the best of us,” Everett admits. “Your mother— Addison is much better. Beth, too. But even they didn’t see what he was until it was too late. We were in too deep, and we were just…we were hanging on.” He drops his gaze for a beat, then lifts it back to me. “We were targeting the Wolfes. So when Varrick got close to William Wolfe, then when he proposed to Daphne—it was all part of the plan. What wasn’t was him killing William.”
“He killed Emilia’s husband?”
“I didn’t see it. Beth said he used potassium chloride and put the needle under his tongue. Varrick held the man down while he was sleeping. Everyone…everyone believed William died of a heart attack. No one suspected foul play.”
“So what’d you think would happen the night my parents died?” I question.
Everett tilts his head back against the cement. He turns away from me, like this next story is misery. “Beth was in a car with Varrick. They were tailing Christian Wolfe and his family.”
“I thought you said you and Addison were following them?”
“We were technically following Varrick, who was following them. Beth was trying to convince him to turn around. Addy and I were keeping our distance. He didn’t know we were there. We were afraid he was going to kill Christian’s entire family. He needed them out of the picture, and this was the best chance to do it, since they were headed to Vermont for a family vacation.”
My family. The family I never knew. “They never made it out of Connecticut,” I say with hollowness.
“One did,” Everett says to me. “You were a one-year-old boy in his car seat. Your oldest brother was next to you. He must’ve unbuckled you while the car was sinking. He got the window cracked, just enough to squeeze you through.”
My chest tightens. I fight an onslaught of raw emotion. “How could you know this?”
“Because I jumped off the bridge and went into the water. To see who was alive.”
“And you found me?” He what—he saved me? I’m fisting his shirt now, but it’s not with malice.
“You were a child .” Everett’s nose is runny. He wipes it with the back of his hand. I’ve never seen him this outwardly overcome with an emotion that’s not disappointment, frustration, or anger. “I wasn’t going to let you die. The river was deep. Varrick had run them off the road and driven away. He didn’t want to risk anyone seeing him.” Everett fights a tremor in his voice. “I would’ve…I would’ve tried to save more, but they were already gone. You weren’t even breathing. Addy gave you CPR when I brought you to the bank of the river. The only thing that we knew at that point is we had to get you out.”
“Get me out? I had a grandmother, an uncle, an aunt who were all still alive—and you took me?”
“He was going to kill them—”
“Alert the sheriff.”
“The sheriff was his best friend!” Everett shouts with a shrill, wounded laugh. “You have no idea, son. You think you can talk your way out of five federal penitentiaries—he can talk his way out of five hundred . They were all going to die, and we couldn’t stop it. But we could save you.”
I blink, my eyes so dry—they sear. “How does Varrick know who I am? Present day. He called me Brayden . How?”
“He knows you exist. He’s always known. We couldn’t just run off with you without him knowing, so we were trying to work around him. We told him we wanted a baby—me and Addison. It’s why we saved you. It’d been our dream. We weren’t going to raise you as a Wolfe, which would’ve been a threat to him. Instead, we’d strip you of your identity. And we were going to raise you as ours. You’d grow up as a con artist. He thought it was a great idea. We wanted to leave Varrick on good terms. So he had no reason to come after us.”
Too many questions slam into me, but I just go with this one: “Why call me Brayden? Out of everything—why would you risk choosing my birth name?”
He shrugs, his eyes glassing. “Guilt. Shame. We did have a hand in killing your family, indirectly, and maybe it was our way to make ourselves feel better.” He drops his gaze. “Your father was a good man—”
“Don’t,” I choke out. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He nods tensely, understanding. “They didn’t deserve it, is all. William—your grandfather, maybe, but not his kids.”
Nova suddenly speaks from the stairs. “Varrick has been targeting the girls. You said you left on good terms—how is that fucking good ?”
Everett wipes at his nose again. “He’s not singling out the girls. He’s probably hoping to unsettle all of you. Or test you—to see how well we raised you.”
“You aren’t sure?” I ask, loosening my grip on his shirt.
“No. He knows all six of you are here, and he knows Addison and Elizabeth haven’t stuck around. We’ve been worried that he’s trying to threaten you all, just to lure them out to Connecticut for more than a day at a time.”
“Why haven’t they come out here more?” Phoebe asks angrily from the ground. “Why hide away?”
“Beth is terrified of him. For good reason.” He exhales a long breath. “And Addy won’t leave her. They’re…attached at the hip, and I can’t argue with it. You know how it is,” he tells me, then stares behind me at Phoebe and Hailey. “Varrick is…unpredictable. We don’t know what he’s going to do, which is why we’ve avoided pulling jobs in this state since ’86. Which is why we need to leave after this one with the Konings. We’re playing roulette the longer we stay.”
My temples pound.
I have this strange feeling, and the longer I stare at my father, the longer his eyes veer away from mine, the more I feel like…he’s evading.
He’s left something out.
He knows I see through him. But Nova says, “They’re here.”
The godmothers rush down the creaky stairs. “Hailey?” Addison’s voice pitches up as soon as she sees Hailey crumpled in Phoebe’s lap and how she’s staring off at nothing.
“Oh my God, Addy.” Elizabeth grabs on to her friend’s arm, and they race toward their daughters, but I cut off their path.
Oliver does, too.
“Oliver?” Elizabeth winces. She tries to step toward Phoebe, but the fire coming out of her daughter’s eyes stops her dead in her tracks.
“Wh-what?” Addison staggers at me. “Move, Brayden. Your sister—”
“She’s been in pain for months . Because of your lies. That”—I motion behind me—“is what your deception and love does. Horrific. Your . Doing .”
“Let me see her,” Addison says icily, painfully, between clenched teeth. She budges forward.
“Back up,” Phoebe sneers at her. She weaves her arms protectively around Hailey, like there is no way in hell they will touch her. “You don’t get a heartfelt reunion. Not when you caused this.”
I fall in love with Phoebe a million times over in this one moment. I could kiss her. Hug her. Marry her—though we’ve done that a hundred fake times already.
“Brayden,” Addison pleads with me.
“See this line?” I drag my foot across the dusty cement, creating a line in the dirt. “Any of you cross it, Nova shoots your leg. Which’ll probably blow off since he’s holding a shotgun.”
“You’re kidding.” Addison gapes, hurt all over her face.
I’m trying not to envision her on the bank of a river, giving me CPR. I’m not thinking about the past. I’m just thinking about this moment. My sister. My family in this storm shelter. And the three people in front of me have been excommunicated, as far as I’m fucking concerned.
“Brayden.” She checks behind her, looks at her husband. Everett is torn up in ways that physically rattle her. “Everett, honey?”
“They know. I told them about Varrick.”
Elizabeth clutches a heart-shaped locket at her neck. She seems ill. “How much do you know?”
“Why don’t you tell us?” I ask her. “ Dad , say nothing. You two, keep your backs to him and start talking.”
It takes at least fifteen minutes for them to run through the same exact story. With a little more detail about the car crash. (Wish I didn’t hear it.) And the deaths of Daphne and Brent.
Elizabeth is crying through these recountings of the past they clearly never wanted to revisit. Addison dries her friend’s tears with travel tissues from her purse and becomes more stoic for her. It’s not fabricated emotion. They’d have to be evil to play us this hard, and I know they aren’t. Not when all they want is for Hailey to be okay.
“Has she been sleeping?” Addison asks, constantly peering over at my sister. “Hailey, can you hear me? Hailey. ”
“I wasn’t in the backseat,” Hailey mutters. “I wasn’t in the backseat.”
“Bethy.” Addison whirls to her. “We have to tell her.”
Elizabeth buries her face in her hands, then drops them. “Okay, okay . We’ll tell them. We can tell them.” She takes a readying breath, but her face punctures when she sees her son. “Nova, please don’t look at me like that.”
He’s staring at her like she’s a stranger.
“I’m your mom . I didn’t lie, spider. We didn’t lie about that.”
“You lied about Rocky.”
She slaps her hands to her sides. “We felt like we had no choice. If we were going to raise you as confidence men, you couldn’t know the truth. We’d…”
“Lose us?” Nova finishes coldly.
Elizabeth claws at her heart like it’s breaking. “I…we didn’t want it to be like this.” She lifts the slipping strap of her yellow floral sundress.
“ Hailey ,” Addison cajoles. Her red hair is in a tightly coiled bun. Wearing a slim black dress, she bows forward like she’s enticing a kitten out of a cranny. “I can tell you everything . Everything you’ve ever wanted to know.”
“I wasn’t in the backseat,” Hailey mutters.
Addison straightens up, then glares at me. “Let me cross the fucking line.”
“You can tell her everything right there. Maybe start with whether you were actually pregnant with Hailey.”
Addison and Elizabeth slip each other grief-stricken, surrendering looks, then Addison unknots her bun. Red strands pool onto her shoulders. She exhales for a solid second and breathes out, “No, I wasn’t.”
“But you were pregnant at one point?” Phoebe says with a heated, tremoring voice. “You had a miscarriage, right? That’s what you said at the Berkshires. That’s why we thought you were pregnant with Trevor—but really, you adopted him.”
“No,” Addison says. “We made it look like I was pregnant.”
“We staged it, bug, because we didn’t want any of you to question where Trevor came from,” Elizabeth explains further.
“We lied to you during the dinner,” Addison admits outright. “At the Berkshires.”
“Why?!” Phoebe yells. “Why the fucking cruelty?!”
Elizabeth winces and raises her hands, as if they’re clean of misdeeds. “Bug, I promise you, we felt like this was the only way to protect you all.”
Addison shakes her head in thought. “You pull a thread and then another and another. We thought we could stop you all from pulling threads, if there was a reasonable explanation for Trevor’s birth.”
“But you all kept pulling,” Elizabeth says. “If you knew we lied about Hailey, Trevor, and Rocky, then you’d doubt us, and there is no room for doubt between each other—not in what we do. We knew you could never know or…or this would happen.” Her face twists in a surge of grief as she peers from Nova, to Oliver, to Phoebe. “You’re my kids. Please. Please. I love you, and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Her knees buckle, and Addison catches her, holding her friend, who sobs into her chest.
Oliver rubs his face with his bandaged hands. He’s looking between Nova and Phoebe, but the triplets stay strong. They don’t console their mom. They leave that to her friend.
“Who is Trevor?” I ask them, when really, inside I’m screaming, Where is Trevor?! He’s still not here.
Fear stabs me, but I can’t desert the storm shelter. I can’t abandon them right now.
“And let me remind you,” I tell the three of them, “whatever you say next, it needs to be the truth. Because Hailey has done enough research to find holes, and if you even have a fucking pinhole, she will know. And we will know. And you will have no chance to ever reconcile with us. We will never believe or trust you again. We won’t work with you. Hell, we won’t even talk to you. It will be a long, permanent goodbye.”
Elizabeth stays knelt on the floor while Addison has an arm around her.
Everett starts, “We were given Trevor.”
“In a way,” Addison clarifies poorly.
“In a way?” I shoot back. “What the fuck does that mean? In a way ?”
Addison rises to her feet, but she’s unbalanced on her heels. She’s nervous. She even smooths out her dress—which is her anxious tic. “He’s the son of a mark.”
“Of a mark?”
“Of billionaires. Awful , terrible people.” She grimaces even recounting them. “This couple—they were so deep inside their own self-centered world, they couldn’t bother to be around for the birth of their own child.”
“They took a vacation to Tahiti,” Everett says from the wall, his arms crossed. “While their surrogate was in labor.”
“For nine hours,” Addison snaps. “When Trevor was born, Everett and I paid the surrogate for the child. She believed we’d care for him more than the couple.”
“She believed that, huh?” I nod strongly. “You tell her you’re grifters? You tell her you’d raise that boy to nab wallets? Or that he’d be your little shill—a way for you to gain credibility wherever you went? Cute little Trevor. No way am I screwing you over if a baby is on my hip. ”
Addison stakes a glare my way. “Judge me. But you weren’t there. You didn’t see their aversion and apathy toward anyone marginally less privileged than them. They didn’t care for their surrogate. They saw her as subhuman . She felt that. It’s why she called to let them know the child passed during birth. Do you want to know what they did? Hearing that their newborn died?”
Elizabeth’s tears have dried. She winces at the memory. “They extended their vacation.”
My brother.
He was born out of neglect. And all he’s ever desired is to be included.
“We love Trevor,” Addison professes. “We care for him in ways they never would. He would’ve been a forgotten child, or worse, he’d have turned out just like the men we target. Vile, cruel, and so blinded by their own vanity, they leave despair in their wake.”
I look through her. “You didn’t save him. You chose him. How many marks have kids? How many have we run by that you could’ve so easily robbed out of their cradles or convinced the parents to hand them over like you’re a divine fucking saint? Trevor was different, though, wasn’t he?”
“Of course he was different,” Everett says from the wall. “He’s six years younger than you all.”
“At that time, we wanted a baby,” Addison says like it’s simple.
“Get pregnant. Adopt. I don’t know, do it the normal way.”
“The opportunity presented itself.”
“Right.”
She hears my skepticism and takes a sharper breath. “Jobs are easier with a child. We realized that really early into having you, Bray. But you all…you were getting older. I personally thought if the baby had gray eyes like yours, if you believed I was pregnant, it’d be easier on you and Hailey. You wouldn’t question where you came from.”
“This is your family,” Everett says. “That’s all that mattered to us. The ones we built. Tinrocks. Graveses.”
“What about Hailey?” Phoebe asks, my sister’s head still in her lap.
Hailey stares dazedly. Silent tears leak out of her eyes.
“ Hailey .” Addison bends forward again. “Hailey, look at me.”
Hailey blinks a slow, slow blink. “?‘Have I gone mad?’?” she whispers.
“?‘All the best people are,’?” Oliver replies with light in his voice, and gradually, my sister focuses on Addison.
“Hailey,” Addison says carefully, afraid to spook her. “I love you. I love you so dearly, and you came into our lives with so much love. You came after the triplets. I never met your birth parents. Everett and I posed as a lovely couple from the suburbs, and we found you.”
“Where?” Steadily, Hailey sits up, then more weakly leans into Phoebe, who curls her arms around my sister’s slender frame.
“The foster system.”
“We adopted you under fake names,” Everett says gently to her.
“Because of my eyes,” she says distantly.
“And because…” Addison gets teary. “Because we wanted another girl.”
“For Phoebe,” Elizabeth explains, thumbing the locket at her neck again. “We wanted you two to grow up as friends…like Addison and I did.”
“And look at you two now,” Addison says.
Phoebe fights tears and hurt. “So you took Hailey for me?”
“ Adopted , bug,” Elizabeth emphasizes.
“W-where was I born?” Hailey asks.
“Chicago.” Addison’s gaze softens. “Whatever you want to know. Any details. I’ll give them to you whenever you ask.”
Hailey is drifting a little. “You’re forgetting to tell us something. There’s something you’re forgetting. Or maybe you just don’t want them to know. Maybe you’ll always say you forgot. When we know. I know.”
“What’s she talking about?” I ask them. The feeling I had earlier with Everett—it creeps up again. “It’s about Varrick?”
Elizabeth is woozy. She’s on her knees. Staring at the line I drew in the dirt. “When Addy, Everett, and I left Victoria with the baby—with Brayden…I didn’t know at the time…I didn’t realize it.”
“Realize what?” I ask.
“I was pregnant. With the triplets.” She dabs at her wet eyes, but her makeup is already smeared across her cheeks. “We didn’t want to return to Connecticut because Varrick never knew the truth.”
“And what is the truth?”
Elizabeth tries to say it, but the words catch. So Addison finishes, “That Nova, Oliver, and Phoebe are his children.”
You could hear a pin drop.
Until Nova growls out, “He’s our father?”
“No way,” Phoebe mutters, catching my gaze with wide, terrified eyes. This entire fucking time, I thought he was my dad. I smear a hand down my face. I don’t want him to be hers—probably more than I didn’t want him to be mine.
“But Mattias,” Oliver names their supposed dad.
“He’s a friend who went to prison for fraud,” Elizabeth says. “I wish…I wish he were your real father.”
“Does Varrick know about the triplets now?” I ask her.
“Yes. He believes they’re his kids. He figured it out while you’ve been here. He wanted me to come to Connecticut. To live with him at Stonehaven, but I won’t…I won’t.”
Nova is fuming. He’s pacing at the bottom of the stairs, so he doesn’t see the movement at the opened doors.
My pulse pitches up, and I explode forward. “Trevor!”
My little brother climbs down the steps, the hood to his peacoat over his head.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
Trevor barely assesses the storm shelter or anyone in it. He takes measured breaths, his face flat. Void. He only looks at me. “We have thirty minutes to leave the Koning estate. It’s how long Jake is giving us before he calls 9-1-1. We need to go now.” He’s about to turn.
I catch his wrist. “Why the urgency?”
“Because it’s done.”
My brows slowly lift as apprehension builds. “What’s done, Trev?”
“I pulled the rope. It’s over. You’re welcome, everyone.” He waves a hand around the bunker.
No one utters a fucking word of gratitude.
“What’d you do?” I ask while standing on a bed of nails. Please don’t say it. Please don’t say it, Trev. Please. Please.
“Claudia Waterford is dead. I killed her.”