Chapter Eighteen
The shock of Brooke’s statement struck Alice with so much visible force, Owen was worried that she might faint. Sebastian must have had a similar fear, because the dust bunny muttered anxiously and huddled as close as possible.
Brooke frowned. “Are you okay?” she said to Alice.
Alice stared at her, clearly stunned.
Owen did the only thing he could think of, given the narrow range of options.
“Alice,” he said, sharpening his tone to get her attention, “drink some of my coffee. Now.”
She managed to drag her gaze away from Brooke and look at him. “What?”
“Forget the herbal tea.” He set his cup in front of her. “You need the caffeine.”
“Coffee. Yes.” She wrapped both hands around the cup and took a couple of sips. When she was finished, she straightened her shoulders. “Core Principle Number One: Do not mistake impulse for true intuition.”
Brooke was bewildered. “What?”
“Core Principle Number Five,” Alice continued, her voice unnaturally thin, “You control your talent; your talent does not control you. Core Principle—”
“Alice, snap out of it,” Owen said. “Drink some more coffee.”
He was starting to feel deeply uneasy. He’d had a couple of clients drop to the floor in a faint when they discovered an unsettling truth about their ancestry.
Others had turned on him in fury, as if the facts of their paranormal DNA were his fault.
One had tried to kill him to ensure that he did not reveal the truth to anyone else—the FBPI, for example.
Everyone knew the Bureau maintained a not-so-secret list of people known to possess potentially dangerous paranormal talents.
To his great relief, Alice blinked a couple of times and then appeared to come back to the real world. She gulped some more coffee, set the cup down with her customary grace, and gave Sebastian a reassuring pat.
“I apologize,” she said to Brooke, her tone excruciatingly polite. “I wasn’t prepared for that information.”
“No shit, I can see that.” Brooke shook her head. “I’m sorry to drop that on you with no warning. I just figured that by now, what with the video and all, you knew everything.”
“It’s okay,” Alice said. She visibly braced herself, as if preparing for another blow. “I just needed a moment to process your statement. You said Travis told you my mother married Dunstan Kelbrook. Is Kelbrook my father?”
“No,” Brooke said, startled. “That was the problem, you see.”
“I cannot tell you how relieved I am to hear that.” Alice briefly closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I really, really do not want to think that I might be a blood relative of the Kelbrooks.” She opened her eyes. “Do you know the identity of my father?”
“All I know is what Travis told me. He said your mother ran off with a Guild man when she was eighteen.”
“A Guild man,” Alice repeated softly, as though tasting the words.
“Lillian’s parents were dead. She had been living with her grandmother when she eloped with the Guild man. It was just a Marriage of Convenience, but then your mother got pregnant with you.”
“Legally speaking, that automatically transforms an MC into a full Covenant Marriage,” Owen observed.
“Yes.” Brooke’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “Lillian’s grandmother was furious. Marriage to a Guild man was not supposed to be the fate of an heiress who had been raised in upper-class circles. But your father was killed in an Underworld accident before you were born.”
“What happened to my mother?” Alice asked.
“Travis said your great-grandmother whisked your mother off to some unknown location for the duration of the pregnancy. Your mother was told that you had been stillborn, but the truth was, your great-grandmother made sure that you disappeared into an orphanage.”
Owen did the math in his head. “According to the ancestry files, Kelbrook’s first wife was nineteen when they were married.
That’s unusually young, especially for a woman in the upper classes.
Kelbrook was considerably older. There was no record of it being an agency match, but everyone knows that in Kelbrook’s world, marriages are primarily business arrangements. ”
“Money marries money,” Brooke said with a fatalistic air.
“And power marries power.” Owen took his phone out of his pocket and did a quick search. “Kelbrook’s first wife died at the age of twenty. Suicide.”
“I imagine she never recovered from the loss of her husband and baby,” Brooke said quietly. “Such a tragic story.”
“Did Dunstan Kelbrook know about me?” Alice asked.
Brooke snorted. “According to Travis, no one even knew you existed, let alone that you were still alive, until Kelbrook’s brother, Hampton, died and left you a bunch of shares in Kelbrook Industries.
Travis said that’s what led to the plan for him to marry you.
He said that doing so would allow him to control those shares.
” Brooke briefly closed her eyes. “He told me that once you were locked up, he and I would be able to live together just like a real married couple.”
“Except you couldn’t be legally married,” Owen said.
Alice shot him a stern look but it was too late. Brooke was starting to cry.
“I let myself believe everything he told me,” she whispered.
Alice took a sharp breath. “But this makes no sense. Why would a Kelbrook leave money to me?”
Owen got the familiar ping of intuition.
“Revenge,” he said, feeling his way forward.
“It was no secret in the business world that the Kelbrook brothers were engaged in what amounted to a blood feud. The older brother, Hampton, never forgave Dunstan for persuading their father to bypass the firstborn male and anoint Dunstan as the heir to the Kelbrook throne.”
Alice groaned. “So I was intended to be the tool of the older brother’s beyond-the-grave vengeance? But why me?”
Brooke said, “I don’t know, but here’s the kicker. If you died, all of the shares would go to various charities. Travis said they had to keep you alive in order to maintain control of the shares.” She grimaced. “I still can’t believe that he made it all sound so…so reasonable.”
Owen walked through the logic. “Step one of the plan was to find a way to make sure Alice married into the Kelbrook family. Step two was to have her committed to the para-psych hospital and diagnosed as dangerously insane. In the eyes of the law, she was deemed to be incapable of making her own financial decisions. She was in a Covenant Marriage, so power of attorney automatically went to her husband.”
“Who supposedly jumped off the roof of the hotel the night I was kidnapped,” Alice said. “What happened to the shares?”
“We should assume that Poole was pushed off that roof,” Owen said. “It’s a good bet that at some point before he died, he signed documents that transferred his power of attorney to Dunstan Kelbrook.”
Alice shook her head. “Why didn’t they just ask me for the shares?”
Brooke looked at her as if she was not very bright.
“No one in their right mind would expect someone to hand over a controlling interest in Kelbrook Industries,” Owen said. He paused. “Let’s say no Kelbrook would expect anyone to give up that kind of power so easily.”
“They could have offered to buy them,” Alice said.
Owen shook his head. So did Brooke.
“Too risky from their point of view,” Owen said. “Those shares gave you a lot of leverage. They assumed the price would be exorbitantly high.”
To his surprise, Alice got a considering look. “Something doesn’t feel right about your logic.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
She moved one hand in a gracefully vague motion. “I’m not sure. Something about Travis Poole’s death and the Hotel of Dreams connection. We’re missing a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t know what that is.”
“We’ll keep investigating,” Owen promised.
Alice looked at Brooke, a sheen of tears in her eyes. “Thank you for telling me all this. I am very grateful.”
“You shouldn’t be thanking me,” Brooke said grimly. “You should be demanding to know why I didn’t try to straighten things out sooner. Why I didn’t contact the tabloids or the police.”
Owen shrugged. “You were afraid of the Kelbrooks. It was logical to keep quiet.”
“Yes,” Alice said quietly. “But that was not the only reason you stayed silent, was it, Brooke?”
“I believed what everyone else believed,” Brooke said.
“What Travis told me to believe. I honestly think he believed it, too. He said you were a madwoman endowed with a monster talent. He was afraid to sleep with you or even kiss you. He said you could put him into a coma filled with nightmares and he might never wake up. All you had to do was make physical contact and rez your talent. So yes, I wanted to believe you made Travis jump off the roof of that hotel.”
“I understand,” Alice said gently.
Brooke drank some of her cappuccino and then blotted her eyes with a napkin.
“I’ve been blaming you for destroying my plans to escape Illusion Town.
Deep down, I knew that probably wasn’t the truth, but I needed to believe it.
When I watched that damn video and saw Travis helping that thug carry you out of the hotel room, I knew I could no longer lie to myself. I should have come forward sooner.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Alice said.
“No one would have listened to you. I still would have been locked up in Serenity Gardens and Kelbrook probably would have taken steps to silence you. If you’re looking for my forgiveness, you have it.
You are the first person to give me any useful information about my parents.
I have been searching for even the smallest scraps of data my whole life. Thank you.”
She held out her hand. Brooke automatically started to reach for it and then froze. She stared at Alice’s fingers.
“It’s okay,” Alice said. “I won’t hurt you. All that nonsense about being able to put someone into a permanent nightmare is just that—nonsense. Travis told you that to justify his scheme.”
Brooke managed a shaky smile and bravely reached out to take Alice’s hand in a gesture of goodwill. It seemed to Owen that the handshake between the two women lasted a little longer than it needed to. He felt energy shift in the atmosphere.
Alice ended the contact. Brooke appeared relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She got to her feet.
“Take care of yourself,” she said to Alice.
Alice nodded. “You do the same.”
Owen waited until Brooke was gone before he met Alice’s eyes. “What did you do to her? I know you used your talent.”
Alice pushed his coffee cup back to him and picked up her tea. “You saw her. It’s obvious she’s suffering from insomnia. I just tweaked her dreamlight energy so that she’ll be able to sleep better. Maybe that will help her get on with her life. She needs to use her energy to focus on the future.”
“You can really do that?”
“Not in every case, but yes, under the right conditions.”
“There was no reason to do any favors for Brooke. Maybe she didn’t actively participate in the crime, but not speaking up was wrong, too.”
“I know.” Alice looked amused. “But there was a reason I tried to give her permission to move on. A selfish reason.”
“What?”
“I did it for myself. I’ve spent too much time in hiding. Going nowhere. Just living day to day. Like Brooke, I need to move on. That means letting go of as much negative energy as possible. Anger is a destructive force.”
“Even if it’s righteous?”
“It’s a weapon. It should be handled like a mag-rez.”
“Or a dangerous talent?”
“Exactly. If you’re going to rez the trigger, make sure you aim it at the real threat, not a bystander who happens to be in the way.”
He picked up his coffee. “Is that one of the core principles of the Ballantine Method?”
“No,” she said. “It’s common sense.”
He was about to respond when a shout came up from the lobby below the mezzanine.
“There she is, up above in the coffee shop. Alice. Ms. Smith. Are you all right? What’s going on?”
“Alice, we’ve been so worried.”
“Are you really married to that guy? Where’s Sebastian? Is he okay?”
Sebastian chortled exuberantly and vaulted from the back of the chair to the railing that ran the length of the mezzanine. He looked down and waved his sunglasses.
“There’s Sebastian.”
Alice leaped to her feet and looked over the railing. “Dr. Loring. Patty, Linda, Benny, Jake. It’s so good to see you.”
“We watched the video,” one of the men said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, Dr. Loring. I’m fine. I can explain everything.”
“Congratulations on your marriage,” one of the women called. “We brought some cupcakes.”
“That is so thoughtful,” Alice said. “Thank you.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to your husband?” one of the others asked.
Alice hesitated a fraction too long before she replied. “Absolutely.”
Annoyed by the brief hesitation, Owen stood and went to the railing. He surveyed the small gaggle of people below. “Friends of yours, I take it.”
“Yes,” Alice said. She glowed. “Some of the staff and a couple of clients from the Aurora Street Dream Clinic. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll introduce you properly.”