Chapter Seventeen
T he sky was pitch-black by the time I arrived at Tate’s waterfront estate.
A sprawling neoclassical palace boasting columns and arches, surrounded by private golf and tennis courts as well as a gigantic pool.
I knew he had inherited it from his adoptive father and was immensely fond of it.
He insisted on not altering a single detail about the property, which was in dire need of a fresh coat of paint and updated furnishings.
My name was registered as a permanent guest in the database of his gated community, so I managed to get through the first set of gates breezily.
Once in front of the property, I punched in the main gate’s password: an elaborate sequence of numbers only he knew. The Fibonacci sequence.
I knew it too.
Thank you, Daddy, for making me a math nerd.
And then I was in.
The house was dim and quiet. I peered around, wondering if he was even here. Maybe he drove back into the city? Maybe this was all a trap set by the Callaghan guy, and I landed exactly where he wanted me to be?
My heart began racing. Clutching my phone in a death grip, I moved through the vast space of the first floor without turning on the lights. If a monster lurked in the shadows, I didn’t want it to see me.
Empty kitchen. Empty guest rooms. Empty study. Empty family room.
The only telltale sign someone had been here was a single glass of water, half-full, sitting on the kitchen counter.
I turned toward the door, stepping over something slippery and sticky. The hardwood squeaked beneath my feet. I frowned, turning on my phone’s flashlight. I grabbed the sole of my shoe, examining the smear of crimson marring it.
Blood .
I angled my phone to the floor. A path of blood led into the hallway. A straight line of minuscule drops, like morsels of candy in Hansel and Gretel’s story. I knew how that tale ended, but curiosity killed the cat.
It might as well kill me too.
Why was there blood here? And what did it mean that my first reaction was to worry for my awful husband’s well-being?
I followed the red trail, keeping my flashlight on it. Two sets of dusty imprints from boots marked the floor. One I recognized as Tate’s Hermès loafers, but the other set belonged either to another man or an extremely robust and tall woman.
The trail led me back to the study. I’d searched here before, and it was vacant.
I continued following the blood to where it stopped in front of the floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves laden with books, certificates, and decor.
A smidge of blood sat inconspicuously on the bottom of the wooden shelving, trickling just beneath it, hinting that whoever had been dragged here also disappeared beyond the shelves.
A secret passage.
Tate was a high-profile billionaire. Having a place to hide in case intruders came in was probable. Most billionaires had panic rooms.
I scanned the rows of books, mostly business-related, wondering which one I should move to open this sesame.
Initially, I looked for a book placed out of order, knowing my fiancé’s affinity for structure and math. Alas, they were all primly ordered alphabetically, by surname, with equal numbers of hardcovers and paperbacks on each shelf.
I began sliding books in and out. Shifting small statues around. The figurines and bookends were all Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themed.
The White Rabbit. The Caterpillar. The Queen of Hearts. The Hatter. The Dormouse.
It was no wonder my boss was enamored with this particular artwork. It was a satirical book, penned by a don of mathematics in a Victorian era, that dealt with the tragic and inevitable loss of innocence, death, and life as a meaningless riddle.
My heart rammed against my rib cage, and bile coated my tongue. Finally, my gaze landed on two matching bronze bookends. Each had the face of a creepy, smiling cat. Their ears could be used as a lever. I yanked one toward me.
Nothing happened.
I pulled both simultaneously, and the ceiling trembled, the floor shifting beneath my feet.
The bookcase groaned and squeaked, moving slowly as it parted into a door leading to a steep, pebbled stairway.
Goose bumps shot from the base of my spine all the way to my skull.
I stepped inside before I changed my mind. The door clicked shut behind me. I took a deep breath and made my way down. Danger soaked the walls, the air, even my lungs.
Why was I here, doing this?
Because if he’s in trouble, you’ll help him. And if he is the trouble, you’ll be able to blackmail him out of this arrangement.
It was a win-win situation, really. Unless I had just signed my own death warrant and this ended with my body in someone’s trunk.
Music reverberated in the narrow, curving stairway, bouncing off the walls like bullets. It sounded like it came from somewhere deep and far. “Search and Destroy.” The Skunk Anansie version. The bass danced in the pit of my stomach.
Muffled voices rose from the foot of the stairway, ribboning around my limbs like chains.
My fingers gripped my seashell bracelet. I had spent my entire life doing the right thing, always on the straight and narrow, and this was where I landed.
In the secret basement of my ruthless billionaire husband, while he did God knows what to God knows who.
Not everything you did was right. You do have one very messed-up secret.
I reached the end of the stairway. A panic room. Small and square, paneled by metal walls, and scarcely furnished.
Inside, my husband, still clad in his work suit, crouched over a dead man on the floor, surgically sewing what appeared to be a small, black thorn between the corpse’s eyes.
I slapped my mouth and clamped my teeth, desperate not to make a sound, but a frightened moan escaped anyway.
Tate twisted around, expression vacant, eyes dead.
And that was when I started to run.