Chapter 25 X Marks the Spot
X MARKS THE SPOT
I didn’t sleep that night.
Samuel tried to soothe me. He pulled me against him in bed and ran his fingers through my hair, the mate bond humming with his calm like a lullaby. None of it worked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood stains on the cellar floor.
The thought of the Lincoln sisters being trapped in that terrible place for weeks, suffering through God only knows what atrocities, kept churning my mind. The only saving grace was that their magic signatures had not vanished. Which meant they were still alive.
In the dark silence of our bedroom, I told Samuel about the abilities my white wolf had manifested in the last week. That I could somehow see past glamour and sense magic on a level I shouldn’t be able to.
“Should we tell the Alliance?” I murmured against his chest.
Samuel was silent for a long time, his heartbeat just that bit faster as he absorbed my revelation.
“Not yet,” he whispered in my hair. His arms tightened protectively around me.
I gave up at four a.m. and crept downstairs to the study with my laptop, leaving Samuel slumbering fitfully in our bed.
Bo padded in on silent paws an hour later. He curled up under the desk and pressed his warm body against my feet without a word. Nora came in quietly with a cup of coffee shortly after. I thanked her and narrowed my eyes at the screen once more.
The Delaware shell companies had been mocking me for two days solid.
I’d already exposed layer after layer of cryptic corporate redirection designed to exhaust anyone stubborn enough to keep digging.
But whoever had built this house of cards had made the same mistake every clever criminal eventually made.
They’d gotten comfortable.
The outermost shells were flawless. Clean registrations, legitimate-looking addresses, even fake annual filings.
But the deeper I went, the older the paperwork got, and older paperwork meant sloppier paperwork.
A registered agent who’d used the same P.O.
box for two different entities. A filing date that preceded the company’s official incorporation by three days.
The kind of errors that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t an accountant with an unhealthy fixation on dates and numbers.
Lucky for us, I was exactly that kind of accountant.
By six a.m., I’d peeled back enough layers to find something solid. The innermost shell—the one that all the others ultimately fed into—was registered to a trust. The trust’s paperwork was filed in a county I didn’t recognize, using a naming convention that was archaic even by legal standards.
I stared at the name on the screen, my wolf going very still.
Thornwick Family Trust. Established 1976.
Bo’s head popped up from under the desk, his ears swiveling. “Your scent just did something weird.”
“I found it,” I said quietly.
In this particular instance, I hated being right.
Samuel appeared in the doorway before I could call for him. The mate bond must have spiked too, because he was barefoot, shirtless, and radiating the kind of alert energy that meant his wolf had dragged him out of bed.
“What is it?” he asked.
I turned the laptop toward him. “Every shell company traces back to a single entity,” I said in a hard voice. “The Thornwick Family Trust.” I pointed at the screen. “It was established by Cordelia Thornwick three years before the covens exiled her family.”
Samuel’s eyes narrowed. “She set it up as a safety net.”
“More than that. She set it up to survive.” I scrolled down to the property records I’d pulled from the trust’s filings. “The trust holds assets. Including real estate.”
Samuel leaned over my shoulder, his jaw tightening as he read. “One property. No street address listed. Just a lot number and a county designation.”
“I know.” I rubbed my eyes. “The lot number is old format. Pre-digital. I’ll need Gavin to match it against the county clerk’s records.”
Samuel straightened, the mate bond thrumming with cold focus.
“Get dressed. We’re going in early.”
The conference room at Hawthorne her expression told me she’d slept about as well as I had.
Gavin sat beside her with a cardboard tube under one arm and dark circles under his eyes.
Barney occupied his usual spot at the far end of the table, a leather-bound folio open in front of him.
The vampire looked like the only one who’d had any sleep.
Bo circled twice and flopped down by my feet as Samuel closed the door.
“Right,” my alpha said. “What do we have?”
We traded glances.
“You first,” Didi told Barney.
The vampire inclined his head and slid the folio to the center of the table.
“Cornelius granted me access to the restricted section of the Alliance archives last night. The Thornwick records are limited since most were purged after the exile. But I found a file the archivist had overlooked.” His dark eyes glinted. “Or more likely, deliberately buried.”
He opened the folio to reveal aged documents covered in spidery handwriting. There was a family picture among them.
I reached for it.
“That was the last Thornwick family portrait, taken a year before their exile,” Barney said.
Cordelia Thornwick sat like a queen in the middle of the photograph. Even though she was in her sixties, she was a beautiful woman. A pretty girl stood beside Cordelia, her hand on the older woman’s shoulder. I knew instinctively that I was looking at Esmeralda Thornwick.
“Cordelia owned several properties in and around Amberford prior to her family’s banishment. Most were seized by the covens. But one parcel of land on the northern outskirts was never formally cataloged in the confiscation records.” Barney paused. “Neither was that warehouse.”
My pulse quickened. “Because no one knew about them?”
“Or because someone made sure they were forgotten.” Barney tapped a faded deed. “Both properties were listed under a trust entity, not the Thornwick name directly. They wouldn’t have shown up in a standard search.”
“The Thornwick Family Trust,” I said flatly.
Barney looked up sharply.
I told them what I’d uncovered that morning. By the time I finished, Gavin’s horns were smoking.
“Barney messaged me the lot number for that plot of land last night. I’ve got the county records for it.”
The dragon newt uncapped the cardboard tube he’d brought with him and unrolled a printed map across the table. Bo came out from under the desk and propped his paws on the table to take a look.
Didi raised an eyebrow at Gavin. “The county clerk’s office is open that late?”
“One of my friends works there. He owed me a favor.”
We rose to examine the map as he weighed the corners down with Didi’s coffee mug, Barney’s folio, a stapler, and Bo’s squeaky toy that had somehow made it into the conference room.
“Can I see the lot and county designation numbers you found for the trust?” Gavin asked me.
I gave them to him.
The dragon newt frowned. “They’re the same.
The trust filings matches a parcel here.
” Gavin pointed to a spot on the map. “North of the Crossroads, past the old industrial district. It’s about twelve miles out of town.
” He straightened. “The area is heavily forested. No residential development. The property records show a structure on the land, but there’s no building permit on file and no utility connections registered in the last thirty years. ”
My wolf went still.
“So, a house that technically doesn’t exist,” Didi muttered.
“On land that technically belongs to no one,” Barney added.
“Except it does belong to someone,” I said in a hard voice. “I suspect it is Esmeralda Thornwick we’re dealing with after all.”
Samuel frowned at Didi. “Did you get anywhere with Arthur Holt?”
“He gave me the configuration of all the ley lines he knew of.” The witch was already reaching for the item she’d brought. It was a rolled sheet of thick paper that she spread across Gavin’s map.
Arthur’s ley line chart was hand-drawn in ink, the lines rendered with the fine detail of someone who’d spent a decade inside the magical currents he was mapping. It was beautiful in a way that made my skin crawl.
“He traced the one beneath the warehouse on Porter and Ninth,” Didi said. “It runs northeast.” She placed her finger on the line and followed it across the map. “It intersects with two other major ley lines approximately twelve miles north of the Crossroads.”
Her finger stopped on the exact spot where Gavin’s property parcel sat.
Bo’s ears flattened. Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Three ley lines,” Samuel said quietly. “A convergence point.”
“The same kind of convergence he said the Black Chalice Rite would require,” Didi confirmed.
Her voice was steady, but I could feel the controlled fury radiating off her.
“Arthur told me a three-line intersection is rare. There are only a handful in the entire county, if you exclude the one beneath his family mansion.” She shot a glance my way.
“If Abby is right. If Esmeralda wanted to perform a sustained magical ritual—the kind that would let her drain another witch’s power over weeks or months—this is exactly the kind of location she’d need. ”
My chest tightened. The Lincoln sisters had been moved from the warehouse likely a few days ago. If Esmeralda had taken them to this property, to a convergence point even more powerful than the one beneath the warehouse, then whatever she was doing to them had only intensified.
“We need to move on this,” I said.
“Agreed.” Samuel frowned. “But we need to be smart about it. We’ve seen what this magic can do. The warehouse was a holding location and the residual magic in that cellar nearly overwhelmed us. A convergence point with an active ritual will be significantly worse.”
Didi’s mouth thinned. I could tell she wanted to argue, but she knew he was right.
A heavy silence filled the conference room.
Didi finally broke it. “Then we don’t go in alone.”
We stared at her.
“We’re going to need more witches,” Didi explained grimly.