Chapter 20
ADELAIDE
Send me more beach shots, you horrible person, Chris texts.
I grin and snap a photo of the ocean from the deck, then send it straight back.
Stop gloating, he replies almost immediately.
I laugh and type, How are you? And how’s Hannah?
Magnificent. Amazing. Everything. I’m being very normal about it , he sends.
Wow. You are smitten, I type.
True. But what about you?
That makes me pause. I’m good and happy. Hawaii really agrees with me. Might stay a while longer.
There’s a short pause before he replies, Who is he?
Am I that easy to read?
He sends back, . Are you going to tell me who the lucky guy is?
I bite back a smile. Well… there could be more than one.
His response is immediate. I need to meet and approve. You know that, right?
I laugh out loud and type back, Of course you do.
Jokes aside, are you okay, Addi? Really?
My chest tightens. Yeah. I really am. Better than I’ve been in a while.
There’s a pause, then he sends, Good. That’s all I needed to hear.
I send him back a heart and toss my phone onto the couch. Then my sight is back on the guys out at sea, where three figures are riding waves, staying out there for hours because they love it and because the tournament is close.
I lean on the railing and stare out at the three of them. On the deck outside the closed French doors is the rooster, named Colonel Mustard by Luca. The bird pauses and glances up at me.
“Not coming in today, Colonel,” I tell him.
He resumes pecking, and I should go swim, every inch of me demanding that I go out there in the surf wearing my smallest bikini ever, which happens to still be in the laundry basket where I left it this morning.
I pad down the hallway and pass under the long skylight that runs along the ceiling, sun pouring straight down through it and turning the whole corridor gold.
The walls of the hallway are lined with photos. Those big, framed colored prints—surf shots mostly, the guys in various stages of dominating a wave, one of them at a luau with their arms around each other’s shoulders and laughing.
I’ve walked past these photos every day for over a week that I’ve been living here. Today the sunlight catches one of them at a specific angle, and the frame’s slightly off-center on the wall.
I stop. It’s a photo of a wave, a huge blue-green face curling in on itself, mid-break, with the sun behind it turning the crest to glass.
I reach up to straighten it. When my fingers catch the edge of the frame, I nudge it, expecting the small, satisfying movement of wood against painted drywall.
It doesn’t move.
I nudge again, when something clicks.
A short, mechanical sound, followed by a faint hiss escaping from the wall beside the frame, and I freeze.
A hairline seam I hadn’t noticed in the wall gets slightly deeper. A shadow, and the wall is opening just enough to show me that it’s going to, if I push.
I stand there in the hallway with my hand still raised to the frame and my heart racing in my chest. “Get the fuck out of here,” I whisper to the empty house. I know I shouldn’t open it, but they have a door in the wall?
The door swings inward at my push with a quiet pneumatic release, revealing a set of wooden stairs going down into soft recessed lighting.
I stand at the top and stare. They have a secret basement.
They have a secret basement, and at no point during my stay has anyone mentioned this. I have been sleeping in this house for days, thinking I knew the layout, and there is, it turns out, an entire hidden level I didn’t know existed.
I’m already heading downstairs. The lights at the bottom automatically switch on, and I gasp.
A sectional couch facing a wall-mounted television that rivals the one upstairs.
There’s a proper bar along one wall, glass shelves backlit with warm amber light, bottles in neat rows.
And a pool table. Leather armchairs. It is, unambiguously, a very well-appointed man cave.
“We’ve been sitting in that basic living room watching movies on that basic TV, and this entire thing has been here. Who are you?”
I walk farther in, and that’s when I notice the monitors. They’re mounted in a row on the far wall, six of them arranged in a grid, each one showing a different outdoor feed in black and white. I cross to them.
The feeds cycle through the property in quick, clean sweeps from the front gate and driveway, the beach side of the house, the shack and the path leading to it, the road-facing fence line, the back patio, and the stretch back toward the house, every angle covered in the kind of quiet, thorough way that makes it very clear nothing gets near this place without being seen.
I watch the Colonel attack the leaf for approximately eight seconds. He wins.
Okay, I knew they had cameras. They’re careful people with sketchy pasts, so they’re paranoid?
I know this, so I turn on the spot, taking it all in, when I notice the cabinet.
It’s on the far wall. I don’t know how I missed it coming in, except that the rest of the room is inviting and this cabinet is not.
It’s metal in a matte black finish that absorbs the light rather than reflecting it, with a simple flush handle.
My stomach does the specific thing it does when a room is about to tell you something.
I walk across and tell myself I’ll just look, so I pull the handle and it opens.
I stop breathing for a second.
The cabinet is deep, the inside lit by a soft, cool strip of white light, and every inch of the space is filled with blades and weapons.
Daggers, long and short, in sheaths and without, their handles wrapped in leather and cord. Machetes. Knives of every imaginable size and style, mounted neatly on padded pegs, each one held in place by a small retaining strap.
On the higher shelves, the pieces are clearly more significant. Older. Ornate. The hilts carved, inlaid, one with what looks like abalone in the grip. Small wooden stands under each.
Ancient Hawaiian war clubs, if I’m remembering right. Shark-tooth edges. The kind of thing that should be in a museum with a small descriptive placard beside it.
I stare. They do the luaus—they dance with knives, so of course they collect these. They’re performers and probably train with them. Some people collect wine, and some people collect weapons. There are a lot of them.
I don’t touch anything. I keep my hands at my sides.
At the bottom of the cabinet, tucked against the back, there’s a flat black case.
Rectangular. I lean in and flip the latches on the box, because at this point, what does it matter?
The lid lifts with a small hiss of its own. I stare inside to find black masks.
Three of them nested together. Close-fitting—not the kind of mask you wear for Halloween but the kind that contours to a face.
When the light from the cabinet hits them at the angle I’m looking from, the material throws off a faint greenish sheen, like the back of a dragonfly’s wing, and for half a second, my brain insists they’re made of reptile skin.
I reach out before I can stop myself and touch one with a single fingertip.
Not reptile, just a finish. Some kind of textured fabric, stretched tight over a rigid base.
The face shape is clear. Two small eyeholes. Two pinpricks at the nostrils. A thin slit for the mouth. Nothing more than that. Cold runs up my spine, because these are the kind you might wear if you don’t want to be identified.
I close the case and the cabinet, my hands trembling.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”
I hurry back to the stairs, and the door shuts behind me.
The picture on the wall is a fraction off again, and I nudge it a smidgen with my knuckle until it matches the other frames on the wall exactly.
Next thing, I rush into the living room and look outside, my heart hammering.
The three of them are still in the water.
I press my palm flat against the glass and force myself to breathe.
They told me they had dark pasts. Dangerous things back there, and I nodded like I understood what they meant, as if I was ready for it. But this feels different standing here now, heart pounding, thinking about a hidden basement and knives and three masks that weren’t for parties.
I tell myself not to panic because I’m doing what I always do when I’m scared—taking scraps and building the worst version of the story out of them.
They warned me. They didn’t lie. And still, my thoughts are running too fast, because this house has been starting to feel safe, and now I’m standing here wondering what kind of men I’ve really been sleeping beside.
I take my hand off the glass and head to the couch, where I grab my phone and open my messages with Clio.
Can you talk? I type.
The reply comes in under a minute: At the shop. Boss breathing down my neck. Two minutes?
She has a second job at a tourist gift shop, and I didn’t realize she was working today. Please.
My phone rings.
I answer on the second ring. “Hi.”
“Hey, you okay? Everything okay?”
“I want to chat but not on the phone. Are you free after work?”
“Tonight’s the mystery murder club. Come join us and we can talk? We’re doing it at Aura’s shop. More space. She’s closing up late. Eight o’clock. Come at seven, and we can actually talk.”
“Perfect.”
“Adelaide. What is it?”
I take a breath, glance out at the ocean. The three dark figures are riding the swell, and my pulse is speeding. “I found something.”
“Okay.”
“In the house. A door I didn’t know about leading to a private basement.” I stop. “And weapons. Like, lots of knives. And masks. Clio, tell me I’ve overthinking this.”
She’s very quiet.
“Is there any chance you’re being paranoid,” she asks carefully.
“Yes. A huge chance. But better to be careful too. The masks could be for anything. It could all be for anything.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I’m nibbling on the corner of my lower lip, my free hand twirling nervously in my hair. “But I had to tell someone. I need to work it out with you on what it could mean. If I’m safe.”
“They haven’t hurt you, have they? Raised their voices?” she asks.
“God no, they’ve treated me so delicately and also…”
“Oh, Adelaide, you had sex with them, didn’t you?”
I exhale loudly. “It’s close to impossible to ignore them, and they behave as though I’m their goddess. I will never be able to be with another man again.”
“Okay, rein it in and let’s try to be logical about this, as your safety is priority. Come early tonight, and we’ll talk it through properly. Yeah?”
“Yes, please.”
“And remember Dexter is safe if you’re not a bad guy,” she suddenly says.
I almost laugh.
“I know. I’m sorry, bad joke.” She exhales. “Seven. I’ll send you the address.” I hear a bell jingle on her end, the sound of customers coming into the shop. “I have to go. Love you. Keep your face neutral. You are a terrible liar, but you can do it for five hours.”
“I’m a great liar.”
She laughs. “No, you’re not. Okay, love you.”
“Love you.”
She hangs up.
I set the phone on the couch, and the address for tonight arrives thirty seconds later.
I stand in this house I’ve been calling home and realize I’m a scent match with three Alphas who might be hiding something big from me.
So I tell myself it’s probably nothing, probably just people with pasts and a collecting instinct, not to mention a concerningly thorough approach to home security.