Chapter 3 Visible Patterns #2
The Mayfairs have enough houses on this estate to qualify as their own zip code, but despite that, every single one of them seems magnetically drawn to the main house.
Nora and her son, Baryn, technically live in the second and third mansions over, but from what I’ve seen, that distinction means absolutely nothing.
After Henry died, it just made sense for Victoria and Emily to move in with Evelyn.
Neither of them wanted her to be alone. And when Peter went to prison not long after, Victoria never left.
Her own house was gradually abandoned, left to gather dust like the rest of the things she couldn’t bring herself to face.
Nora is draped in a silk kimono, casually elegant, her long blonde hair curled to glossy perfection. The oversized sunglasses perched on her nose are likely worth more than my entire net worth, possibly even my entire bloodline.
“Ugh,” she whines, throwing herself onto a velvet armchair with all the drama of a woman who has never had to struggle for anything. “It’s a nightmare out there. Those reporters are legitimately insane. I had to bribe the security guy just to get up the driveway to my own fucking house.”
Emily winces. “They’re still camped outside?”
“Like vultures.”
Beside me, Theo shifts, the analytical gears already turning in his head. I don’t have to ask to know he’s cataloging every detail—every word, every reaction, every Mayfair eccentricity.
Nora catches him watching her and tips her sunglasses down just enough to peer over the top, considering blue eyes raking over him like she’s contemplating whether or not he’d make a suitable addition to her collection of expensive things.
“And who is this fine gentleman?” she purrs.
“This is Theo,” I say quickly, before she can dig any deeper. “My boyfriend.”
Nora leers, her lips curling like she doesn’t quite believe me but finds it amusing all the same. “Lucky you.”
Theo makes a noise that could, if you weren’t paying attention, be mistaken for a cough. But I am paying attention, and I know him well enough to recognize it for what it really is—indignant suffering.
And then, as if this family couldn’t possibly get more dramatic, someone drawls from the doorway, dripping with lazy disdain. “Oh, great. More houseguests.”
I don’t have to turn around to know who it is.
Because of course it’s Baryn.
Every interaction I’ve ever had with him has left me with steam pouring out of my ears. He has that special talent—one I assume is either inherited or finely honed over years of being intolerable.
Which is why it still throws me, even now, that once he was actually kind to me. I’d shown up at the estate in the middle of a complete breakdown. Laurel had just died, and I couldn’t breathe in my own house anymore.
I went there looking for Emily, only to find out she wasn’t home. She was away at a competition with her horses, and I’d been too lost in myself to bother calling or texting before showing up unannounced.
It was Baryn who let me in. Baryn who sat on the floor beside Emily’s bed while I cried into her pillow, offering me water and snacks and, for the first time, not a single sarcastic remark. I stayed for hours. He never left.
And then the next time I saw him, he was back to being the pompous, sharp-tongued asshole I’d come to know and loathe. Like it never happened. Like I imagined the whole thing.
He’s leaning against the doorframe, exuding a brand of conceit that only comes with obscene wealth and an utter lack of consequences.
Blond hair that falls just right—it’s never met a bad angle in its life.
His white button-down is open just enough to look deliberately disheveled, the sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned forearms. He wears a smirk that could probably make rational women throw their entire moral compass into the ocean.
I would be charmed if he wasn’t such a blatant jackass.
Baryn’s gaze drifts lazily to Theo, scanning him with mild amusement, and then—without so much as a polite nod—he turns his full attention to me, as if Theo is no more remarkable than a custom mahogany coat rack his grandmother commissioned during a wine bender and then left to gather dust in the east wing.
Which is absurd, considering there’s nothing unremarkable about Theo. He might as well be carved from myth, and pretending otherwise feels almost offensive.
“Lila,” he muses. “My mother failed to mention you’d be visiting.”
“Yes.” I am curt, fighting off the urge to roll my eyes. “We’re here to spend time with Emily for the week.”
Then, without hesitation, I grab Theo by the hem of his sleeve and unceremoniously yank him closer to my side in what is absolutely not an act of petty defiance.
Theo, caught off guard, stumbles just slightly before begrudgingly wrapping an arm around my shoulders in what can only be described as the most awkward and reluctant display of affection in human history.
Baryn watches the whole thing with thinly veiled amusement before finally pushing himself off the doorframe, strolling into the room like he owns the place—which, to be fair, he kind of does.
“My cousin is grief-stricken,” he announces, rolling his eyes so hard I’m honestly amazed they don’t get lodged in his skull.
I process that.
What the actual fuck?
He’s always been a smartass, but this crosses the line from sarcasm to sociopathy.
He leans in close, words barely audible, his lips curled in a way that makes me itch to punch him in his pretty face.
“We don’t do grief here, sweetheart,” he says evenly, faux-conspiratorial. “We do press statements, inheritance disputes, and thinly veiled death threats over brunch.”
The silence isn’t shock. It’s routine. Waiting for his next absurdity.
“Bear—cut the shit, you douche canoe,” Emily says from the settee, slightly monotonous, but the words hit their target anyway.
My eyes briefly flick over to her before snapping back to Baryn.
“Maybe that’s true for you. But Emily’s actually capable of human emotion.
So forgive her if she’s not keeping up with the family traditions of asset management and passive-aggressive homicide threats over eggs Benedict in the wake of her mother’s death. ”
His smirk falters, but only for a split second before it stretches wider. “Well,” he says. “Aren’t you a feisty little thing today?”
The face I make at him is something a smart-ass sixth grader would pull—somewhere between a squint and a grimace, just shy of sticking my tongue out.
Mature? No. But I never claimed to be.
Emily stands and clears her throat, an insistent little sound that cuts him off before he can take it any further. She’s clearly used to stepping in, an expert at rerouting Baryn before he goes a step too far. Then she turns to us, her tone gentler. “I’ll show you two to your room.”
I nod, eager to put space between us and the Mayfair brand of dysfunction. I move to grab my bag, but before my fingers even skim the handle, Theo is already there, plucking it up.
“Stop,” Evelyn says crisply from her chair. “I’ll have the butler carry those up.” She speaks louder without even bothering to turn her head. “Giles!”
Theo shakes his head, already moving toward the door. “There’s no need.”
Evelyn tsks softly, like he’s just guaranteed his own doom. “Suit yourself. But you’ll wound his pride. Giles takes household order very seriously.”
As I turn to follow, something catches my eye.
Just beneath the heavy, gleaming railing of the grand staircase.
The rug, just slightly askew—not enough that anyone would notice at a glance, but enough that it doesn’t quite sit right.
A picture frame, a fraction of an inch out of place, the angle just slightly off from the others lining the wall.
Small, almost imperceptible details. But enough.
The exact spot where Victoria Mayfair’s life ended with the brutal tug of a garrote.
Something in my stomach tightens.
It’s subtle—so subtle that if I weren’t already looking, I would’ve missed it completely. But I see it. A faint discoloration just above the baseboard, where the sheen of the paint shifts ever so slightly.
At first glance, it looks like a flaw in the finish. A scuff. A shadow in the brushwork. But then I step closer, and the shape clarifies—thin, reddish-brown, smeared across the otherwise smooth surface like a fingerprint dragged sideways.
Definitely blood.
And definitely there before the paint fully dried.
I glance at Theo, and he’s already staring at it. He doesn’t need me to say it. We both know what it means.
We’ve always been like this, even while mildly at each other's throats.
It’s why my advisor insisted I ask him to sit on my thesis committee, because it was obvious to anyone who’d been around us for more than a minute that he understood the way I think.
The questions I had before I asked them.
The patterns I’d see before I could explain why they mattered.
We didn’t talk much outside of meetings, but somehow, he always knew exactly where my brain would go next. Still does.
Someone brushed against this wall while the paint was still tacky. After the murder, but before the scene was officially processed. Someone bleeding.
And not the victim—Victoria’s body had no injuries that would have caused bleeding., which means this didn’t come from her. It came from someone else. Maybe the perpetrator. A split knuckle, a careless cut.
It’s something that would be easy to miss in bad lighting. A detail a shitty police officer would overlook, and Bellwood’s got no shortage of those. The blood is dried into the paint, oxidized to a dull rust shade, half-hidden by the wall’s uneven texture.
I shift my weight, angling myself just enough to block the others’ view, moving with a skilled subtlety earned from a lifetime of covering my own ass. Theo doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t ask questions. He just sets my bag down, hunches over like he’s tying his shoe, and reaches into his pocket.
Could we have come back later? Probably.
But that would’ve meant leaving it to chance, risking someone noticing the flaw and touching up the paint while they’re still wrapping up the remodeling.
Theo stealthily pulls out his phone and snaps a picture with barely a flicker of movement.
If anyone else notices, they don’t say a word.
We say our goodbyes to the family, and Emily leads us down the long, dimly lit hallway toward our room.
She opens the door to let us inside, and it is at that moment that I realize I’ve made some terrible, horrible, no good, very bad life choices.
Lila: Update from the field: I have made a shocking discovery.
Calla: You found the murderer already??
Serena: Did you alert the authorities?
Lila: Worse.
Calla: …There’s a second murder???
Serena: You are the second murder, aren’t you? Are you contacting us from the other side?
Lila: There’s. Only. One. Bed.
Calla: *gasps in tropes*
Serena: Oh, this is better than murder.
Calla: You’re telling me you, Lila Jennings, are going to spend an entire week sharing a bed with Professor Grumpasaurus Rex?
Lila: Technically, I’m going to be spending an entire week making Theo’s life as miserable as possible while we are trapped in this ridiculous, romance-novel scenario.
Lila: Which will take zero effort on my part because he simply hates being in my vicinity.
Lila: He said he’s sleeping on the couch.
Lila: It’s a chaise lounge.
Lila: There’s no way in hell he fits.
Serena: You’re calling him Theo now???
Calla: Oh, she’s so done for.
Lila: No. NO. Don’t you dare. This is not a thing. It’s an inconvenience. A logistical nightmare. A violation of my personal space rights.
Serena: A set-up from the gods of forced proximity and unresolved sexual tension.
Calla: You and I have read this book before, babe. You two are about five chapters away from some kind of “omg he has a pierced dick” situation.
Lila: That will not be happening.
Lila: One, because it’s just NOT.
Lila: And two, Theo Grayson is the literal last person on earth to do something like get a fucking dick piercing. He’s too buttoned up. Too STIFF.
Serena: Something’s gonna be stiff HEH HEH HEH
Calla: What was his reaction? Did he look at the bed, then at you, then sigh like the weight of the world had been placed on his irritable, well-muscled shoulders?
Lila: … I hate you both.
Calla: I KNEW IT.
Serena: Babe, you’re sharing a bed with the hot professor you’ve been verbally sparring with for over a year. At this point, I don’t even know if I want you to solve this murder. There are so many MUCH MORE ENTERTAINING things you could be doing this week.
Calla: Yeah, can you focus on the real mystery here? Which is: How long before you snap and climb him like a tree?
Serena: ENTERTAINING AND ORGASMIC
Lila: Blocking both of you.
Calla: Lila.
Serena: Lila, no.
Lila: [Lila has left the group.]
Calla: She’ll be back.
Serena: Yep. Probably at 2AM when she’s wide awake and stuck listening to his unlabored breathing as she gazes upon how sexy he looks when his face is soft with sleep and the weight of his past has melted away from his chiseled features.
Calla: Can’t wait.