Chapter 27 Chain Reaction
CHAIN REACTION
LILA
The shock of seeing her there nearly bowls me over and I feel so, so careless for not keeping my mouth shut.
For the love of Fanny, please tell me she didn’t hear any of that.
But what she says throws a wrench in any half-formed plan we may have had for our last day here. “You think I wanted to?”
She stands there, shoulders rigid, eyes bright with something that looks too close to panic.
“You think I’m her?” she whispers, voice unspooling, brittle and sharp all at once.
“Emily?” The word scrapes out of me. My brain can’t reconcile the girl in front of me with the one curled on the couch with me a few nights ago, laughing too loudly at one of Theo’s dry jokes, pink-cheeked from wine.
This version of her looks carved open.
She steps forward, chest heaving. “I didn’t mean to kill her, Lila. You have to understand.”
My vision tunnels.
“I just needed answers,” Emily continues, tears welling but not falling.
Shock floods my system, leaving everything else momentarily distant.
Beside me, Theo is still.
There is no surprise on his face.
He barely reacts.
I’m more thrown by that than what Emily is saying. I look him in the eyes and all I find is the calm of someone who saw this coming.
The room is still for a beat too long, right up until rapid footsteps sound in the hallway outside. The door pushes inward, and Baryn enters, unmistakably panicked. “Em—”
“Stop.” The word splinters on its way out.
He looks at her, eyes searching hers. Understanding, knowing, falls across his features. “Emily, I have this under control.” He is pleading, desperate.
“I can’t—I can’t let you do this anymore.” She speaks with a tremor, but she doesn’t look away. “I can't let you take the blame. I told you I’d fix it. That I’d make it right. But it’s not right. It’s not even close.”
She looks at me then, tears falling rapidly now.
“I did it. I poisoned her,” she admits without faltering. “I started a month ago. Maybe a bit longer.”
“Em, no one knows about the poison,” Baryn says, desperate.
Theo looks at me, hesitant at first, then seems to make the decision in real time. He stands, approaches Emily like a cornered animal, and wraps his fingers around her wrist, holding her hand up in front of her own face. In front of Baryn’s.
He peels off the bandage she’s had wrapped around her hand since our first night here because of the cut from the glass.
Her fingers are red and tender, the skin slightly peeled in spots, like old blisters healing.
“We know,” Theo says. His next words are clinical. He doesn’t look at me when he says them. Each one that spills from his mouth makes my throat close up just a little more.
“I saw the first tox report. The one missing from Henry’s file. I couldn’t let it go. I started digging into hellebore. Reading everything I could get my hands on—case studies, autopsy reports, toxicology breakdowns. I needed to understand it. To see how it fit.
And one of the things I kept finding is that handling it in raw or lightly processed form can cause blistering. Severe skin irritation. Especially when it’s absorbed through broken skin. And the shape of hers—the placement on her fingers—”
He swallows. “They matched. I noticed it at dinner.” His gaze drops to her hand. “It looks worse now that it’s drying out. More noticeable. But I knew what it was almost immediately.”
Something inside me fractures further. I can’t stop myself from saying, “You let me chase every wrong lead. You let me look like an idiot while you stood there and waited for me to catch up.”
My voice cracks on the last few words, shame flaring hot under my skin. Not just because I missed it, but because he didn’t trust me to see it for myself. Because he decided I wasn’t ready. Because he made that decision alone.
He looks at me, finally releasing Emily’s hand. “That’s not what I was doing, Lila.”
“Then what were you doing, Theo? Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like you didn’t trust what I would do with the information.”
He moves away from Emily, hands loose at his sides. It’s a careful movement. Measured. The kind you make when you’re approaching something that is both fragile and volatile.
He reaches for me, but I pull away before I can think not to and the hurt that flashes across his face almost matches the one that’s currently splitting me in half.
“I trust you more than I have ever trusted anyone,” he says anyway.
The words punch a hole straight through me.
I look at him, and all I can think is—then why didn’t you trust me with this? Why didn’t you trust me to do the right thing even if it was Emily?
He steps toward me again, almost like he can’t stand the space between us.
Like he knows I need space but he can’t bring himself to leave me completely alone in it.
It would be easier if he was defensive, if he snapped, if he gave me something to shove against. But he doesn’t.
He just stands there, steady in the way I can’t bring myself to be right now.
“She’s your friend,” he says. “Your best friend. You’ve already lost Laurel. I didn’t want to be the reason you looked around for Emily and saw another empty space in your world.”
I inhale deeply, but it doesn’t quite help. Something ugly and aching swirls in the pit of my stomach.
“I was trying to protect you,” he says, reassuring me again.
“Not from the truth. But from what it would mean if I shared my hunch and it turned out that I was wrong. Blaming her for something she didn’t do, or even questioning her about it all would have ripped your friendship apart from the inside out. I needed to be certain.”
I want to scream. Or cry. Or throw something that will shatter.
But I don’t.
Because he’s not wrong about any of this. He’s just right in a way that fucking sucks.
It’s the type of hurt that comes when someone sees a part of you you were trying to keep out of sight—not out of shame, but necessity. When they notice something you couldn’t afford to examine too closely yourself.
He wasn’t trying to deceive me. He was trying to brace me for another instance of my life falling to pieces when I’d barely recovered from the last time.
The weight of what he’s said presses down on me, but a broken, panicked sound from Emily pulls me out of myself. She’s unraveling faster than I can process any of this.
“I’m so sorry, Lila,” she sobs. “So, so sorry.”
I find it within myself to stand and walk over to her. “What happened Em?” I feel desperate for answers now.
Baryn moves immediately, one hand on her arm, the other at her back, muttering her name and a string of no’s like he can physically hold the truth inside her if he just says it enough times.
“Emily,” he says, urgent. “You don’t have to—”
Her shoulders fold inward, but her words pour out like vomit she’s held it in too long and it’s all coming up at once.
“Yes.” Tears run down her face in endless streams. “I do.”
She looks at me, really looks at me, bracing for impact.
“She was looking for it,” Emily says. “Victoria. The orrery. Sixteen million dollars’ worth of brass and myth and obsession. She was convinced Henry hid it somewhere on the estate.”
Baryn’s hand tightens at her elbow. “Emily—”
“I don’t care anymore, Bear,” she snaps.
Her breathing falters. She presses her hands to her face, drags them down. Her cheeks are wet and red.
“She thought if she could find it, she could finally get what she deserved for marrying my father. He never wanted anything to do with our family’s money, and it made her batshit crazy.”
My stomach twists.
“I found everything several months after we moved out of the house and in with Grandmother,” Emily continues.
“In my mother’s old room. Notes. Books. Printouts.
About orreries. Poisons. She was obsessed.
There was never even a hint of any of it while Dad was on trial.
I don’t think she expected us—or anyone—to go back there, especially after so much time had passed.
She’d become careless, leaving things out in the open.
But one day, Baryn and I were wandering the tunnels the way we used to as kids. When we passed the one that opens into the basement of my old house, it was hard not to go in. Walk around. Reminisce.”
She pauses to sniffle. “That’s how we figured it out. What she’d done. We suspected it, anyway.”
Baryn closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“For a long time, I didn’t know how to move forward,” Emily says.
“I had pieces that pointed to what we thought actually happened, but nothing concrete. Nothing solid enough to act on. Everyone knew she was always researching, digging, obsessing. Everything we found could just as easily be dismissed as that.”
Her hands curl into fists at her sides.
“It wasn’t until I went back through the reports from my grandfather’s murder that I had more to go on.
The coroner noted signs of early stage heart failure, but Henry’s heart was fine.
He had just had a checkup. So I dug deeper.
Cross-referenced everything. That’s when I realized a supplemental toxicology report was listed in the evidence log, but it wasn’t in the case file.
It had been removed,” she pauses, then continues.
“I paid to have it tracked down through the lab’s internal database.
The report flagged trace amounts of hellebore in his system.
It wasn’t just early stage heart failure. He had been poisoned."
She looks at me like she needs me to understand—not just the crime, but the ache behind it.
“I told myself it was different,” she continues. “That I was just trying to get her to confess. My father was already dead, but I needed to fix things. And Baryn didn’t know. Not until it was already happening. Not until it was too late.”
She looks up at me again, completely wrecked.