Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
FINN
Martina clears away the dishes, deep wrinkles in her forehead.
“You have to eat,” she says, frowning at the full plate in front of Zane. “Eat, boys. Keep up your strength.”
Dutch pushes his plate away. I don’t think he touched a single bite of his baked potato.
“Is my food no good?” Martina asks sorrowfully.
Zane musters up a smile for her. “Thanks, Martina. The food was great.”
“Not according to these plates.”
I hand Martina my dish, and she lights up when she sees I’ve scraped every bite.
Rounding the table, she pats Dutch on the back. “The girls will laugh at you both when they come back and I tell them how you sulked around the house.”
No one responds.
Martina’s smile flickers like a candle in the wind. “They are so strong. They will make it back.”
I agree with our housekeeper on both counts. But at this point, we have more questions than answers.
Dutch and Zane are doing everything they can to find the girls but, ultimately, this is a tech issue. The burden of solving this lands heavily on my shoulders.
I hope I made the right choice entrusting our family’s future to Jinx.
Martina retreats to the kitchen to wash up, and we head to the pool. The sun is beginning to set, and the fiery orange tint on the clouds looks like hell on earth.
“I’ll get a sweater. I’ll be right back,” Dutch mumbles. He walks with his hands in his pockets to the pool house where he’s been sleeping.
Zane took the couch the very first night. Neither of my brothers can stomach sleeping in the bedrooms without their wives.
Zane emerges from the kitchen with a bottle of Grey’s favorite wine in hand.
I give him a stern look.
He falls into the pool chair next to me. “Relax. It’s empty.”
Even worse.
Zane sounded determined to stay away from booze and not spiral, but tonight is an indication that he’s not as impenetrable as he thinks.
Some patterns are hard to shake.
Today, the wine bottle is empty.
Tomorrow, it won’t be.
The day after that, he’ll find a reason to drink.
It’s a slippery slope. The mind never truly forgets, even after years of making different choices. It’s easy to make excuses, especially when familiar patterns are more comfortable than taking the hard road.
“I’m not going to fall apart,” Zane says, as if he can read my mind. He sets the bottle on the ground. With his uninjured hand, he twirls his drumstick around.
“How’s the wrist?” I ask, nodding to the brace.
He shrugs.
“I haven’t heard you practicing lately.”
He shakes his head. “Haven’t felt like playing.”
That’s a really bad sign.
Even after Zane’s wrist was cruelly snapped in a fight after the winter dance, he didn’t lose his drive for music.
When the doctor said he could never play again, Zane grinned and told us that he would.
He went faithfully to physical therapy, got a brace for the pain, and he’s been learning new techniques to play drums in a way that won’t flare up his injury.
“Maybe we should practice a set. Just to get it off our chests,” I offer, watching him.
Zane shakes his head. “Not right now, Finn.”
The uneasy feeling I’ve been having since the girls were kidnapped multiplies. On the surface, Dutch and Zane are keeping it together.
But below the surface, the water is boiling.
When Dutch isn’t beating the pavement, chasing leads, and hassling the detective in charge of the case, he’s walking around in a daze, unable to sleep.
And Zane…
Zane is like a rubber band being stretched farther and farther and farther…
The longer it goes, the harder it’ll snap.
Dutch returns wearing a hoodie, and he takes a seat next to Zane. The moment he sees the wine bottle, he immediately reaches for it.
Zane pulls it back. “Get your own. This is mine.”
Dutch growls. “Share the booze.”
“It’s empty,” I inform him.
Dutch’s eyes flicker over Zane. “Smart. The last time he drank, he started crying.”
Zane flips him off.
Dutch glances at me. In the night, his amber eyes remind me of a lion’s. “Any update with J?”
“She said she needed three days.”
“Are you sure one girl working on this is enough?” Zane asks, deep worry lines appearing on his forehead. “Shouldn’t we pay a suite of IT guys?”
“We did. They sucked,” Dutch grunts.
“Then we get more guys. Different guys.”
“Like who?” Dutch asks.
“I don’t know. Smart people. Like from one of those big tech companies. The guy that makes phones or the guy who builds rockets.”
“Yeah,” Dutch says sarcastically, “let’s just call up the billionaire who builds rockets and tell him to decrypt some code to find our wives. Great plan, Zane.”
My brother’s back stiffens. “I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas.”
“I’m doing everything I freaking can to find my wife.”
“So am I!” Zane yells.
“Enough.”
Dutch and Zane look away, breathing hard.
“Blaming each other won’t bring Cadence and Grey back,” I remind them.
“I still don’t think we should trust it all to J,” Zane insists. “At least we got references for that PI company we hired. We have no idea who this girl is. Where did she come from? What’s her actual name? Do we know anything about her?”
Dutch keeps his mouth shut, silently agreeing.
“Why’d we just let this stranger waltz into our lives? Why’d we believe her when she said she could save us?” Zane throws his hands up.
“Because Finn vouched for her.”
Silence falls.
The weight on my shoulders gets heavier.
“Fine.” Zane slouches in his chair. “At this point, why not let her do it? I’d even trust Jinx to help us.”
I sit up straighter. I don’t think the timing will get any better than this.
“Guys.” I wait until both my brothers are looking at me. “She is.”
“She is what?” Zane scrunches his nose.
Dutch freezes. “Jinx?”
Zane shoots to his feet. “You’re in contact with Jinx?”
“I thought she went ghost after sending us the kidnapping video?” Dutch growls. “You were communicating with her, and you kept it from us?”
“I’ve been looking for Jinx for a long time. Long before Cadence and Grey were taken,” I say. “I wanted to know how she knew so much about us.”
“And?” Zane motions for me to continue.
“At first, she wasn’t leaving any openings. But when I started working with her to expose those names on The Grateful Project list, she seemed…”
“Interested?” Zane looks bewildered. “In you?”
I shake my head. “I’d say she was receptive.”
“She wanted to be found,” Dutch muses. His eyes flit to mine. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’d been getting blocked for ages, but suddenly, a few days ago, I was able to triangulate her location using the code in her app.”
“Her app?” Dutch looks impressed.
“You code?” Zane’s eyes widen.
“How’d you find her using her app?” Dutch asks again, as if he wants to be answered first.
“Jinx’s encryption runs on triple-layer obfuscation, but I was able to dig behind her syntax to a self-learning proxy loop that…”
My words slowly fade as I look at their faces.
Zane is scratching his head. “Ob-foo-what?”
Dutch is squinting at me in confusion too.
“There was a trail,” I say simply. “And it was simple enough that I followed it.”
“So who is she? Where is she? How is she helping us?” Zane demands.
Dutch studies me. “It’s J, isn’t it?”
Zane whips around, his jaw hitting the floor. “The tiny blonde? The one with the heart condition? No way!”
I nod again.
Zane staggers back. “My mind is blown.”
“I don’t have proof though,” I add. “That’s why I didn’t tell you earlier, but everything points to her. She knows things about us a normal fan wouldn’t, and she has the skills to hack anywhere at any time. Gathering information is something she could do in her sleep.”
Dutch sits in stunned silence.
“But why us?” Zane licks his lips.
“I don’t know.”
“What’d she do with all the money she extorted from us?” Dutch asks next.
I shake my head. I don’t know that either.
“Jinx said, in her last text, that she wanted something from us. Specifically, she said: ‘I have something you want and you have something I need.’ What does she want from us?”
I pull my lips into my mouth.
“Damn. She has us by the throat, and we still don’t know anything about her.” Zane curses.
“Does she know that you know?” Dutch asks.
“My gut says yes, but she hasn’t confirmed it, and I’ve been pretending to be clueless too.”
Zane massages his forehead. “So let me get this straight. The owner of the anonymous gossip blog who knows secret, intimate details about us that we’ve never told anyone…
is a heart patient in a hospital. She doesn’t attend Redwood Prep, but she’s around our age, and she just so happens to want to help us find our wives for free? ”
“At this point, that’s all I have on Jinx.”
“Can we really trust her?” Dutch asks me, his expression somber. “I feel far less assured now that I know Jinx is the one controlling whether or not I speak to my wife.”
“She has the skills, Dutch. I was there when she decrypted the line and got through to Mom. We don’t have a choice.”
He blows out a breath.
“But,” I add, “we don’t have to leave everything up to Jinx.”
“What do you mean?” Zane accidentally kicks the wine bottle to the ground. He dives after it like it’s a child and cradles it in his arms. “Sorry, baby. Sorry.”
Dutch frowns worriedly.
My gut churns in an unpleasant way. I guess this is what worry feels like.
Zane sets the bottle down and faces me again. “I’m listening.”
“Follow me.” I lead my brothers to the music garage. It’s one of three garages, and it’s been converted into a practice studio.
Dutch’s prized guitar is in its stand, gathering dust.
Zane’s drums still have the protective covering on them.
I hand Dutch his guitar, and he runs his fingers over the strings. Each one holds a letter that spells CADEY, and the last string is a heart.
It’s strange to be back in this room again. It feels like, at any moment, Cadence and Grey will skip into the room, enjoying the music while we practice.
“What are we doing here, Finn?” Zane growls.
“Music is not a priority right now.” Dutch flashes me an angry look as he throws his guitar back in the stand. He used to worship that thing and never let it touch the ground. But now, he doesn’t even care about it.
“J found traces of Mom through the internet. That means the girls might have access to the internet too.” I pick up the guitar and shove it back into Dutch’s arms. “We can’t talk to them in the traditional way, but there are other ways to get a message out there.”
Dutch’s eyes widen. His fingers tighten over the guitar neck.
Zane shakes his head. “I don’t deserve to play right now, man. I should be searching harder for Grey. I should be doing something.”
“You hired the PI team. You’ve been driving around that mall and looking through footage every day. You’re doing everything you can.” I squeeze his shoulder.
Dutch nods his agreement. We’ve both seen how Zane threw himself into the search.
“But I can’t force either of you to play,” I tell Zane.
“If there’s even a chance that I can let Cadey know I’m thinking about her, I’m taking it.” Dutch’s chin rises a notch.
Zane catches on to the idea and gets behind his drum kit, while I turn on the camera.
“Do you think it’ll make a difference?” Zane asks, reaching for his drumsticks. “Do you think they’ll be able to hear us? Because there are things I want Grey to know too.”
“We’re The Kings.” I slip my bass guitar over my head and face my brothers. “We’ll make so much noise that they’ll hear us wherever they are in the world.”
A smile grows on Zane’s lips, and a familiar spark returns to his eyes. “We’re The Kings.”
Dutch plays a complicated riff. The guitar isn’t hooked up to an amp yet, but his fingers are so precise that I can hear the melody clearly.
Looking hopeful for the first time since the girls were kidnapped, Dutch grinds out, “We’re The Kings.”