Chapter Twenty-Four
Remember our conversation about whether empaths could potentially be acclimated to violence if we started exposure young enough?
Get on the next plane to Seattle.
You’re not going to believe this.
—Thirty-eight-year-old note buried in a filing cabinet at the Empath Initiative
Alex leaned on the rail on the Bellingham Boardwalk, gaze not on the water but on his phone. Gretel had responded to his condolences
about her parents.
Gretel: What would you say if I told you I think my parents’ murder was a setup?
His eyebrows went up. How much did she know? Who did she suspect? The waves rolled in quietly as he typed a message back.
Alex: I’d say you’re probably right. Your parents were pretty powerful people.
Another pair of texts came in a moment later.
Gretel: Not as much power as the person who had them murdered.
Gretel: Nobody is going to believe me about this. I’m never going to get to justice.
Had she even been told anything about her parents? Was she ever going to be allowed to see her parents’ bodies—to bury them?
Or was she just going to be kept in the dark for the rest of her life, never getting answers or closures?
And suddenly he was typing again, too honestly.
Alex: One of the most powerful men you can think of had my parents murdered too. I’m still working on “justice.”
Cora’s steps echoed on the boardwalk as she came to join him at the railing. “I found a park staffer,” she said. “But she
said she hasn’t seen any boats on the water today with the weather.”
“So where the hell did a group of pacifist empaths go by land?” Alex said, pocketing his phone.
Cora closed her eyes. A minute went by. Then she swallowed. “Stone Solutions has access to that abandoned pulp mill by Everett.
Plenty of space, right on the water with enough land that no one hears anything. Even screaming.”
Rage flared in Alex, the reminder of what Cora and her fiancé, John, had been put through in November. Stopping Nichols, stopping
Stone—it wasn’t just about the chaos. It was vengeance, for all the people they’d hurt—John, Gretel’s parents, his parents,
Evan.
He reached for her hand. Their fingers intertwined, and emotion flowed between them for a moment, no words needed.
Finally she seemed to shake herself. “So are we gonna look for some empaths?”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
As soon as Anthony left, Gretel wasted no time crossing the swanky sitting area and opening the unlocked door to Vivian Marist’s
office. She stepped inside, taking in the oversized mahogany desk with its expensive ergonomic chair and the personal printer
in the corner. The wall held framed art of mountains hung beside an oversized flat-screen monitor, and a few of Marist’s things
were scattered around the office, including her coat and scarf hanging in the corner.
The desk held a monitor, a mousepad and a laptop in the dock. Gretel took a seat at the desk and booted up the laptop. It
was password-protected, but in the corner was the option to log in as Guest. She clicked on that, and the screen opened to
an internal homepage.
She didn’t actually expect to find proof Charles Stone was a murderer on the Stone Solutions intranet. But on that call with
Charles, her dad had mentioned that shareholders were concerned about a suspicious filing from October.
Where there’s murder, there are often other crimes, Jamey had said that morning.
Gretel had already glanced over the 8-K in question herself. It seemed like nothing more than the required notice to Stone
Solutions shareholders regarding the acquisition of three small companies that made materials used in the empath gloves. Building
a vertical supply chain sounded like profit as usual to her, not something to raise suspicion, but she was printing all of
it to go through with Jamey, just in case.
As she waited for the exhibits and attachments to print, her gaze fell on the monitor on the wall. Could this be some kind of stock ticker? Or something else tracking the financial information she was looking for?
Gretel stood up and stepped toward it. She ran a hand along the bottom edge of the monitor until she found the power button.
She pressed it, and the screen burst into life.
It was a map of North America, speckled with blue dots. There were no controls visible, so she touched the screen like she
would her phone, and the map shifted slightly. She made a flicking motion with her fingers, zooming in more closely on a cluster
in Chicago, watching as three of the blue dots slowly moved together along Shoreline Drive heading north. She touched one
of the dots, and a profile popped up with a picture and biographical details for a thirtysomething empath nurse.
“Oh my God,” Gretel said out loud as her stomach turned over. She clicked on a second blue dot, then the third, and then a
fourth in Madison and a fifth in Minneapolis. Each one pulled up a profile for an empath.
Stone Solutions was tracking all of them.
Two days ago, she might have believed anything Stone Solutions had done was for the greater good. But then, two days ago,
she hadn’t been convinced the CEO’s father was a stone-cold murderer.
Her phone chimed. She kept one eye on the door and pulled out her phone to see a new text from Alex.
Alex: One of the most powerful men you can think of had my parents murdered too. I’m still working on “justice.”
She stilled, gaze flicking between the door and the monitor and her phone.
Alex’s parents had been murdered too? But he’d said he was from Texas. What powerful man that she might think of would have reach all the way into Texas?
Charles and Cedrick Stone, her mind supplied. You’re looking right now at how their control stretches across every inch of the country.
Her gaze went back to the screen. She zoomed out, and then zoomed back in on northwest Washington. Her brow furrowed. There
were no blue dots in Washington.
“Where are Cora and Reece?” she said out loud as she zoomed back out, scanning the West Coast for dots. Then, on one side
of the map, her gaze fell on three red dots clustered in the ocean. She clicked on one of them and pulled up a picture of
a familiar empath.
Reece Davies, location unknown, said the caption.
Gretel stared at Reece’s picture, Marist’s words coming back to her.
The empaths are more complicated than the public has been led to believe. I’m not at liberty to say more than that. Just know your sympathy for the empaths, and Reece Davies in particular, is misplaced,
and our funding is more necessary than most could even imagine.
Gretel clicked on the second red dot and found herself looking at a picture of Cora.
Cora Falcon, location unknown.
Gretel furrowed her brow. She looked back at the map and pressed on the third red dot. And suddenly she was staring at a younger
version of the man she’d had brunch with, who’d texted to say he was sorry about her parents.
Alex Grayson, said the caption. Location unknown.
Reece scrolled through search results on his phone as he waited for the gas pump—because maybe Grayson could drive Reece’s Smart car for ages on a single tank, but Reece had to fill up—and frowned.
The only connection to EI that was turning up in the area was the old unfinished facility outside Port A.
Why the hell would Evan be heading there?
The pump finally stopped, and Reece got back on the road as quickly as he could.
But the minutes ticked by with no sign of Traynor’s Tahoe.
“Where the fuck are you?” he muttered as he finally pulled onto the shoulder and idled the truck. The wipers swished away
the falling snow as he opened his GPS. It only took a moment to pull up the tracker they’d put on Traynor’s Tahoe: He was
actually behind Reece, a little ways down some tiny side road that didn’t even have a name.
“What. The. Hell.” Reece put the truck back in gear. He had the advantage of a vehicle capable of handling a snowy road, so
he cut straight across the two lanes and the median to head back east. A few minutes later, he made a right turn at a gas
station, heading south on a road that turned empty almost instantly.
Reece didn’t like this at all.
A couple of miles down the road, he caught sight of a black Tahoe on the shoulder, looking abandoned at the base of green
pine trees.
“Son of a bitch.” Reece slammed on the brakes, pulling over onto the opposite shoulder. He hopped down from the truck and
approached the vehicle.
The snow was sticking to the ground now, beginning to pile, but not quite high enough yet to hide the evidence of a recent
struggle: mud churned up, footprints everywhere, the Tahoe’s driver’s door smashed on the ground.
Red streaks all over the snow.
Reece crouched down by a particularly bloody patch of snow next to the Tahoe’s smashed door, cold snowflakes dotting the back
of his neck. There was no sign of Traynor himself. Was this his blood?
Traynor was following Evan, the little voice in Reece’s head pointed out.
His fingers curled into a fist. If one single drop of this blood was Grayson’s—
He shot to his feet and followed the red trail into the tree line. Then he stilled.
At the base of a pine lay Holt Traynor, eyes open and glassy, blood smeared across his face from his eyes, his nose and the
single bullet wound in the center of his forehead.
Reece felt himself tense.
The bullet would have torn through skin, burning flesh and bone in its wake—
He brushed angrily at his own forehead before an echo could bloom on his skin. He wasn’t that goddamn pacifist anymore, and
he would not feel grief or phantom pain over fucking Traynor.
He forced himself to stare at the corpse, to try to piece the scene together. Had Traynor been too far from Alex, burning
out, bleeding from the eyes, maybe losing all control? And someone else had been here with Traynor, someone armed and with
good enough aim to take him out with one bullet, giving Traynor a more merciful death than the inevitable thrall burnout?
Reece could take a pretty good guess who’d fired the shot.
He backtracked to the Tahoe and then headed several paces down the road, already suspecting what he’d find. And sure enough,
in the mud beyond the Tahoe was a different set of tire tracks; these were small and narrow, the perfect size to have been
left by a Smart car.
He went back to the truck, starting the engine right up and doing a tight U-turn to head back to the highway, this time with
more speed.
If this was Grayson’s work—as it almost certainly was—he would have made arrangements for the body’s removal, which meant Reece needed to be out of there immediately.
He didn’t know for sure where Grayson was going, but they weren’t too far from the abandoned EI facility now. Reece was going
to trust his gut. He punched the gas, and the engine opened up full throttle, the high-pitched whine of the turbos echoing
around empty trees as he sped back north.