Chapter 3
Iregister the words that come out of the man’s mouth—shakily, because I’m shaking the fuck out of him—but not what they mean. I’m the last one in our group to understand that he’s given an address.
A pair of addresses.
Because apparently the motherfucker who took Lily—and who this guy is going to suffer for—had a couple of places ready just in case.
Someone takes him out of my hands. Poseidon, I think. Somebody strong enough to lift him with two hands on his arms, like you’d lift a statue that had turned into Jell-O.
That’s good, because I had no plan for him. Bring him along as a punching bag, maybe, but I’m not interested in touching him. I’m interested in getting to Lily.
So I’m taking the initiative of pulling one of our security guys—we have to be firing all these people, because there’s no way they can work for us ever again—out of the nearest black SUV. I don’t care where he goes next, or what he does. I just want the car.
The sound of raised voices catches my attention. Julien, talking forcefully to August, who signs back like he’s yelling, too. Mason has come out of the cathedral, and he and Gabriel are arguing with one another. Hades and Poseidon aren’t shouting, but it hits me like they are.
“I’m leaving,” I snap at all of them. “Get in the fucking car.”
Mason drives, his face set. I’d have fought him on it if I had any time to spare. His knee still hurts when he’s under stress, and it hurts more when he’s driving. I should be the one behind the wheel.
Except my heart is beating so hard that I can feel my pulse pushing at my neck and my chest and my toes. I’ve driven plenty of times under pressure.
This time’s different.
This time, it’s Lily.
Half of me splits off and hovers above the car. Half of me wants to be in my body as much as I can be so I can be ready for?—
For whatever happens next.
Hades sits in the passenger seat, watching the map on Mason’s phone. August and Julien have taken over the back row. Julien has stopped talking out loud to August, but I can hear them signing. No point in looking. I won’t know what they’re saying. It won’t matter.
I focus on staying in the car.
There’s traffic, because of course there fucking is. This is Manhattan. It takes more than one kidnapped woman to shut down the city.
It takes more than two dead parents and a critically injured brother, too. Nothing stopped for us. Not ever.
Not that I expected it to.
The first address is the one closer to the cathedral. A matter of blocks. That can’t be where Lily was taken. It’s too easy. But there’s no other choice. We have to know if she’s there.
I could get there faster on foot.
Mason would lose his mind if I got out of the car right now. I know he’s not happy that we’re in two separate groups—three, if Lily and whoever took her count as a group. Gabriel and Remy are at the cathedral with Sunshine and Elise and her sisters and the rest of the wedding party. Both Hades’s brothers. If they work as a team, they’ll probably be able to keep everyone from finding out that the ceremony has gone to hell and one of us might not come back.
Lily’s going to come back. I might not make it. If I can’t find her soon, or at least get my heart to slow down, then I’m just as screwed as she is.
Mason would go full-on Protective Dad Mode if I leap into traffic with tachycardia, so I stay in my seat.
Crowded sidewalks. Storefronts with awnings. Blocks go by at a crawl. How can it be so close to the cathedral and so outrageously far? It’s like the drive to get Lily after she went back home. Looking for her between the coffee shop and the dry cleaner. I catch myself looking for the shine of her red hair twice, then three times, then remind myself that she wouldn’t be obvious because of her hair, she’d be obvious because of her wedding dress.
Unless she’s not wearing it anymore. Unless the person who took her knew that the white gown would make her too distinctive and forced her to change out of it.
They had to balance that with the time they had to get away, and it wasn’t long. It can’t have been long. It only felt like I was standing at the front of the cathedral for a decade, and Sunshine saw her before then. Hades carried Robin the Baby back and forth from our room to the bridal suite.
Lily’s existence isn’t in question, but in the back of the car, it sure as fuck feels like it. Like I could have hallucinated all of this, and nobody was brave enough to tell me.
The people in the car would tell me. At least one of them. She’s real, and I haven’t lost her for good. I’ve only lost her temporarily.
My palms burn with how hard I shook that prick at the cathedral. I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. What I should feel guilty about is letting Lily out of my sight. But that’s what happens when you look away. Turn your head, and your whole fucking life is burning down. Convince yourself that you have nothing to worry about, and your parents are dead and your brother’s ready to follow them.
Jamie.
“No,” I say.
The SUV jerks. Mason, braking.
“What?” he says, his eyes on mine in the rearview mirror. “Do I need to turn around?”
“Don’t turn around.”
“We’re almost there.” One of his hands is visible on the wheel. His knuckles get whiter. Hades says something to him. He answers. Every hair on the back of my neck stands. Tension stretches down my spine. The sound of people signing to each other in the back row starts again. I’m probably making up that they seem concerned. That’s not something I can tell by the soft pats and slides of hands on hands.
Jamie, my mom whispers.
I stare at the back of the driver’s seat. If I close my eyes, Mason will know that I’m cracking up. He’ll know more about how I’m cracking up.
Mom, please, I think at her. Not right now. I’m busy.
Are you? I think you’re just sitting in a car.
I don’t think anything at all for as long as I can.
That lasts for less than a minute.
I’m trying to find Lily. I can’t talk right now.
Okay.
Everything outside the car is freakishly bright. It’s a sunny day, so that tracks, but my vision is fucked. All the colors clash. There’s nowhere to rest my eyes. It’s not like my cottage. It’s not like when I look at Lily.
I might not find her, Mom.
You will.
I might not.
You will.
I have to, because what the fuck am I supposed to say to Snowball? Lily’s dead?
No.
No.
Mason pulls the car over to the curb, startling the hell out of me. My body is ten steps ahead of my brain. I’m out on the sidewalk before he stops. At the building in a few steps.
This isn’t where she is. This is a storefront with a boarded-up front window with a SOLD sign. The door isn’t locked. It pops open with one half-assed pull on the handle.
The building is nothing to me. I don’t want to think about fucking property values when Lily’s been taken. And I still have a ballpark figure in the back of my mind. It’s the most ridiculous reflex I have. It’s pointless. It was worth something when I worked for Mason’s company. I guess I still do, since he hasn’t fired me, but now it isn’t worth anything, and it’s still there.
Numbers switch over to lower ones when I cross the threshold. Any property that’s left open halfway through renovations—there’s drywall dust and a bucket of drywall mud and some sawhorses—is going to be screwed. Most of the value comes from the fact that it’s Manhattan real estate, but the rest is going to be a pain in the ass to get back if the wrong person walks in off the street.
I don’t want to think about this.
For fuck’s sake.
I shove all of it into the background of my thoughts. Building has three floors. Renovation bullshit on the ground floor. Empty rooms on the second. Abandoned file cabinets on the third.
She’s not here.
Everybody’s waiting outside the car when I come back. Mason’s holding the door open for me like he knew she wouldn’t be here, too.
Once I’m inside, I take off my jacket and throw it at the opposite side of the car.
“We’ll find her,” Mason says, catching my eye in the rearview. He pulls back into traffic.
“I know.”
I say it like I don’t know that finding somebody can fuck you up forever. I say it like I didn’t go looking for those crime scene photos and get turned into one myself. I say it like I haven’t been running from those pictures ever since.
I’m never going to outrun them.
I can’t have another thought about the photos or property values. I don’t have any room in my body for anything but my heart. I let my eyes skim over the sidewalk and drag thoughts out of my useless brain.
Who took Lily?
It had to have something to do with her grandfather. He’s the only one left. Bettencourt is dead. Van Kempt is dead. My parents are dead. The remaining members of the consortium are mega-fucked.
Judge Beaufort Hayes is the last person with a vendetta against us. He tried to keep Lily at his house. He sent a bunch of rogue cops after me. The judge wants a word with his granddaughter. He came to Mason’s building.
And that’s as far as he’s going to go. Beaufort isn’t the kind of man who gets his hands dirty. He’ll say a few stern words to a doorman, but he’s not going to sully himself by walking in the woods or shooting someone or burning down a building.
So it wasn’t the judge who came to the cathedral. Somebody would’ve noticed him.
And the guy Hades brought back wasn’t the kidnapper. He was still close enough to the building to get caught.
There are layers to this. It’s an onion of assholes, and I’d bet anything that Judge Beaufort Hayes is at the center.
But the person who’s doing all the dirty work is somebody else.
The name of the person who killed my parents—the person who actually lit the fire in the building—wasn’t in any of the paperwork I went through. Gabriel didn’t find it, either. He would have said. We might be able to find it if we went through all the paperwork from every company in the consortium and tracked every invoice they ever paid, but there’s no time for that.
Another way might be faster.
I lean up toward Hades’s seat. He looks at me, his expression calm.
“The guy at the cathedral,” I start.
Mason takes a breath, but doesn’t say anything.
“We still have him, right? We haven’t given him to the cops?”
Hades shakes his head. “That seemed premature, given your previous experience with the police.”
“I didn’t ask his name.” My palms heat up again. I didn’t draw any blood, and here I am, wondering if what I’m feeling is guilt.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Besides the obvious, I mean. Besides the fact that I’ve spent years doing crimes on behalf of the less powerful. I’ve rescued pigs and chickens and one snowball-looking bird. I’m a fucking vegetarian. According to Lily, I might be Jesus.
It’s like the property values. I know that the guy at the cathedral was a victim, too.
He was probably a victim. Of capitalism. Of the judge. Of the judge’s middleman. If I’m being very fucking generous, I can imagine a scenario where he didn’t want to be involved in kidnapping a bride on her wedding day.
Despite all that, I don’t think I’m feeling guilt about how I shook him.
I feel guilty because I didn’t kill him.
Killing isn’t my thing. It’s the judge’s thing.
Hades taps away at his phone.
“Who are you texting?”
“Zeus,” he says. “He knows everyone and their secrets.”
“You didn’t think to mention that earlier?”
“You didn’t ask.” He cuts me a glance out of the corner of his eyes. “And you were high the last time we discussed this. Would you have remembered if I told you?”
“Probably not.”
I miss the painkillers. There’s still a faint ache left over in my ribs from the cops. I should have been resting for a month or two at minimum, but that’s not a thing Hills do. We get tossed off buildings or jump out of them or get kicked around by cops and keep going.
Hades’s phone buzzes in his hand several times in a row. He holds it up so I can see the screen.
The first text is just a name, bland and forgettable.
Zeus: That’s the guy we have here.
Zeus: Consortium members
Zeus: Bettencourt/Hayes—unclear who was first to approach. Hayes is the one left standing.
Three dots hop up and down on the screen. He’s typing something else. Hades doesn’t move the phone, and I watch it like this next message is going to be the answer to everything. I wouldn’t mind if it said Lily turned up in the cathedral, you can all come back, everything’s fine.
Zeus: Sorry. Poseidon’s being a fucking pirate.
Zeus: Ah.
This is going to make me stroke out.
Zeus: Our friend here gave me a name, but it was an alias.
Zeus: There was another name on more paperwork—only unsealed after Bettencourt died. He didn’t want this getting out.
“He didn’t want what getting out?” I bark at the phone.
“Jesus, Jameson,” Mason says.
Zeus: Malcolm Walsh
Zeus: He’s the man who took Lily
Zeus: Find him and you’ll find her
Zeus: Hades?
Hades turns the phone, then shows me the screen again.
Hades: What
Zeus: Don’t kill him.
A sound comes out of my mouth. It’s nothing like a laugh. “Tell him not to worry. You’re not going to kill him. I am.”