CHAPTER 31
Memories haunted the grand staircase. Hugo, florid face beaming in the tailcoat and tie of the Turnbull annual dinner. Julia beside him, pale as a phantom in her mermaid lace gown. Emma herself running up the steps, red gown streaming behind. Alive as a flame.
At the top of the stairs, the ghosts left her.
Fox instinct ran through her, a live current.
Beware. She flattened herself against the wall.
Voices murmured ahead, from a door thrown open to the passage.
A door burned into Emma’s memory. The dining room, where they had served her plates of bleeding flesh.
Where she had broken their bowl. Where she had seen Jasper’s expression change to cold, implacable anger.
She had to force her feet forward, every step silent and sinking in the thick carpet.
Firelight flickered from the doorway, casting silhouettes on the wall.
She caught the outline of a bow tie, the edge of a tailcoat.
Emma pressed herself to the doorframe and peered in.
Turnbulls sprawled in chairs dragged around the fireplace.
Glasses of port dangled from their hands, tawny as the flames behind.
Francis Carr, once her partner for dinner in this very room. Eddie Spencer, Guy Cavendish, Philip Cranbottom, Atticus Tremaine, and Rory Clarke. Their names were growls in her throat.
“They were back again,” one of them was saying. “Asking questions.”
“They’re journalists.” Atticus Tremaine yawned. “That’s what they do.”
“They’re not meant to.” Guy Cavendish was petulant. “That was supposed to be all sorted—with the newspaper group and all. I thought we had a deal.”
Francis plucked at his bow tie. “It’s worse at home. The questions, I mean. My sister won’t leave it alone. Asking about the girl. Even my father—”
“Questions are to be expected. Even now. We just need to be prepared, that’s all.
” The deep, cool voice was Rory Clarke’s.
“They’ve not reopened the investigation, remember that.
The thing that has them so excited at the moment?
It’s just an appeal. That friend of the girl’s.
Nate Oluwoggy, or whatever his name is.”
Emma’s fingers curled to claws around the doorframe. Calling her “the girl.” Like she had no name. Like she wasn’t a full person to them. Only the fading sting of her encounter with Piers kept her from lunging, teeth bared.
“Can’t he leave it alone?” Guy flung himself back in his chair.
“No one can touch us if we keep our stories the same.” Rory’s gaze was calm. “We were all together, and Jasper was with us. All night. Didn’t leave us for a moment.”
“And why are we still covering for Jasper? Come on, we’re all thinking it.” Eddie Spencer looked around for support. “He’s been the weakest link here. No alibi. Stupid mistakes in the interviews. We all stick to the PR lines we’re given. But no, he just—”
“This is what we do,” Rory cut in. “This is how the Society works. If one of us goes down, we all could.”
Someone snorted. “And if you want to piss off the Balfours, Spence, go for it.”
Philip Cranbottom smiled thinly. “Think, Eddie. Jasper’s not the only one that’s been covered for, is he? Remember when you got into that spot of trouble last year? That party. The Baldock girl, Imogen—”
And like a fist to the stomach, Emma remembered.
Imogen at the party in Jasper’s rooms, dancing barefoot.
Staggering between two boys. Being led to one of the bedrooms. Imogen, who disappeared from the University not long after.
Emma had been there while something happened to Imogen.
While these boys did something to her. Guilt burned her throat, sour and sick.
Eddie turned on Philip. “Too much to drink, had some fun, regretted it the next day? That’s not the same.”
“Her aunt was threatening to raise quite the dust, though. You’re lucky you had Balfour senior to back you up. Made it go away, didn’t he? Him and my father. Stupid story like that, could have wrecked your career.”
“Now it’s our turn. We stick up for Jasper,” said Rory. “Ride it out.”
Francis Carr nodded. “Look, wherever the girl is—”
Philip Cranbottom’s voice was a whip. “Do not talk about where the girl might be. Never. We do not know. We do not even suspect. Remember that.”
Emma’s lip curled. Such liars, all of them.
But it amused her to think that in one sense, Philip had spoken the truth.
Because the boys in front of her did not know exactly where she was.
That she was a mere fox’s leap away, fingers tipped with claws.
And that while they drank and gossiped, and wasted the power they’d been given, she was making her way farther into their stronghold.
Unstopped. Unstoppable. And somewhere in the shadows of the clubhouse, she would find the key to their destruction.
The key to their destruction looked rather like a broom cupboard, at first glance.
But something about it made Emma stop. The metal around the lock was bright with new scratches, as though it were in frequent and recent use.
Strange for a cleaning cupboard to be important enough to lock.
Or to be in a passage velvety with dust, come to that.
So Emma tried the handle. Locked, as expected.
She turned her attention to the floor. Dust lay thick as frosting on a cake; footprints stood out like deer tracks.
A fat, layered trail ran down the center of the corridor and turned off at this door.
But there was also a second path, narrow and lightly trodden.
The prints ended beneath a gilt-framed portrait of a cavalier.
Emma approached the painting, triumph tingling in her fingertips.
Sure enough, she found a ledge carved into the back of the frame. And nestled inside, a key.
It turned smoothly in the lock. The door swung open.
A window lit the outline of a tiny room stuffed with shelves and filing cabinets.
In the corner was a door, half hidden by a curtain.
Emma pulled back the drapes and hissed. A Turnbull mark glowed green from the wood.
And no matter how she tugged at the door, it would not open.
Defeated, she turned back to the room. Every surface held piles of paper, folders, box files.
A records room. Emma slid the outer door shut and sloughed off her cloak.
Time for a different kind of hunt. If—when—she went back to the mortal world, she could not rely on the City to bring down the Turnbulls.
To destroy them, she needed their secrets.
And after several hours of sifting, Emma knew she had them. Her hands shook. It was too much, too big for one person to comprehend. She had thought she had known the Turnbulls. She had known nothing.
Some records were clearly for the boys. Catering invoices for dinners in the clubhouse, a quarterly bill for the cleaning of silver.
And transactions with other services. Like the proprietor of a nearby escort agency, who had apparently complained of her girls coming back with “injuries” and consequently received a sum that made Emma open her eyes very wide.
But the majority of the recent records belonged to the older Turnbulls, the alumni.
Records of business deals, legal documents, party donations.
Cozy letters between senior Turnbulls and the heads of media conglomerates, outlining a “mutual friendship.” To her surprise, the Baldock Group was among them.
Whatever had happened to Imogen, it seemed her father had not let it affect his business dealings.
The Turnbulls downstairs had expected the media to leave them alone, as though there had been a deal agreed: Reading between these delicately written lines, she now understood their confidence.
Emma read on in disbelief. Corruption, tax dodging, political expense scandals: It seemed impossible for every one of the crimes to have gone unpunished.
But they had been. She saw the letters from the business managers and lawyers, on thick, expensive paper, outlining the success of one “campaign” or “initiative” after another.
The words “covered up” were not used, but that was the gist of the messages.
With enough money, it seemed, you could buy your innocence.
And perhaps the Turnbulls had other helpful tools.
In a file marked LEVERAGE, Emma found dirty little sentences on what seemed to be every important person in the country.
Jotted notes in jerky, contracted language, as though only intended to jog the memory.
Emma could make out some of them. Infidelity, addictions, embezzlement.
Some mentioned children in ways that made her swallow and shove the file from her, shaking.
The Turnbulls had enough ammunition to blackmail their world into submission.
She turned to the shelves, where gilt-edged books listed members by year.
She flicked through a few. With every page, every name she recognized, the tension within her cranked another turn.
Politicians, as expected. But also royals, film stars, authors.
Surnames that headed the banks and consultancy firms that left recruitment flyers for the students in the mail rooms. The Turnbulls were everywhere.
No, she corrected herself, they were not. They were in one place. At the top.
Emma felt as though she had been looking at a painting upside down.
All this time, she’d thought of the Turnbulls as a University club.
But these years, this clubhouse, were just a training program.
The real center of the Turnbull Society was its alumni.
The point of the Turnbulls wasn’t to be the most powerful boys at the University; it was to become the most powerful boys in the country.
Emma leaned back in her chair, overwhelmed.
These had just been the most recent records.
And the Turnbulls were so sure of their power, they were happy to leave this evidence here in plain black-and-white writing, behind one simple lock.
Perhaps they were right to feel safe. Whatever they did, succeeded.
Whatever they hid, disappeared. They had connections in the media, the courts, the government.
She had wondered once what men like this would even bargain for from the Night City.
Men who had everything. Now she realized.
Everything was the bargain. How else could such a small group of mortals have held so much power over so many generations?
The scale was staggering. Of course the Night City hated their bargain. It must be crippled by this flow of power to the Turnbulls. What reward would it give the person who helped it break free?
That recalled Emma to reality. The information she’d found might have swayed a mortal’s opinion.
It had certainly made her burn with fury.
But the Night City would not care about any of it.
The only Turnbull dealings it cared for would be magical.
She looked again at the door in the corner, and the Turnbull mark glowing from it.
The only magical thing in the room. Whatever was behind that door, it was treated as more in need of protection than the secrets here. It was where she needed to be.
But try as she might, the door would not open. Emma tried force, then cunning. Nothing shifted it. She searched every inch of wall, but there were no keys hidden behind paintings here. Jamming her claws into the lock only resulted in a nasty jolt and a strong smell of singed fox.
Defeated, Emma slumped against a filing cabinet and waited until the Turnbulls stumbled out of the house.
She heard a dim bloom of voices and a muffled door slam.
Then she slunk through the darkened house with every muscle tensed.
The Turnbulls’ mortal crimes weighed on her as though she were part of them.
Because now she knew. And it was her responsibility to make sure the world did too.
But she forced herself to leave the records room without taking anything.
Not tonight. Missing papers could put the Turnbulls on alert.
Given warning, they might destroy the evidence in the records room and the secret space beyond.
Emma had to get through that locked door first, before giving them any reason to suspect that they were under attack.
Her reward from the City depended on it.
So she padded through the warren of disused passages at the base of the clubhouse, until she found a disused storage room at the back of the building.
A perfect entry point for someone who wanted to remain inconspicuous.
She broke the lock on the window and climbed through.
From the alley beyond, she turned to glare at the Turnbull Clubhouse.
She was not done with that secret door. And now she had a way back inside.