Dark Favors

by Sophie Stern

  Josiah Reagan, king of Ruby City, had an illegitimate daughter: one he wanted to keep a secret.

  One he was willing to kill for.

  Chapter 13

  Paige

  A week went by, and then another. The weather got colder, my classes got harder, but my goals were the same. I had to do a good job in my classes. I needed to graduate. I needed to prove to my mother’s memory that I could do it, that I could accomplish something. I didn’t want all of my mom’s sacrifices to be for nothing.

  I definitely didn’t want to finish out the semester with poor grades, especially due to the fact that my mind was totally preoccupied with Mr. Locke.

  He was an enigma. Each time I thought I was getting closer to figuring him out, something happened that proved me wrong. I would come see him every Saturday, and the story was always the same. He’d have me look up information online and compile it in different databases for him. It was wildly boring, but it wasn’t hard, and I wondered why he was having me do it.

  Before I left, we always did something sexual together. He spanked me, or I blew him, or he went down on me until I had an orgasm right there in his office. It was wildly impossible. It was wild all around.

  I’d never been with anyone who made me feel like that. Not the way Locke did. I was getting more and more attached, I knew. I was getting addicted to him. That was going to be a problem at some point. I was sure of it. Locke wasn’t dating me. He wasn’t interested in dating me. As far as I knew, he hadn’t dated in a long while: not since his sister died.

  Before her death, he had been very happy, and he’d been quite the playboy. He still had that reputation, but I’d done a lot of online digging about Mr. Locke, and everything I’d found seemed to indicate that he hadn’t dated since she died.

  What we were doing definitely didn’t “count.”

  It was playing around, pure and simple, but I didn’t mind one bit. I owed him, after all, but he owed me, too. The knowledge of who my father was rested on the understanding that I would continue to serve Locke until he was ready to tell me. We both knew I’d paid off the “debt” I owed him from donating his pocket money. That was all that had been to hi, anyway. It had been loose change. It had been nothing to him.

  A man like Locke had everything he wanted.

  Well, a man like him had everything he could possibly buy.

  Locke was after something else, though, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. The research he was having me do was monotonous. It didn’t seem like anything important. He would give me a list of names, and I’d cross reference different articles and websites to find things like their past addresses or other names they’d used. I’d find pictures and save them in different folders for him. Sometimes he wanted to get quotes from different people, but they all seemed really minor.

  It all just seemed...

  Simple.

  Unimportant.

  It wasn’t at all like what was happening between me and Locke. What was happening between us was wild and crazy and hot. It was like fire and ice. It was unbearably wonderful, and I hated how much I was loving it.

  I never left the office without having at least one orgasm, and ever since the day when I’d first sucked his dick, he didn’t leave without one, either. We were helping each other out, in a way. In a certain sense, we were getting each other wound up.

  There was a kind of trade-off in that sort of relationship. The things we were doing weren’t wrong, really, but they weren’t exactly acceptable in good society. I got that. I might have grown up in the trailer park, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know things. I didn’t live in a trailer park anymore. I knew a lot about the world.

  And I knew that falling in love with a guy like Locke was a great way to get myself hurt. Not that he’d ever think twice about a girl like me. I might be pretty enough for him to sleep with, but that was all there was to our relationship.

  Then again, we hadn’t actually slept together.

  And I didn’t know why.

  It had been almost a month of Saturdays when everything changed again. I knocked on the office door, but no one answered. Nobody called out. Maybe he was on the phone. Curious, I turned the knob and was surprised to find the door unlocked. I walked into the office expecting to see him sitting at his desk or staring out of the window, but he wasn’t there at all.

  Where the hell had he gone?

  “Mr. Locke?” I called out.

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  There was no coffee on his desk. There were no keys. There was nothing at all to demonstrate that he’d even been into the office at all that day. How very strange. In all of the time that I’d known him, Locke had never been so much as a minute late.

  The fact that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be – in his office –was very strange, and to be honest, a little concerning. What if something had happened to him? I felt nervous, all of a sudden, and I pictured him in some sort of terrible car crash on his way to the office.

  That was when I realized that I didn’t know where Locke lived. I didn’t know what his house looked like, and I didn’t even know what kind of car he drove. Maybe he didn’t even live in Ruby City. Maybe he commuted from someplace nearby. I had no way of knowing. There was nothing I could do to find out, either.

  “Nathan?” I called out.

  If he was nearby, that would get his attention. He hated being called by his first name, at least by me. At least, I assumed that he did. I’d never called him anything but Locke or Mr. Locke. Considering the fact that we were all but sleeping together, perhaps it was strange or a little informal.

  “Where the hell are you?” I muttered.

  I looked around again, as though doing so would produce him out of thin air. Maybe this was some sort of test, I realized. Did he think I was going to rummage around in his desk? Did he suppose I was going to sort through his belongings?

  It wasn’t that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. An office like this had a lot of secrets. I didn’t think Locke was so crazy as to have something like a secret passageway, but I bet he had other things. I’d seen enough movies to know that men like him had a safe in their office that was located behind a beautiful painting. They had documents and they had files, and if they were really stereotypical, they had a flash drive that contained horrible secrets.

  What secrets did Locke have?

  What things were there to know about him that nobody else knew?

  I walked around his office, waiting. There were lovely paintings that hung on the walls. They were gorgeous and wild. Most of them seemed to be from the same series. They had two people in them: a man and a young girl. Maybe they were father and daughter. The people in the paintings were running through the woods. They were standing by the ocean. In one scene, they were playing with a dog.

  The paintings were lovely, and I couldn’t look away.

  There were other pieces, too, pieces from popular local artists and a couple of very expensive pieces from famous artists I’d learned about in high school, but the series of father-daughter paintings kept drawing my attention.

  Who had painted them?

  I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of the signature. I couldn’t quite make it out. I wasn’t much of an art professional, but maybe I’d want to know more. I was taking several art classes after all. Even if I couldn’t figure out who the artist was, one of my professors might know. I wanted to know about the series.

  There was something I’d been learning about in school: art always told a story. Writers penned books, and they crafted these lovely, gorgeous stories, but artists painted, or they drew, and they weaved something just as wonderful and lovely.

  I put my phone back in my pocket and walked around some more. I stayed away from the desk. There was a part of me that didn’t want to know what secrets Locke had in there. Maybe he just had pens and pencils, but there was a part of me that worried there was something else locked in the depths.

  Besides,
he probably had cameras in the room.

  Another ten minutes passed, and I felt like a huge idiot for waiting for him. I opened up the contacts on my phone and found his number. Locke and I didn’t talk much.

  Scratch that.

  We never talked.

  Not on the phone, not via text. Not at all.

  But I typed out a quick text.

  I’m in your office. Where are you?

  Then I waited.

  And I waited.

  Finally, I waited a little bit more.

  Realizing that I was a huge schmuck for waiting around on a guy who was standing me up, I decided to go ahead and leave. I grabbed my jacket off of the chair and headed toward the door. Just as I was about to leave the office, my phone buzzed.

  I pulled it out and looked.

  SORRY. SOMETHING CAME UP. COME TO 532 CHERRY VALE LANE. SEE YOU SOON.

  I didn’t know why his texts were always in all caps. It was weird, but that was Locke. I looked at the time. It was already eight. I’d waited for an entire hour for him, like a total loser.

  What the hell had come up at seven in the morning that had kept him from meeting me?

  And why was I actually considering going to the weird address he’d given me?

  I closed up his office, wondering why he hadn’t locked it, and I headed back downstairs. I passed Amber in the lobby. She seemed surprised to see me leaving so soon.

  “Have a good day,” I said to her, wiggling my fingers.

  “Everything okay?” She asked.

  I stopped walking and looked over. Amber seemed like a nice person. She seemed like a genuinely caring soul who had been through a hard time. Losing Rebecca must have been rough.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “What do you mean? Don’t you have a meeting with Mr. Locke? Usually, your meetings don’t end quite so early.”

  Amber didn’t speak from a place of judgment. She knew Locke. She’d known him for a long time. She probably figured that we were fucking around, and she’d be right in assuming that, but still, she didn’t seem to be bothered or upset with this fact. She didn’t look like she was trying to catch me being a bad girl. Amber just seemed like she wanted to make sure I was okay.

  “I’m still doing research for him,” I said lamely.

  It sounded stupid even to me.

  “Okay?”

  “He didn’t show up for our meeting today, though,” I said.

  “He was in this morning,” she said carefully. “But he left right before you got here. I should have said something, but I was in the restroom when you came by,” she blushed.

  “It’s fine,” I said. The reception desk had been strangely empty when I’d come in, but I didn’t worry about it.

  “I should have warned you,” she said. “But I totally missed you coming in, and honestly, I figured he had just forgotten something from his car. He’s so bad about that. He always comes and goes.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know where this address is?”

  I held up the phone.

  Considering the fact that Amber paled as soon as she saw the address, I figured that yeah, it was safe to say she knew the place.

  But she lied.

  “Nope,” she said, licking her lips. She looked down at some papers in front of her. “I have no idea.”

  “Seriously?” I laughed. I wasn’t letting her off easy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You should probably just go meet him. Sounds important.”

  “Amber, what aren’t you telling me? You went white as a ghost when you saw that text. I know you know what I’m walking into. Can you give me any sort of heads up?”

  She frowned, looking up at me. Then she glanced around the empty lobby, as though someone was going to appear. Nobody was. It was early on a Saturday morning, and the only people who were coming in today were realtors who were totally work-obsessed with no real lives.

  “Look,” she said, lowering her voice. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

  “Okay.”

  “That address...” She stared at my phone like it was going to bite her. I pulled it back and slid it back into the pocket of my skirt. Yeah, my skirt had pockets. I’d finally learned how to shop appropriately.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s for a place called the Weston Estate,” she said.

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s one of the most beautiful properties in Ruby City,” she explained. “And it’s often considered to be a haunted mansion.”

  “Haunted?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “A lot of strange things have happened there,” she said. “The property has changed hands several times over the years, but it used to be a place where people held huge parties and balls. That sort of thing.”

  “That sounds...” Well, it sounded pretty nice, actually.

  “It was beautiful,” she said. “At least, that was what people thought.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It fell into ruin,” she shrugged. “About twenty-five, thirty years ago, it just all sort of...stopped. Something happened there. A woman went missing. After that, nobody wanted to go there.”

  It was horrible. It was obviously a huge tragedy, and that was enough to break my heart as it was, but there was more the story. She was holding something else back, something important. Amber looked at her hands when she was nervous. I wasn’t exactly the best at reading body language, but most people didn’t just stare at their fingernails for fun. I didn’t think she was exactly an exception to that rule.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she said slowly. “About a year ago, there was another tragedy at the Weston Estate. A young woman’s body was found. It was ruled a tragic accident. Some people said it was suicide, but there are people close to her who think it wasn’t an accident at all. There are some people who think that the woman’s death was actually on purpose, and that it happened at that place so that no one would ever find out what had actually happened.”

  “Amber...”

  She looked up at me sharply then, eyes flashing with anger.

  And with pain.

  “Last year, Rebecca Locke’s dead body was found there, and her brother bought the property.”

  Chapter 14

  Paige

  My drive to the Weston Estate was short and silent. When I reached the road that it was on, I wasn’t surprised I’d never heard of the place before. There were huge, sprawling trees that lined either side of the road, and there were gated entrances to giant mansions. As I drove farther down the road, the mansions grew farther apart. Some of the gates seemed in disrepair, and some of them even had vines growing over them.

  Cherry Vale Lane was a long road, though, and by the time I reached the correct address, I was about to wonder if the road was ever going to end.

  The Weston Estate was the last property on the road. The road literally ended right at the gate. I stopped my car when I saw the giant stone sign that read Weston Estate.

  “Charming,” I said aloud.

  The gate was open, which was good, because this place looked a little bit creepy. Even in the middle of a Saturday morning, there was a certain sense of danger and fear. This was the place where Mr. Locke’s sister had passed away. It was here. He was bringing me to the place where she’d died, and I had no idea why.

  That wasn’t quite true.

  Nathan Locke was a weird guy, sure, but he was also a very gentle one. He’d been hurt when he lost his sister, and maybe he wanted to share that with me. I drove down the narrow drive. It widened quickly, and soon the trees cleared and I could see a big giant house. The driveway split. One portion led off to the garages and the other looped around in front of the house.

  A car was parked there.

  It was Nathan’s.

  I hoped.

  There was no way for me to know for sure. After all, I had never
seen his car, but it looked expensive, and it was bright blue. I pulled up behind the car, killed the engine, and got out of my car. I locked the doors and stared up at the mansion. To say it was sprawling would be an understatement. This was the kind of place that probably had like twenty bedrooms. The porch that wrapped around the front was incredible, and there were three stories that I could count.

  I pulled out my phone and called Locke.

  “Are you here?” He answered.

  “This better not be a trap,” I said coolly. Amber’s words had gotten to me. I shouldn’t have been scared, and I hadn’t really been until I’d arrived at the estate itself.

  “A trap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re outside?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come in.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because this is the way people get murdered, Nathan.”

  “Have you forgotten your manners already?” He asked, lowering his voice. The tone he used went straight to my core, making me hot and bothered and annoyed. I hated how he could use just a couple of choice words to manipulate me and make me want him.

  It wasn’t very fair.

  I already wanted him more than was healthy for me, but there was something else happening. He had stood me up. He had made me wait. He hadn’t called me, and he hadn’t texted me, and he hadn’t done anything. He’d let me wait, alone at the office, for what seemed like an eternity.

  That didn’t seem very kind to me.

  “You stood me up,” I said, snapping at him. “I think manners have gone out the window. Now are you fucking here or not?”

  My words came out harsh, but I didn’t feel the passion I was snapping them out with. I tried to sound angry, to sound mad, but really, I felt defeated. I had such a big fucking crush on this guy, and we were really just no good for each other. We were using each other. I wanted him for...well, to feel good. To feel alive.