Will she survive it? Will her precious chrysalis crack open and free the raging butterfly trapped within? Or will it wither and die?
I really don’t care. So long as the family is stopped, nothing else matters.
28
I Know What You’ve Done
Jack uses the light on his phone to see the contents of the drawer in the closest of the omnipresent hall tables outside his parents’ suite. He pulls out a flashlight, flips the switch, and starts toward his old rooms, playing the beam along the floor. He doesn’t really need the light, he knows the Villa so intimately he can easily maneuver in the darkness, but he’s feeling unsettled, so welcomes the extra illumination.
He needs to think, damn it. None of this makes sense. An assassin sent to Nashville, someone spying on them, and Morgan’s body showing up two days before his wedding? Add in the hijacked servers... It doesn’t matter that his mother thinks things are under control, Jack fears something truly sinister might be afoot.
Someone is trying to stop his future with Claire.
Too late. He smiles internally. Too fucking late. They are here now, on the island, where he can keep her safe. There is nothing he won’t do to protect Claire. He doesn’t understand why anyone would want to test him. He will trample anyone who dares try to hurt her.
From the moment he met her he knew, deep in his soul, this was his person, the one he was supposed to be with, raise a family with, grow old with. He’d never felt that with Morgan. Not like this, at least.
Maybe it was the way the light hit Claire’s eyes as they walked through the streets of Nashville. Maybe it was the way she moved, graceful, like a dancer, the strides long and confident. Maybe it was her art, her abandon when she held the paintbrush, how she was so wholly in the moment he could tell she was on another plane entirely.
Maybe it was the smudge of paint on her cheek, when she showed him the big bloody painting she was working on, the monstrosity of a canvas that he, having grown up around the great masters, recognized immediately as important but had no real idea exactly what it meant. Unlike Ana, who was a tastemaker, art to him was simple; he knew what he liked and what he didn’t. As to the rest, well, that was part of what he found so fascinating about Claire, how she saw the world, how her mind’s eye took the mundane, synthesized it, and made it into a masterpiece.
Maybe it was her humility. She didn’t think she was the greatest artist, though he tended to disagree. With time to focus on her work, and the right patron, he thought she could be a household name.
Maybe it was the way she looked at him, like he was the most handsome man in the world. Maybe it was because when she looked at him, she didn’t see what he could do for her. She didn’t see his money, his family, his destiny. She saw him. All of him.
Claire had no idea who he was when they met, and he’d kept the illusion in place long enough to be sure she was in love with him. Just him. Just Jack.
There is no other woman like her, and he knows this first-hand, having sown his oats across four continents. No, he won’t let anything happen to her. He fears, though, more people will die before this attack is over.
Who is behind it? The family has plenty of enemies. They’ve been exerting their unique brand of pressure discreetly for decades. The list of people who would be happy to see the Comptons fall is long and varied.
So why now? Claire is the only common denominator.
He wants to head to the bridal suite, to see her, be near her, but, recognizing his overprotective mood and knowing she has to be asleep by now, he detours to his own childhood rooms to catch his breath. Ascertain where the threats are actually coming from.
He plays the flashlight over the main room fondly. Eventually, his children will take over this old space of his. It is still relatively unchanged from his childhood. The twin beds pushed against the walls on either side of the window with their soft hand-loomed quilts, the cracked leather club chair, the bookcase with its multihued spines, calms him. He chooses a book at random and takes it to the chair, opens it, unseeing, listens to the raindrops patter on the courtyard below. When he glances at the title, he realizes he’s chosen his well-thumbed copy of Where the Red Fern Grows, and has to fight back the wave of emotion that courses through him. Those damn dogs. Old Dan and Little Ann.
Will used to read him stories before bed, and this was Jack’s favorite. Every summer, when the family came to stay, Will would read it to him. This is one of Jack’s dearest memories, being snuggled under the covers, in thrall to the great man. That Will wanted to spend time with him, with a kid, instead of the famous people mingling downstairs, was intoxicating. He’d bring the dogs—there were always Italian wolf dogs around the Villa when he was growing up—and allow them to sleep in Jack’s room overnight.
Will’s savage declaration earlier: You know what’s going to happen. It happens every time.
It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens too often for comfort.
Compton men lose their wives too soon. William, Will, and Jack, all three lost their wives to early death. Elliot is losing his to divorce. Brice is the exception, but Ana is an anomaly in so many ways. Her strength, her courage, her innate sense of familial preservation, is impossible to conquer. She is kept safe, safer than the others.
With everything that’s happened, Jack hasn’t allowed himself to think about the incident with Will. He touches his cheek gingerly. Nothing broken, but it’s still sore. By God, the old man still has some strength in him.
Seeing his grandfather so confused, so violent, was a shock. Will Compton had always been so much fun. He’d lived a great life here at the Villa, with movie stars and artists and writers flocking to the island to spend time at the colony. They’d create during the day, and in the evenings, would be invited to the Villa for parties. Legendary parties. There was nary a biography of any major name in the arts that didn’t mention at least one wild weekend on Isle Isola, with Will Compton at the center of the gaiety.
It was only in the past ten years that the parties had started slowing down, when Will started seeing old friends as strangers, and the artists’ colony had begun its decline. Heartbreaking.
Jack shoves away the ghosts of his grandfather’s issues and focuses back on the present. What is he missing? Who is trying to derail his life?
He’s done everything in his power to shelter Claire from his own violence. He wanted her to get used to the idea of the family business before she was forced to participate in it firsthand.
And then they’d surprised this creep in Nashville, and she’d managed to pick up the gun and shoot the fucker.
No. Malcolm shot the intruder.
God, she’s going to be so pissed he hasn’t told her everything. About himself. About the family. About their history.
His mother is right, Claire is safe now. Here, on the island, no one can touch her. She has all the protections he can give her and will bear his name soon enough. There is nothing else he can do but hold her in his arms and shield her with his body.
And he will. If anyone comes for his family, he will protect Claire first.
He stretches out his long legs, crossing them at the ankle, wincing at the tiny pop the right one makes as it settles over the left. Thirty-eight and falling apart at the seams. That’s what happens when you lived rough half the time. Lap of luxury or a field tent in the bush—his two extremes.
He flips through the pages of the book, but the words swim. He is exhausted. He can’t read, can’t focus. He puts the book back on the shelf in its proper spot and starts for the door. He will slip into their room quietly, get into the bed, and hold her. It will make him feel better to have her soft breath on his collarbone, her body solid and safe in his arms. She has saved him, and she didn’t even know it. Before he met her, he feared he was becoming numb to emotion, numb to the world. An automaton with a gun, controlled by Ana and Brice and their v
ision for the company, the world.
With Claire by his side, he can finally live again.
His phone chirps from his pocket with a new secure text. Elliot or Karmen with news, he expects. He opens his family-designed app, end-to-end encrypted and utterly unbreakable, developed by his father in the early days of the SMS that now lives on hundreds of thousands of security professionals’ phones.
He doesn’t recognize the number. There is a video attached, with an encryption key. He taps on it, and the video opens and auto plays.
The video quality isn’t remarkable, but it’s clear enough. A small snippet of the events from Monday night, it shows the body of the intruder, the man the police tentatively identified as Francis Wold, bleeding out on the landing. There is no audio, but there’s no need for it to sink them all... Claire is holding the man’s gun. God, her eyes, her eyes, wide and frightened and shocked.
A plain text message comes in.
I know what she did. Soon, the whole world will, too. Repent, Jackson. Repent.
“Son of a bitch!”
He needs Elliot to trace the encryption key. Karmen needs to find out where the planted cameras broadcast to. A wireless signal, hell, who knows if it was secure or not. The neighbor across the street could have hacked the Wi-Fi.
Who the hell is threatening them? It’s not just Francis Wold, not anymore. He hadn’t acted alone. Who is he working with? Who is close enough to the family to peer inside their lives this way?
His mind offers him a solution.
Morgan.
Good grief, Jack. That’s impossible. Ghosts can’t send texts. No, Morgan is dead and gone—this he knows in his heart. And he can prove it to himself now.
He clatters down the main stairs, down yet another flight to the kitchens, straight back into the darkness by the wine cellar. He knows the way through the maze of halls and storage rooms, but uses the flashlight so he can move quickly. Claire must be wondering where he is. Once he’s satisfied himself here, he will go to her.
The heavy iron door to the crypt is usually barred by a massive padlock on its handle; it is now cracked open several inches.
He halts, catching his breath. Who is here? Who would be so careless as to leave the door to the crypt open? Especially with the life-changing evidence lying within?
The scent of must and mossy dirt wafts out from the black beyond. It is cool, so cool he shivers. Darkness bleeds before him. This isn’t a movie set, with a burning fire and ready-made torches to be dipped and lit. This is emptiness. Vast nothingness. This is the personification of death—the unknown blackness beyond.
He listens intently for the tiniest whisper, for a footfall, a breath, the scratch of claws through the dirt, the struggle of a minute life in a sticky web, but there is nothing.
With a deep breath, he steps into the darkness.
29
The Crypt Keeper
The flashlight is bright in the still air, illuminating the path, but Jack moves slowly. The crypt is only accessible by traversing a long dark downward-sloping tunnel of dirt, framed out overhead with thick wooden trusses that date back to the fortress’s inception, well before the Villa was built. There are several tunnels and levels excavated below the fortress; typical to the islands in the area, some of the tunnels lead down to the grottos, coves, and beaches.
The sea caves were used for many things over the centuries. Some were practical—escape hatches, boat storage, a way to ferry supplies up to the fortress. In some cases, they were more metaphysical. As lore had it, several of Isle Isola’s grottos were used as nymphaeums, shrines dedicated to the Roman nymphs and sea goddesses. And of course, on Isola in particular, Venus. They were even rumored to be places for witches to gather and hold rites.
Jack always believed the grottos were designed for practical, not supernatural, purposes, but as a child, he wasn’t comfortable alone in the dark with the specter of witches holding rites down the darkened tunnels or sea goddesses rising from the depths. The fortress held a dungeon at one point, too, rumored to be somewhere down here, but he and his brothers never found it. Not that it mattered—his grandfather had gated off all the grotto tunnels with heavy iron driven into the rock as a security measure. The Comptons couldn’t risk enemies trying to enter the Villa through the ancient tunnels, nor curious little boys slinking through the darkness.
The crypt though—this is someplace they’ve all been, semiregularly. His great-grandparents William and Eliza are buried here, as is his grandmother May, plus a number of previous inhabitants of the fortress, monks and kings alike. The crypt is actually a series of rooms, and Jack, as a child, explored them all. It stopped being a fun place to visit after they laid his grandmother to rest, though. When they lost May, he was old enough to conceptualize what was happening behind the square doors on the wall. For months after her interment, he woke at night screaming, besieged by images of her moldering body waking in the darkness several floors below him, clawing her way out of her hole in the wall, wandering the hallways to his room. He’d insisted on a chair beneath his bedroom door handle for months.
He supposes some families would be happy to have their dead so close. Because of his childhood nightmares, he still finds it deeply disturbing.
The island itself is a mausoleum to the past. There are cemeteries and graveyards scattered about as well, including one attached to the church where he and Claire will be married, but that houses the inhabitants of the island, not the landowners themselves.
He hears something, a sound, deep in the darkness ahead, and pulls up so hard he stumbles into the wall and drops his flashlight. It lands hard, extinguishing the beam. He is plunged into darkness, heart thudding in his ears.
What is that?
Crying. He can hear crying.
The sound is eerie, but entirely human.
He takes a deep, shuddery breath. God, Jack. Are you eight or thirty-eight? Still scared of the dark? Blowing out one more quick breath, feeling silly at his reaction, he picks up the flashlight, thumbs it back on, and starts forward again. He arrives at the interior doors to the crypt to find them open, and his grandfather, a lit candle in his hand, standing by May’s resting place, wiping his eyes. Wax drips down the gnarled joints, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Gran?” Jack calls softly, not wanting to scare the old man.
“Eh? Who’s that? Brice? What are you doing here?”
“No, Gran. It’s me, Jackson. Are you okay?”
Jack angles his flashlight so he can see Will’s face but isn’t shining the beam into his grandfather’s eyes. He’s afraid Will won’t remember him, but there is recognition. Recognition, and resignation.
“Hello, son. I’m just visiting my May. It’s been a while since I came down here.” Though it’s clear he’s been crying, his voice is hearty, and not at all confrontational.
“Me, too.” Jack puts a hand on the plate that marks his grandmother’s dates. Beloved May. Born April 7, 1945. Died June 29, 1989.
The anniversary of her death is coming soon. No wonder his grandfather is here, mourning.
She was only forty-four when she died. His great-grandmother Eliza was only thirty-three. They both saw a great deal in their short lives, but it still hurts that he didn’t get to meet Eliza, or see May grow old.
Compton women die young.
Morgan was only twenty-five when she died...
“Do you remember her at all, Jacky? She loved you to pieces. I’ve never seen a woman so proud to have a grandchild before. She thought you hung the moon, and though you couldn’t even crawl yet, the moment Ana put you in May’s arms, you stopped crying and looked up at her with such wonder. She fell in love in an instant, and you did, as well. You used to toddle after her everywhere she went. You couldn’t stay away. Like magnets, you were.”
Jack smiled. “I do remember her, Gran. I remember her hair,
and her smile, and the way she always smelled like pine needles, so fresh and clean. She wore red lipstick, all the time. And great-grandmother’s pearls, of course.”
“That she did. She wouldn’t leave our rooms without Eliza’s pearls. Ah, I do miss her. Do you remember the time May went swimming with the dogs?”
Jack isn’t about to ruin the old man’s moment, so he stands with him and listens to a few of the stories. He knows them all by heart—Will has told them all a hundred times before—but he listens, and laughs, and wipes his eyes a few times. Finally, when Will slows down and yawns, Jack suggests the two find their way upstairs to their respective beds.
With a sigh and a good-natured pat of the plaque on the door to May’s tomb, Will agrees, and Jack thumbs on his flashlight again and blows out the candle. He is careful to secure the padlock to the crypt, vowing to return later to see Morgan’s body and lay her ghost to rest in his mind.
He leads his grandfather toward the kitchens, careful not to show worry, or scold, just grateful they’ve had a moment together to revisit some of the old stories.
At the door, Will grabs Jack’s arm with surprising strength. “Be careful, Jacky.”
“Careful? Of what?”
“The dead don’t like to stay that way.”
“Signore Compton, there you are. We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Fatima stands at the edge of the root cellar, a scowl on her face, hands folded in front of her. She is half in shadow and Jack is reminded of a bleached skull. Her hair is a wiry gray mass, and her face is lined. She has always been slightly warped in his mind. He would think her an unhappy woman if she weren’t so devoted to his mother, and so excellent at her job.
Will moves past her gruffly. “Well, you’ve found me. And I’m thirsty. Let’s have a nightcap.”
Moments later Will’s nurse, Petra, bursts into the kitchen. She is out of breath and overflowing with apologies.
Her Dark Lies Page 14