by Stella Hart
But I was still me. I had to believe I could always be strong and brave. I had to believe I could handle it all without him.
Look where that got you, my inner voice told me. You idiot.
A beeping sound emanated from the other side of the room, and my eyes snapped open. Edward stepped through the door and strode over to me. “Dr. Redstone told me you were awake,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Are you serious?” I said, tugging on the cuffs. “How the fuck do you think I feel?”
He smiled patiently. “The sedative I gave you can cause severe nausea, headaches, and confusion. Are you feeling any of that?”
“No. I’m not confused at all. I knew it was you,” I spat. “I knew you were the one behind it all.”
Edward frowned. “What on earth are you talking about, Alexis?”
“Don’t patronize me. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” he said, raising his brows. “Why don’t you humor me and tell me?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I know you’re the secret head of the Golden Circle, and I know you ordered my father’s death ten years ago. I also know you were responsible for all of those other deaths on the island. For the organs,” I said. “That’s why you didn’t want me or Sascha here. You were afraid we’d nose around in your life and figure out the truth if we got close to you. So you tried to pay us to leave. When that didn’t work, you started following me to keep an eye on me, and you realized I was investigating everything, so you sent me threatening texts to scare me into stopping. But that didn’t work, either, and now we’re here.”
Edward’s forehead creased. He went over to the other side of the room, grabbed a chair, and brought it to my bedside. Then he sat down and rested his chin on one hand, head slightly tilted to one side. “This is all very interesting,” he said slowly. “I had no idea you knew so much. In fact, I had no idea you were investigating anything at all.”
“Bullshit.” I tugged on the cuffs again. “Why else would I be here?”
He smiled thinly. “I’ll admit, you’re right about why I didn’t want you and your sister on the island,” he said. “I was worried that one or both of you would poke around in my life and figure things out. And I suppose I was right to be worried about it, considering what you just told me.”
“You knew what I was up to,” I insisted. “You knew the whole time.”
Edward lifted a palm. “I’m telling the truth, Alexis. I genuinely had no idea you were investigating anything.”
“Why did you send me that text, then? The one that told me to stop digging?”
“I didn’t send you a text.” He rubbed his chin and frowned. “I did try to drive you off the island, of course. But texting isn’t something I do. I prefer proper calls.”
“What do you mean about trying to drive me off the island?”
“I had people follow you to scare you. And then there was the chocolate trick. That was my favorite.”
My brows shot up. “That was you?”
Edward scoffed. “Of course it was. Who else would send you a box of chocolates laced with scopolamine?”
I slowly shook my head. “Why did you do it?”
“Like I said, I wanted to drive you off the island. Part of that plan involved an attempt to drive you insane and make you think you had to leave to escape the terror,” he said. “Scopolamine is the perfect drug for that. You may have heard of it as Devil’s Breath. It can cause hallucinations, paranoia, disorientation, amnesia, sleep paralysis, and night terrors. It can even cause psychosis in some rare cases.”
“What about vivid nightmares and sleepwalking?”
“Yes, it can cause those things too.” He smiled. “Some people who are dosed with it are seen wandering around at night by friends and family. They can get dressed, leave the house, and even hold a full conversation with another person. When they wake up, they have no memory of it whatsoever. It makes them think they’re losing their mind when other people tell them what they’ve been doing.”
My mind spun as his words sank in. Now I knew what I did on the night of the recent Blackthorne murders. I was affected by my nightly ritual of chocolate in bed before I went to sleep, and it made me sleepwalk. I got dressed, left my dorm, and wandered around the campus in an intoxicated Devil’s Breath haze. When I awoke the next morning, I had no memory of it because of the drug’s amnesic effect.
“How did you fake my mom’s handwriting on the letter that came with the chocolates?” I asked, mind still whirling.
Edward let out an annoyed sniff. “Your mother kept a diary when she was a teenager. She’d use the pages to air out all her grievances with the family,” he said. “She left it behind when she ran away, and I figured her handwriting couldn’t have changed much over the years. Most people have their writing style set by the time they’re thirteen or fourteen.”
“So you used the diary as a guide to copy her writing.”
“Yes. I knew you’d probably be too smart to eat a box of chocolates that showed up at your door without a card. But if you thought it was a gift from your mother…” He trailed off and smiled. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
I briefly closed my eyes. “Jesus,” I muttered. “You really are a psychopath.”
“If you say so. I actually consider myself to be a pragmatist.”
I opened my eyes and glared at him. “Did my mom ever know about the Golden Circle?”
He shook his head. “No. She wasn’t the right sort of person. We could tell that about her from an early age,” he replied. “Even if she hadn’t run away, we wouldn’t have told her.”
“And my aunt and uncle?”
“They knew, and they helped. Now tell me,” he said. “How, exactly, did you find out about the Golden Circle?”
“None of your business.”
“Oh well. As long as no one else knows apart from you, I suppose it doesn’t matter.” He cocked his head. “Sascha doesn’t know, does she?”
“No. I looked into it all by myself,” I said. “I couldn’t trust anyone else. Not even friends or family.”
I might die soon, but at least Nate would be safe now. Edward had no idea about him, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
“You know, I’m actually quite impressed at how much you managed to figure out,” he said, tapping his chin with his index finger. “The others in the Golden Circle never knew I was a part of it. They thought I was just a shady guy who accepted payments from them in order to turn a blind eye to the illegal operations that were going on in my hospital. They had no idea that I was actually in charge of everything.”
“Why are you talking about it in the past tense?”
He frowned. “Because the Golden Circle is a thing of the past, dear. We ceased operations in 2009.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I snapped. “I know you’re going to kill me soon, so you might as well be open and honest with me before you do it. It’s not like I’ll be able to tell anyone.”
“I think I’ve lost you again,” he replied. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I gritted my teeth. “The new murders. Nessa Pratchett and Claire Reilly.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Of course it was.”
His eyes flashed. “I can assure you, it wasn’t me or anyone else from the organization,’ he said stiffly. “The new killer is a copycat of Gregory Lockwood.”
I let out a heavy sigh of irritation. I knew Edward was lying, but I couldn’t force him to tell me the truth.
He got up and checked my IV bag. “Hm. I’ll need to replace this soon,” he muttered to himself.
I stared at him, and my pulse began to race again as something occurred to me. “You didn’t answer my question earlier,” I said.
“Which one?”
“I asked you why I’m here if you had no idea about my investigation. It doesn’t make sense.”
He returned to his chair and scooted it a little c
loser to my bed. “That’s actually why I came to see you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you, but you distracted me with all of this Golden Circle chatter.”
“So why am I here?”
His shoulders drooped slightly, and he looked at the wall above my head. “Your grandmother doesn’t have a cold, Alexis. She’s dying.”
My brows shot up. “What?”
“She has hepatic cirrhosis. I never saw it coming. She’s never been a heavy drinker, and she doesn’t have any conditions that could predispose her to it. She didn’t show any of the early symptoms, either.” He hesitated and looked back at me. “She seemed fine until three weeks ago. But then she got sick all of a sudden, and she declined very rapidly. She’s probably got six months left, at best.”
Horror seized me. “She needs a transplant, doesn’t she?”
“Yes. That’s why you’re here. You’re a perfect match.”
“How could you possibly know that?” I asked, heart hammering hard enough to make my chest ache.
Edward smiled thinly. “It was like a miracle, really. I saw you at the Mayfair last week, and it occurred to me that people of your age and status usually have to undergo a certain process in order to join. I’m friendly with the Ellesmere family, who own the Mayfair, so I called them to see if they still happened to have a sample of your blood. Fortunately, they hadn’t destroyed it yet, and I was able to get it from them. I tested it and crossmatched it with Deborah’s blood, and… well, you already know the rest. You’re a match.”
I tugged at the cuffs again. “You can’t take my liver!”
“Yes, I can,” he said. “You’re in a private, secure wing of the hospital—the same wing I let the Golden Circle surgeons use back in the day for all of the transplants. You’ll be prepped and taken into surgery later on today, and no one will ever know you were here, apart from me, Dr. Redstone, and a few surgical nurses who are paid enough to keep quiet.”
Panic flooded me. “Did you say today?”
He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost one o’clock in the morning, Alexis. We can hardly expect Dr. Redstone and her assistants to perform a delicate surgery at such an ungodly hour. They’ll begin at ten o’clock. Then your liver will be placed in cold storage, and we’ll bring Deborah in for the transplant in the afternoon.”
“Edward, please,” I said, limbs trembling and eyes bulging. “I’m your granddaughter. You can’t do this to me.”
“I thought we established this at our first meeting,” he said calmly, looking me right in the eye. “We aren’t family. Not really.”
Tears splashed down my cheeks. “You’re sick,” I muttered. “So fucking sick.”
“Calm down, Alexis. You’re actually very fortunate. You get a nice, quiet hospital room to lie in, and in nine hours you’ll be put under anesthetic. After that, you’ll drift away. There’ll be no pain. No suffering.”
“You call that fortunate?”
“Yes, compared to the others we took organs from in the past. They didn’t get a private room in a hospital. That was reserved for the organ recipients,” he said. “The donors were kept underground, and sometimes, depending on the surgeon, they were carved up while they were still awake. Gregory Lockwood particularly enjoyed doing that. He was a very strange, sadistic man. Wonderful transplant surgeon, though. Very steady hands.”
I bit my lip to stop myself from telling him that I already knew that part, because unbeknownst to him, Greg was still alive.
“You won’t get away with this,” I said. “People will notice that I’m missing.”
“Of course they will. But they won’t know my house was the last place you were seen,” he replied. “I’ve taken care of that.”
“How?”
“I have a driver who’s willing to testify that he dropped you off at Blackthorne after you left the dinner party.” He lay a hand over his heart. “Tragically, you never made it back to your dorm. But that’s not his fault, nor is it mine. The police will think someone snatched you while you were walking across the parking lot. There’s precedent for it, too. After all, you wouldn’t be the first student to go missing at that college, would you?”
My nostrils flared. “You’ll slip up somewhere,” I said, chest heaving with rage and terror. “Someone will figure out the truth.”
“I doubt that. I’ve never slipped up.”
“You’re almost eighty years old, Edward. You’re bound to forget a few things here and there. Bound to accidentally say the wrong thing.”
“Age is just a number,” he said, eyes narrowing. “I’m still sharp as a tack.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong. You won’t get away with it.”
“I really don’t know why you care so much, Alexis.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even if I do get caught at some point in the future, it won’t affect you, because you’ll be dead,” he said. His words sent a dagger of ice through my heart. “In nine hours—actually, eight hours and fifty-four minutes—you’ll be taken into the operating theater, and you’ll go under. After that, you’ll never wake up. You’ll never have to think or care about anything ever again.”
“That’s not true,” I muttered. “Someone will find me.”
His lips curved into a malevolent smile. “You need to accept the truth, Alexis,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You’re all alone now. No one’s coming to save you.”
He was wrong. He had to be.
I closed my watery eyes and sent out a silent prayer to the universe, hoping against all hope that it would be heard.
Please, Nate. Find me.
19
Nate
I tore down the coastal highway, leaving every other car in my dust. For the second time this evening, my destination was the Paxton estate.
Edward had gone out of his way to set up a whole narrative about Alexis leaving and going back to her dorm, but I knew it was bullshit now. Everything that came out of that twisted old prick’s mouth was a dirty lie.
I needed to stay on him. Wherever he went, Alexis was bound to be.
The birthday party was still in full swing at the estate when I arrived. To my chagrin, the maid who was in charge of answering the door told me that Edward wasn’t there anymore. She said he’d left to attend an emergency house call for a friend who had a sick grandchild. That was obviously a lie he’d told her to cover where he really went, but she clearly didn’t know the truth, and I couldn’t get blood out of a stone.
I asked her if I could wait for him inside, but by that stage she knew I wasn’t an invited party guest, so she was reluctant to let me in. She told me Edward would probably be back soon, and I should just wait and come back to see him later.
So I did. I went back to my car and waited.
I sat there for hours, watching the horizon for a pair of headlights to appear in the darkness. But they never did. Cars left the estate as the party began to wind down, but none arrived.
At some point the lack of sleep I’d endured over the last week or so began to catch up with me. One minute I was staring at the road, bleary-eyed and blinking rapidly to stave off the crushing feeling of bone-tiredness, and the next I was peeling my eyelids open to see the sun peeking over the horizon, spilling fire over the gray clouds scudding through the sky.
“Fuck!” I sat bolt upright and looked at my watch. It was just before seven a.m. I’d passed out for three and a half hours.
Anything could’ve happened in those hours.
Cursing myself, I jumped out of the car and ran up to the Paxton gate, which was closed now. I pressed on the buzzer next to it. A moment later, a polite female voice answered the intercom. I told her I needed to speak to Edward, and she went away to check if that was possible. A few minutes later, the gate opened for me with a loud grinding sound.
I strode up to the front door and forced my lips into a courteous smile as the maid let me in. She wasn’t the same one from last night. She was short with red hair and a bubbly B
ritish accent, and she clearly had no idea who I was.
“You caught Mr. Paxton just in time. He was about to head off to an appointment,” she said with a smile as she waved me through the foyer to a sitting room.
Edward was already in there, clipping cufflinks in place on his shirtsleeves. “Nice to see you again, Nate,” he said, raising a brow. “I have a feeling this isn’t a social visit, though, judging by the early hour.”
I squared my jaw and looked him right in the eye. “No, it’s not. I’m worried about Alexis.”
“Has something happened?”
“Yeah. She didn’t come home last night,” I said. “I thought she might’ve come back here after she realized she left her watch here.”
Edward averted his eyes. “No, she didn’t come back here.”
“Are you sure? I figured she might’ve found a room upstairs and crashed there because it was so late. Maybe you didn’t notice because of the party.”
He smiled. “I’m sure the staff would’ve noticed when they did their morning dusting. But maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to look around if you want to double-check,” he said, waving a casual hand around the room.
Shit. That meant Alexis really wasn’t here. If she was, there was no way he’d offer to let me look around. Not unless he had some sort of secret dungeon hidden beneath the mansion.
I forced another affable smile so he wouldn’t get suspicious. “No, that’s okay,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’m just worried because I haven’t heard from her at all, and her phone is off. It’s not like her to do this.”
“Did you check her dorm like I suggested last night?” he asked, thick gray brows meeting in the middle of his lined forehead. “I’m sure that’s where she said she was going.”
“Yeah, I checked. She wasn’t there.”
Edward affected a worried expression. “How strange. I hope she’s all right,” he said. He cocked his head. “What about her apartment in the city?”
“I checked there too. She wasn’t there, and Sascha told me they didn’t leave here together.”
He nodded and straightened his tie. “That’s right. Alexis left shortly after her sister.”