by Geneva Lee
I started toward the door again, and Georgia pulled me back one more time as a chorus of no’s erupted from everyone.
“You can’t ask me to stay here while he’s in trouble!”
“No,” Georgia agreed, “but I can ask you to stay here for your daughter.”
Her words ripped through me, and I looked over to where Edward still held Penny, his own face masked in shock. She was right. I knew why Smith had left tonight. He’d done it to protect us—to protect his family. Whatever—whoever—was waiting for him had planned this.
“They want me to come, too.” The realization slipped from my lips. If someone had wanted to hurt Smith or I they would have had plenty of chances to do so—individually. This was about something bigger than that. Someone wanted to hurt us. Someone wanted to break us. As strong as we were together, tonight we might be stronger apart.
“We’ll handle this,” Alexander promised, but Georgia stepped in front of him.
“We’ll handle this. We’re the bodyguards, remember?”
“She’s got a point, Poor Boy,” Brex agreed. “Someone needs to stay here. This might all be a ploy to get them alone.” He hitched a thumb in my direction.
Alexander looked on the verge of detonation, but almost instantly he smirked. “Good point. We need security here. There are multiple potential targets. Brex, you need to stay behind.”
“That is not—”
“Georgia, you will accompany me as my personal security. It’s a better use of our resources. And I owe Smith Price, so don’t make me put either of you down.” The tone of his voice left no room for disagreement. At another time I might have marveled at his cunning manipulation of the situation, but now all I could think of was the ticking clock. He crossed closer to Brex and whispered something to him. Brex pulled back with surprise, but didn’t say anything.
“We’d better get going.” Georgia drew her own gun and looked to the clock on the mantle. “The letter told him to meet her at seven.”
They started toward the door, but Alexander stopped and turned to his brother. “Edward…“
Their eyes met for just a moment, something unspoken passing between them. Edward rose from the leather wingback and cautiously handed me the baby. I held Penny like a life preserver, reminding myself that she was the reason I needed to let them take care of this. Then he turned and walked to his brother.
“If…“ Alexander said.
The only thing any of us knew was that we had no idea what to expect. We’d seen too much to assume this would end happily.
“I know,” Edward said when his brother couldn’t finish. He clapped one hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’ve got her.”
Alexander’s throat slid, a tight smile flashing over his face, before he turned and nodded for Georgia to follow him. I didn’t have to ask what he had meant. The message had been clear. Alexander knew that he was walking into the unknown, and he did so willingly. He also knew the risk that came with that. If he didn’t return, Edward would be there for Clara. There was never really a question of that. But hearing him say it was what Alexander needed to hear. Despite everything that had happened and the sins that might never be forgiven, they were brothers before all us.
We watched them disappear. I tried to tell myself they would all walk back through these doors tonight—that our nightmare was finally over—but I knew better than to think my life was that simple.
“What did Alexander tell you?” Edward’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “When he whispered in your ear?”
I realized they had been talking about something while I thought about Edward and his brother.
“It doesn’t make sense much, unless…“ Brex paused as if puzzling it. His eyes moved toward the cake waiting on the table with its single red candle still lit. Wax had melted down its side and puddled on the frosting in a pool of crimson. “He told me to watch Mrs. Winters.”
“Why?” I asked, confused enough to be distracted from what was happening on Thornham’s dark grounds.
His eyes lifted and met mine. “Because she’s the Thorne baby.”
27
Smith
It wasn’t Margot. I blinked, checking to see if the night was playing tricks with my eyes, and when they refocused, I finally saw it. She had been there the whole time, under our noses. I’d been too preoccupied with Belle and the baby to really look at her.
If I had, maybe I would have seen the truth. It was so obvious now. In a lot of ways they looked nothing alike—except for the dark hair. A wicked smile carved its way across her lips as I stared, a smile I’d never seen on her face before. A smile I had seen Margot wear so many times.
But it wasn’t Margot.
“Nora,” I said her name in confusion. There was a split second of relief. She was alive. Belle had nothing to do with her disappearance. Margot hadn’t framed my wife for murder, like I’d believed all afternoon. But she wasn’t the naive nanny she’d played. She wasn’t a stranger that we’d welcomed into our home. I’d known her all along. I shook my head and called her by her full name—her real name. “Or should I say Honora?”
“Miss me?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. She sashayed across the frosty grass, looking nothing like the woman I’d trusted to care for my daughter. That didn’t mean she was a stranger, though. There were remnants of the girl I’d known years ago, but Honora Pleasant had been a shy child, ten years her sister’s junior, and as awkward as Margot was graceful. “I lost a little weight, got a little taller. I’m older, obviously. I don’t know why I was worried that you would figure it out. Then again, I’d always been told you were smart.”
I shook my head as a swarm of little moments invaded my brain. The picture of Margot in my desk that had appeared after she came to work for us. Nora had asked if she was my sister. She’d practically handed me the information. My fingers fumbled for the mobile phone in my pocket but I didn’t dare take it out.
“You’re seeing it more now, aren’t you?” She laughed and the sound bounced around the night. “I was a little offended. But then, you never gave two shits about me. You only had eyes for her. Just like you only have eyes for Belle now.”
“Belle is my wife,” I growled.
“So was Margot. But you forgot her, too.” She swirled her finger in the air before pausing it to point at me in accusation. “Everyone was expendable to you. Margot. Hammond. I’m surprised you showed up at all tonight. It was my final test.”
“Test of what?” I pretended to be interested—part of me was—while trying to get my bearings. I listened closely for other movements, something to indicate that she wasn’t alone but the night was still.
“Love,” she sang the word. “I kept waiting for you to betray Belle. How could you resist a hot nanny? Even her business partner said so. I overheard it when we went to lunch. “She reached to pluck a single leaf from a nearly naked tree branch. “And then when Belle was acting so strangely, when she put your precious daughter at risk, I thought that would be the end of it. But you stood by her. You never cared as much for Margot. You passed her around. Let other men fuck her. Let Hammond manipulate her.”
“She let him do that,” I corrected her. “Margot never did anything she didn’t want to do.” Somehow Nora had reimagined her sister as a fucking saint, but the truth was Margot was as twisted as all of us. She’d always burned a little brighter, though. She’d flown a little higher. Just like Icarus.
“That’s what you think?” Nora snapped, her face contorting with feral rage. “Did you ever read her journals? Did you even bother to look through the things you sent to our mother after she died? It was just a box with an unsigned note...”
“I was young.” But I knew it wasn’t an excuse. After Margot’s death, I’d been shaken to the core. Our marriage was nearly over before she’d been killed. We both knew it. Neither of us gave a fuck about making it work anymore. We were both more interested in money and what it could buy us. When she died, I closed the door to our bedroom an
d effectively shut her away. It was easier than asking myself if I was responsible for what had happened to her.
It was easier than admitting what I’d already known. I was.
“She was leaving you. She called to tell mother, but she got me instead. I was too young to understand and she was crying so hard. All I could make out was one thing. She told me, ’Nora, never let love break you.’“
“Margot didn’t love me,” I said in a sure voice. Everything I’d learned since her death pointed to that fact. I’d discovered her connection with the man who had warped my life into a nightmare. She had been planted in my life like a weed. I was lucky she hadn’t taken me down along with her. “We were just kids, playing a game.”
“Margot did love to play games.” Nora nodded. “I read her journals. I know that. She began a game with you. Hammond asked her to. But she lost.”
“She died,” I corrected her. I wasn’t certain there was a point. Nora was insane. I wasn’t going to reach her. I wasn’t going to change her mind.
“She lost!” Nora screamed and there was a flutter overhead as some dark, winged creature flew into the night. “Because she forfeited the game. She fell in love with you. She had everything she could want and so much more waiting for her. Hammond told her she had to stay, but you kept breaking her heart. She couldn’t do it anymore.”
“She didn’t love me,” I repeated feebly.
“No, Smith, you didn’t love her,” Nora said.
I knew she was right. I just couldn’t admit it.
“I would never have hurt her.” I was responsible for marrying a woman I didn’t love, but I’d stood by her. We’d taken lovers with each other’s approval. We’d made a perverted version of a marriage work. Our arrangement seemed fine. I’d never really understood why it all fell apart—why she left that night.
Until now.
“So, I decided to return the favor—for my sister, you see,” she continued. “Hammond kept a close eye on me all those years. I didn’t have a big sister to do that anymore. I didn’t have someone to protect me. My mother was never the same after Margot died. You never even bothered to check on either of us. Hammond had to do that. He took care of us. “
My stomach roiled, understanding too well what she meant. After my father’s death, Hammond had groomed me—just as he had the rest of my family. It was Hammond’s gift. He could find the darkness hidden in anyone and dig it out like a pig trained to root out truffles. Where others saw sad stories, he saw potential. Because sadness could be twisted, especially if you dangled poison that looked like love.
“I’m sorry that he hurt you,” I said in a low voice.
“You hurt me,” she spat back. “When you took my sister and used her. When you broke her heart. When you barely acknowledged that she died. Because once she was gone, Hammond showed me how the world worked.”
I knew that lesson all too well.
“Imagine my surprise when Hammond told me you’d fallen for the woman he sent you—the woman you were meant to use just like Margot was meant to manipulate you. But you fell for her. I’d read Margot’s journals, so I didn’t believe it. You weren’t capable of love. She knew it. She was sure of it. I drove to London from university and followed you both. And he was right! You did love this replacement. You didn’t even remember Margot or how much she loved you.”
“I moved on. That’s the benefit of being the one left alive.” It was a lesson she needed to learn next.
“For a while, I thought Hammond was going to deal with you—and then he didn’t. That was a disappointment. I wish I knew who killed him, I would send them a thank you card. He was useless in the end.”
“And you were free,” I reminded her. “You could be free now. Go back to school. Move on with your life, like Margot would have wanted.”
“Like she would have wanted?” Nora shook her head, sending her dark hair rippling over her shoulders. “She only wanted one thing: for you to pay. She wrote about it over and over again. She wanted you to hurt like she did. She wanted you to know what it was like to live without love.” She paused for a moment and looked at me with round eyes, sparkling like the frost on the ground beneath us. “I didn’t get to know my sister. Not well enough. Not until I read those journals. When I did, I knew what I had to do. I had to take the love you’d found away from you. Just like you did to my sister. Until you had nothing left. Just like my sister.”
“So, I waited,” she continued. “I watched you get married and run around with your privileged friends, all while ignoring the lives you destroyed. And then Belle got pregnant and you got cold feet about those friends of yours. You started looking for a house. I needed to get you in place. I knew it would be easier that way, so I tipped off the estate agency about Thornham. It passed to a trust after the old owners died. They couldn’t list the property—not with its reputation around town. And not many people want to live like this anymore. But I knew you. Your bird needed a gilded cage. Then, once you were where I wanted you, I moved heaven and hell to get that interview with the agency. I read everything I could about Belle and her fashion empire. No one else was going to get that job. I wouldn’t let them.”
“How did you even know about Thornham?” I couldn’t understand how everything led back to Nora. She was crazy—that much was clear. But she didn’t have Hammond’s resources or information network.
“A year after my sister died, I was committed to Brighton Sanatorium—”
Everything clicked into place. She’d been able to move heaven and hell as she said, because she’d already faced hell once.
“Everyone knew that story there. It was the warning cry. Get better or you’ll wind up like her, stuck in your room, talking to the walls. She got out one day and screamed about Thornham and ghosts, and I never forgot that. She made it sound like the mouth of madness. When you decided to move to the country, I looked it up. I knew it was just the place for you, Smith,” Nora grinned wickedly.
“You couldn’t have known we would come here.”
“Hammond told me once that there’s two parts to laying a trap,” Nora said. “First, you come up with the snare. Thornham was my snare. It was everything you were looking for, but you kept going back to fucking London. So I had to figure out how to do the second thing he told me. He said you could wait forever for your prey to cross your trap, or you could send them running in its direction. I remembered that Margot wrote about the bullet you carried with you. The one you were saving to kill your father’s murderer. So I sent you both a little present for the new baby.”
“You sent the bullet?” How much time had we wasted searching for connections to MI-18? I should have seen the bullet as the clue it was: this had always been about me—about my past.
“I needed you to leave London. I needed you to call me to come help with the baby.”
“And Belle needed you, but you betrayed her.” I needed something to fight back with.
“Oh, she did most of the work herself at first,” Nora said. “Credit where credit is due. She was so emotional and useless. It was pathetic, but you both just lapped up whatever help you could get. When she started acting crazy, you believed she was.”
“I never—”
“You don’t have to lie to me. You thought she was crazy. She thought she was crazy, too. That was easy enough to arrange, especially once I moved in. Antipsychotics can do funny things to people who aren’t actually crazy. It’s funny really.”
“You gave her…“ We’d trusted this woman. We’d let her into our home, and she’d breached that trust. But not simply by lying. She had wormed her way into our worlds, depositing her wickedness every place she could find.
“It was simple. Wrong drugs. Wrong tea. I took the nappies she packed out of the bag, and she nearly melted. I whispered to her in her sleep. God, you sleep like a rock. I was so nervous the first time. I was sure I would wake you, Smith, but you didn’t budge.” She laughed with delight at the memory. “I didn’t have to do much to tw
ist the knife. Although personally, if I had to choose a favorite trick, it was the nuts. I know you’re probably thinking: how could I top faking my own death? I mean, it did take effort to get all that mud on her, but she was so out of it after she took that pill. And it wasn’t exactly easy to gather so much blood. But no, it has to be the nuts.”
“You faked that, too?” I needed to keep her raving. I wanted her to spill every detail. I wanted to know everything.
“No.” She giggled, turning in a circle. “I am allergic. It was a real risk. I think that’s why it was so exciting. I made sure that my file was gone. I never put it on there, by the way. I never told Belle. I hid my Epi-Pen. I really could have died!”
“Thrilling,” I bit out, wishing she had. Then the nightmare would have ended.
“Don’t be a sore loser, Smith.”
“Mr. Price,” I growled.
“But we’re family, remember?”
“What do you want from me?” I’d grown tired of her game. I could see every move now. And she was wrong about one thing: Nora thought she had me. She thought she could take me off the board or force me to choose between myself or my wife. She was wrong.
“To pay for your sins,” she said. Her hands slipped out of her pocket. Moonlight caught the edge of a knife. She raised it over her head, her eyes wild, and I saw her final move. She would win the twisted game she thought we were playing, even at the cost of her life.
“No!” I moved toward her as a gunshot cracked through the air. I felt something whizz past my ear, and then Nora’s body was flung into the air like a rag doll, her arms splayed and her eyes frozen in surprise. She hit the ground with a thump.
“Good shot.” Alexander’s voice floated through the fog. I turned to see him and Georgia appearing through the haze like ghosts walking through a wall. Both had guns still drawn.