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Chapter 1
FREDDIE
The house is quiet as I walk in through the front door after having scouted another of Leo’s addresses. The night is dark, and the quiet is eerie as I shut the door silently behind me so that Georgina won’t hear that I’m back. My fucking head is still screaming with anger and the haunting possibility that she could’ve been crushed to death.
“Live in the moment,” Francis said. “Lighten up…breathing isn’t living…”
It is though. It is with Georgina. If she gets taken from me, that’s it. My only source of feeling goes, and I’m addicted to it. To seeing everything so much clearer through her.
So, now the moment is gone, and the only thing I need to do is protect her like I failed to do today. More than that, I need to make sure she feels the seriousness of the consequences of today. I fucking hate her for getting under my skin. For getting inside my head and making me believe that maybe we can have more than this. For distracting me with possibilities that I know will only cause her hurt and sorrow. That could cost her life.
Resisting the urge to go up the stairs, I head straight for the kitchen. As much as the need to check on her needles at me, my heart pulsing with a longing that’s infuriating, I rein it in as I remind myself of the fear in her eyes earlier.
I pull the Belvedere from the freezer before I grab one of the crystal tumblers stacked on the top shelf by the ice drawer. Once I’ve poured myself a healthy measure, I amble into the lounge, ready to put my sleepless night to some use as I open my laptop and start going through everything we have. Again. It’s all I can do to stop myself from physically butting my head against one of these walls. I’m getting to the point where I can’t keep swimming anymore, and the only thing keeping me afloat is Georgina.
The fingerprints we pulled from her stalker earlier have led us to nothing. Much like the ghost that shot Christopher last year, there’s nothing on him. Not a photo. Not a name. Nothing, and that’s all I need to know that this is just the beginning. If we don’t get to the root of all this shit, someone is going to get hurt on my watch again.
It’s not happening. I won’t let it.
Casper’s right—there’s too much at stake. We’ve allowed ourselves too many vulnerabilities. Leo, Christopher, and Casper have opened us up on all sides. And I’m no better. We’re blown wide open. We’ve all got something to lose. A distraction.
I’m sweeping through all the links, the chain of events.
It all leads back to Grace, Fleur’s mother. She started digging, she found something that we still haven’t been able to pinpoint, and she set this entire thing off. Kit tried to help her and got taken out by his grandfather, then Leo took his place, and as soon as we started digging into his brother’s attack…everything unravelled. They’re picking us off one by one, using our weaknesses to distract us.
There has to be something in Grace’s ledgers that leads us back to the very beginning. I switch to the very first ledger, the one Leo and I managed to crack. I go through it all, still fighting my need to just check on Georgina. It’s so quiet, though, that she’s got to be asleep already. Even if I want to take care of her, I need to let her rest. I need to leave her be.
Standing, I finish the drink I poured myself and go back for another before returning to my screen and going back to today even though something tells me I’ve missed something that Grace would’ve made note of. By all accounts and from what she left behind, she was thorough. Thorough enough that her husband silenced her for good.
My head is a scrambled mess of facts and hunches. I need to focus on what’s in front of me and clear. Pulling up the photos that have been uploaded to the database, I pause on the van the prick was driving today. It’s been sent to the lab to get thoroughly searched—pulled apart piece by piece for any little trace of DNA we can find or anything that will lead us to the fuckers stalking us.
The van is identical to the one that was waiting for us outside Christopher’s place the night we went for dinner. The same one that’s stalked Lucy and me when I’ve taken her out. The same fucking van that was on the CCTV, delivering the flowers. It looked black on the footage, but the deep navy of it was visible in person…it’s one of those creamy colours that you don’t normally see on an industrial vehicle. The number plate is registered to a company that I can’t find any real information on, just random mentions here and there for small-goods companies dotted all over Eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, the registration number on the van today is different to the one I pulled from the footage the day I dropped Georgina off and almost ran over the arsehole. Again, it’s registered to another ghost company. It’s the same vehicle though—the dent on the left-hand side is consistent in all the footage.
Why didn’t I notice all of this sooner? It’s what I do—I figure the detail out to the bare bones. I could’ve protected her. All this time I thought we were being stalked by the media, but we are being watched. Our every move is being monitored, which only means that they’re going to strike. We’re going to be hit exactly like we were the night Cassie and Arabella were attacked. Except there’s so much more at risk now. So much more to lose.
I’m flicking through to my email when I notice the note Kit left on the page before he died. It peeks out from beneath my email window, and when I switch back to the scanned document, I freeze.
Petrushka.
The longer I spend staring at his notes, the louder Lucy’s rambles become.
Petrushka. Pretty dolly on a string. We’re all puppets.
Coincidence is a fine thing, but I know when something is more than that.
What if Lucy was the beginning?
The thought throws me. All these years we assumed she was the fire beneath the vendetta, but something is off. She disappeared just when her father was tipped to be the next Prime Minister, and he never pushed to break the rules to find her. Harry accepted like it was something he’d already come to terms with.
Pulling Leo’s number up, I dial him while I send an email with the details for the companies the van was registered to, along with the smaller ones associated with them. I might be good at getting the information, but he’s the best at following money and number trails.
“Fred? What’s happened?” he answers, sounding as though I’ve woken him up, and to confirm, Cassie whines from his end of the line, “Does he even know what time it is?”
“Give me a sec,” he tells me, followed by a mumble that I can’t make out and a bluster of giggles from my baby cousin that makes me cringe.
I’m pacing circles around my couch, trying to make the different pieces of the puzzle fit together, but there’s something missing. Something that’s changed and that doesn’t make sense because everything that’s happened…
They had Lucy all this time, and it doesn’t add up that they would let her go or that she would somehow find an escape. Why would they bring her back and keep her so close?
