“You’re an empath specialist,” St. James said. “Think, Evan. We’re not talking about what regular people would do; we’re talking about what an empath would do. Would Reece bother to seek revenge on someone who hurt only him? Or do empaths, even the corrupted ones, only go after people who hurt the people they care about?”
Grayson sat back in his seat. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” he said, raising his gaze to meet St. James’s eyes. “I thought Alex could be saved once too. All it got me was strapped to a chair in an underground bunker. I don’t want that fate for you.”
Sympathy softened St. James’s eyes. “But what did Alex do when you two got free?”
“He thralled them all and set fire to everything in that bunker,” Grayson said. “Turned everyone and everything to ash in revenge.”
“Yes, he did,” she said. “But revenge forwho?”
“I don’t understand—”
“Was Alex getting revenge because he himself was hurt?” St. James said more quietly. “Or was Alex furious that his captors had dared to hurt his beloved older brother?”
Grayson opened his mouth, then closed it. They were quiet as the waiter returned, setting big bowls of pho in front of each of them and a plate of greens, jalapeños, lime wedges and sprouts in the center of the table.
“Why would someone murder Smith and frame Reece?” Grayson said as the waiter left.
St. James set her phone down. “Thatis the question we need to be asking.”
“But even if Smith’s murder somehow was a frame job, Reece did set thralls loose in the AMI store,” Grayson pointed out. “A lot of folks could’ve died.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe Reece trapped the thralls in the dressing room and cleared out the store before anyone was hurt.”
“Why wouldReecehave been the one who trapped the thralls—”
“Because everyone else in the store was stampeding out infear,” St. James said. “And if you accept the theory that Reece was projecting that fear, then it follows that the crowd would have been too overcome and too busy fleeing to secure the thralls, making Reece himself the most likely option.”
Grayson’s gaze went, unbidden, back to the image of Reece on her phone.
“Reece’s compassion has always been his greatest strength.” St. James picked up her chopsticks. “Maybe he’s on the edge of mercy, his pacifism hanging on to that cliff for dear life. But I don’t think he’s fallen off yet.”
She pointed at him with the chopsticks. “So I’m going to solve the case of who’s framing my brother. And maybeyoushould take some time to consider why, exactly, you’re so determined to believe he’s unsavable.”
Charles:The timeline must be moved up.
Charles:We enact phase two tonight.
Nichols eyed the message from Charles Stone, then pocketed his phone. Fine by him. The sooner he got out of Seattle and into his new facility, the better.
A town car was waiting outside his hotel at 7:00 p.m. on the dot, just as Charles had promised. Nichols had been driven to Kirkland, and the three-story unmarked building that served as Stone Solutions’ private hospital and morgue.
An unmarked van was waiting in the delivery bay, a pair of men in dark coats waiting at its door. The interior of the van would be indistinguishable from an ambulance, but the exterior was far more subtle and forgettable on Seattle’s streets.
A few minutes later, Nichols was in one of the hospital’s finest rooms, a large corner space dedicated to the care of one patient. And there, sedated and unconscious on the hospital bed, hooked up to an IV drip, was Vanessa Whitman.
Nichols eyed her dispassionately. He’d met Whitman a time or two, before her brief stint as Stone Solutions’ director of research and development, which had ended when Cora Falcon had thralled her and left her catatonic. Whitman was an endocrinologist who had been involved in the experiments on Falcon and Reece Davies; perhaps she would have been pleased to be part of tonight’s orchestrations.
Well. Perhaps not if she’d known she was going to be the test subject.
Nichols touched his pocket. The syringe was there, along with the second vial, the very last of the limited supply he had crafted in Polaris.
But Charles had promised there was more. And with any luck, the new Olympia facility would be everything Charles had promised, and Nichols would be able to resume his work.
He straightened, pulling his hand from his pocket. “Load her up,” he snapped at the waiting orderly as he turned back to the door. “We’re taking her downtown.”
Chapter Twelve
Emerson Blackthorne leaned against the floor-to-ceiling glass of his skyscraper corner office. His pretend fiancé, empath Riley Davids, had kept his promises, his ragtag little conservation start-up working hard to make their neighborhood greener—and Emerson’s company’s reputation sparkle by association.
