Gretel:Not as much power as the person who had them murdered.
Gretel:Nobody is going to believe me about this. I’m never going to get to justice.
Had she even been told anything about her parents? Was she ever going to be allowed to see her parents’ bodies—to bury them? Or was she just going to be kept in the dark for the rest of her life, never getting answers or closures?
And suddenly he was typing again, too honestly.
Alex:One of the most powerful men you can think of had my parents murdered too.I’m still working on “justice.”
Cora’s steps echoed on the boardwalk as she came to join him at the railing. “I found a park staffer,” she said. “But she said she hasn’t seen any boats on the water today with the weather.”
“So where the hell did a group of pacifist empaths go by land?” Alex said, pocketing his phone.
Cora closed her eyes. A minute went by. Then she swallowed. “Stone Solutions has access to that abandoned pulp mill by Everett. Plenty of space, right on the water with enough land that no one hears anything. Even screaming.”
Rage flared in Alex, the reminder of what Cora and her fiancé, John, had been put through in November. Stopping Nichols, stopping Stone—it wasn’t just about the chaos. It was vengeance, for all the people they’d hurt—John, Gretel’s parents, his parents, Evan.
He reached for her hand. Their fingers intertwined, and emotion flowed between them for a moment, no words needed.
Finally she seemed to shake herself. “So are we gonna look for some empaths?”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
As soon as Anthony left, Gretel wasted no time crossing the swanky sitting area and opening the unlocked door to Vivian Marist’s office. She stepped inside, taking in the oversized mahogany desk with its expensive ergonomic chair and the personal printer in the corner. The wall held framed art of mountains hung beside an oversized flat-screen monitor, and a few of Marist’s things were scattered around the office, including her coat and scarf hanging in the corner.
The desk held a monitor, a mousepad and a laptop in the dock. Gretel took a seat at the desk and booted up the laptop. It was password-protected, but in the corner was the option to log in as Guest. She clicked on that, and the screen opened to an internal homepage.
She didn’t actually expect to find proof Charles Stone was a murderer on the Stone Solutions intranet. But on that call with Charles, her dad had mentioned that shareholders were concerned about a suspicious filing from October.
Where there’s murder, there are often other crimes, Jamey had said that morning.
Gretel had already glanced over the 8-K in question herself. It seemed like nothing more than the required notice to Stone Solutions shareholders regarding the acquisition of three small companies that made materials used in the empath gloves. Building a vertical supply chain sounded like profit as usual to her, not something to raise suspicion, but she was printing all of it to go through with Jamey, just in case.
As she waited for the exhibits and attachments to print, hergaze fell on the monitor on the wall. Could this be some kind of stock ticker? Or something else tracking the financial information she was looking for?
Gretel stood up and stepped toward it. She ran a hand along the bottom edge of the monitor until she found the power button. She pressed it, and the screen burst into life.
It was a map of North America, speckled with blue dots. There were no controls visible, so she touched the screen like she would her phone, and the map shifted slightly. She made a flicking motion with her fingers, zooming in more closely on a cluster in Chicago, watching as three of the blue dots slowly moved together along Shoreline Drive heading north. She touched one of the dots, and a profile popped up with a picture and biographical details for a thirtysomething empath nurse.
“Oh my God,” Gretel said out loud as her stomach turned over. She clicked on a second blue dot, then the third, and then a fourth in Madison and a fifth in Minneapolis. Each one pulled up a profile for an empath.
Stone Solutions was tracking all of them.
Two days ago, she might have believed anything Stone Solutions had done was for the greater good. But then, two days ago, she hadn’t been convinced the CEO’s father was a stone-cold murderer.
Her phone chimed. She kept one eye on the door and pulled out her phone to see a new text from Alex.
Alex:One of the most powerful men you can think of had my parents murdered too. I’m still working on “justice.”
She stilled, gaze flicking between the door and the monitor and her phone.
Alex’s parents had been murdered too? But he’d said he was from Texas. What powerful man that she might think of would have reach all the way into Texas?
Charles and Cedrick Stone, her mind supplied.You’re looking right now at how their control stretches across every inch of the country.
Her gaze went back to the screen. She zoomed out, and then zoomed back in on northwest Washington. Her brow furrowed. There were no blue dots in Washington.
“Where are Cora and Reece?” she said out loud as she zoomed back out, scanning the West Coast for dots. Then, on one side of the map, her gaze fell on three red dots clustered in the ocean. She clicked on one of them and pulled up a picture of a familiar empath.
