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I didn’t even ask where we were going. I just took his hand and nodded. “Yeah, that’d actually be pretty great right now.”

CHAPTER 29

HOLDEN

I’d fully intended for this trip to be a quiet escape for just the two of us. Hitting the highway always cleared my head and I’d hoped it would do the same for Alicia, but Wyatt and Tasha had both shown up at the house just as we’d been leaving, and when they’d found out what I had in mind, they’d promptly decided to come with us.

Now that we were here, however, I was regretting my decisions with everything I had inside. As we walked around the massive, sprawling warehouse in an outlet mall down south, I genuinely felt like we were in Hell.

Alicia, Tasha, and even Wyatt seemed to be in seventh Heaven, but to me, the place looked like it had been designed by Satan himself. Like a Halloween store had mated with a liquidation center and had dozens of ghastly children, all of which were worse than the last, but I’d driven forty-five miles to this fluorescent hellscape for one reason and one reason only.

I was going to blow Mr. Henderson’s decorations out of the water and win the block party decoration contest.

“Look at this!” Tasha squealed, a pair of plastic vampire fangs shoved into her mouth as she poked at an animatronic werewolf. “If we put this on the porch, it’ll totally scare anyone walking past there at night into early retirement.”

“Buy two,” I said immediately, pushing a flatbed cart that was already close to its maximum weight capacity and I was only just getting started.

Alicia walked beside me with a beautiful, amused smile on her lips and the crushing sadness of her aunt’s visit evidently forgotten. For now, anyway. I wasn’t naive enough to believe those demons weren’t still there, but it seemed the comedy of watching us navigate a discount Halloween warehouse were keeping them at bay.

“You’re out of your mind.” She laughed as I added an entire box of synthetic cobwebs to our cart. “We already have four crates of strobe lights, two industrial fog machines, and a projection mapping kit. Mr. Henderson is going to think the military is invading.”

“He brought a synchronized light show to a knife fight,” I said. “I’m simply retaliating in kind.”

“Alicia!” Tasha squealed again, waving her over to a display of plastic tombstones. “Come check these out. Some of them glow!”

Alicia rolled her eyes but went to join her friend and Wyatt stepped up beside me, watching her walk away. Once she was out of earshot, he finally spoke. “You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?” I asked as I tossed a pack of heavy-duty zip ties onto the flatbed. “All I’m doing is shopping.”

“No, the other thing. The one where you throw yourself into something completely meaningless so you can avoid dealing with the fact that our family is sitting on a tectonic fault line.”

I sighed, drifting over to an entire wall of witches’ cauldrons. “You talked to Colin.”

It wasn’t a question. Honestly, I’d been wondering why he’d shown up at the brownstone for the first time ever a mere hour after I’d left Thayer Headquarters. Now, I knew.

“I did,” he admitted without any shame whatsoever, even shrugging as he pulled a box of mid-sized cauldrons from the shelf. “After you left his office, he called me in. I’m sure he had the same conversation with me he had with you, except he mentioned that you totally shut him down when he started telling you about the legal transition plan for Dad.”

It felt like the temperature in the warehouse dropped ten degrees as soon as he brought it up. “That plan has nothing to do with me. I have a neighborhood association to terrorize. Colin and Jane will be Colin and Jane. It doesn’t matter what I say. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, so it’s a moot point. I didn’t shut him down. I just left because listening to that bullshit was a waste of my tine.”

“Holden, come on.” Wyatt sighed, reaching out to stop me from dumping a bunch of outdoor extension cords into the cart. “Look, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but he’s getting out whether you like it or not and the press is going to start circling us like vultures the moment they find out.”

“Yeah. Exactly. They’re coming for us no matter what we do, so until we have to become shut-ins again, I might as well decorate the fuck out of my porch and win a gift card.”

“We’re down here, buying industrial-grade holiday decorations like the world depends on it, for a gift card?”

“No, we’re buying it for the title of Best Decorations,” I said. “The gift card is just a bonus.”

Wyatt sighed. “Competitive urges aside, why does this matter so much to you? According to Tasha, your greatest rival for this thing is a nice old man across the street. Beating him can’t possibly be all this is about.”

Against my better judgment, I glanced across the aisle to where Alicia was laughing with Tasha, both of them holding up ridiculous plastic pumpkins. She looked so vibrant and alive, so happy, and it was such a stark contrast to the sobbing, defeated girl from just a few hours ago that my heart rate kicked into higher gear.

I’d done that. After her aunt had left, she’d been a trembling mess and I’d lifted her out of that slump. I’d made her happy again.

“This is the only thing that matters to me right now,” I muttered, but I wasn’t referring to winning the contest.

What I meant was her happiness. And mine.

For the last decade, my family had been stuck in survival mode. We’d gotten through every day by taking it one day at a time, and slowly, my siblings had broken out of that horrible fucking cycle. Jane and Colin had kids now, Isaac was living his best life in Egypt, and Ryan finally had a personality again outside of Corporate Raider and Party-Boy Ken.