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My eyes had been drawn to one particular painting, one of the larger ones. Swaths of different shades of blue and purple bled into each other across a canvas, broken by streaks of what looked like clear glue and scraps of redfabric.
Ky nodded to it. “Not surprised you like that one. I had to buy something of Jin’s, ofcourse.”
“It’s nice,” I said. There was something hypnotic about the fall of the colors, as if they were pulling the viewer right into theimage.
“I think so, even if I haven’t got a clue what it’s supposed to mean,” Ky said cheerfully. He plopped down at one end of the futon and grabbed his laptop off the coffee table. “All right. Let’s get cracking on that mystery ofyours.”
I sat down next to him and brought up the photo of Celestine’s bank records that I’d taken on my phone. “Here,” I said, zooming in on the item that had caught my attention. “Can you figure out who she sent this moneytoo?”
Ky took the phone from me. He scanned it with a low whistle. “That’s an impressive chunk of change all right. Let’s see. Yeah, I should be able to trace this.” He glanced up at me, and his face turned slightly pink. “I, uh, may have gone through a rebellious stage in my later teens when I taught myself how to hack into any database I wanted to. The harder the firewall, the better thepayoff.”
My eyebrows rose. “So I’m dealing with some kind of criminal mastermind, huh?” Iteased.
His grin came back. “I didn’t actually do anything criminal. Just proved to myself I could and left everything as I found it. And what about you? Pulling stealth maneuvers like a super-spy, keeping it totally cool with your stepmom afterward. No one suspected a thing,right?”
Now I was blushing. “Not as far as I could tell. As I’ve tried to reassure Seth at least twice aday.”
Ky chuckled. “Aw, my brother can’t help it. That’s just how he operates. He hates problems he can’t just step up and solve with hishands.”
And here I’d come barging back into his life. I rubbed my mouth. “Yeah, I guess I brought some big ones back withme.”
“Hey.” Kyler waited until I raised my eyes again. “Maybe he worries, but don’t let yourself think for a second that he’s not overjoyed that you’re back. Your presence here is a net gain, Rose. I promise. We’ve all kind of drifted apart, but you’re bringing us back together. And I think we’re better off that way, youknow?”
The affection in his tone and his gaze made it suddenly hard to breathe. I fumbled for something to say. “Damon doesn’t seem to think so.” The way he’d talked to me when he’d found me in his mom’s apartment—my gut still twisted when I rememberedit.
“Damon…” Ky exhaled sharply. “He’s had a rough time of it. I don’t even know the half of it. But it’s still not your fault. I do know his mom struggled to get enough work after—after she lost the job on your estate. And his dad, who knows where he is? But Damon just got really angry in general. He did a bunch of stupid stuff at school, got expelled halfway through senior year—after a ton of warnings… And the company he’s been keeping lately is pretty sketchy. But that’s on him, and he knows that, deepdown.”
“Maybe too deep down for it to make a difference?” Imuttered.
“Oh, no. He’s not that far gone.” Ky paused and shot me a conspiratorial smile. “He’d blow a gasket if he knew I told you this, but you know what? I don’t really care about him being pissed off. He texted me the other day. Saying he wanted me to keep him updated, if whatever issues you were having took a turn for the worse. If we started doing anything tohelp.”
“Oh.” The knot in my gut unwound. I sagged a little on the futon. Maybe I’d gotten through to Damon last week after all. He cared at least a little. “Thank you for telling me. It’s good toknow.”
“He’ll come around completely,” Ky said. “Even he knows what we had back then—it was something prettyspecial.”
“Yeah.” The way Ky was looking at me left me groping for words again. Then he turned to hiscomputer.
“All right. Let’s see what secrets we canuncover.”
His fingers started flying over the keyboard. I didn’t understand the process he had to work through, so I found myself just watching him as I leaned against the back of thefuton.
I’d never really thought about the lovely speckling of the faint freckles on his face, denser along the prominent cheekbone and then more scattered across the slight hollow below. His eyes, I could see when I was this close, were speckled too, the foggy gray-green flecked with shards of a more vivid green. And they seemed to shine when he focused this intently on atask.
“Here we go!” he said. He made a quick gesture with his hand. I leaned closer to see the screen—but not too near. When I closed that distance, every inch of my skin woke up to his presence. A hint of a smell that had to be him reached me, lightly musky with a hint ofmint.
“So,” Ky said, motioning at the screen, “that first transaction you saw was actually your stepmother moving her money from a joint account she has with your father to a private account that’s only in her name.Thenshe transferred it again to a… Cora Conwyn. Does that name ring anybells?”
My lips parted. My heart had been beating a little fast before, but now it was outrightthumping.
“Derek—my fiancé,” I forced out. “Cora is his mother.” The lady and head of his witching family, until one of his sisters claimed thatrole.
Ky’s eyes widened. “And you didn’t know anything about your stepmom passing on this money to her? This isn’t, like, some wedding tradition orsomething?”
“Not one I’ve ever heard of.” If it was, there’d be no reason to keep it secret. Snuff my spark. “Why would she be paying his family all that money? There’s got to be something going on that she’s not telling me.” Or Dad, if she’d bothered to transfer it to a separate account before giving it to her intended recipient. She must have told him it was for something else. Which meant whatever it was, it was something he wouldn’t approveof.
My chest clenched. Kyler grasped my hand. “Rose,” he said. “It’ll beokay.”
“How can it be okay?” I demanded. “My stepmother is having secret discussions about special… techniques, she’s paying huge amounts of money to my fiance’s family in secret, she’s hiding all of it even from mydad.”
