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No one could be trusted.
Certainly not him.
Not even the twins.
27
The house had fallen silent not long after I retired to my room. Most of the staff lived off the property except for Carson, the butler, and the head of the house, Maria. Father had very few guards posted inside the house, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any at all. There were also the cameras to worry about. None of them were in the same hallway as his office. I realized now that it was no doubt because he didn’t want anyone to see who was coming or going.
Or the damage he was inflicting.
My sweaty hand reached out and gripped the door handle, turning it slowly, quietly. The corridor was silent, eerily so in this big house. My feet were bare. The old wood floor often creaked, and I wanted to remain as stealthy as possible.
The pulse of my heartbeat pattered an unrelenting drum beat against my rib cage, threatening to burst through my chest. My breaths came in shallow, quiet rasps. Cold sweat washed down the back of my neck and clung to the collar of my pajama shirt.
I was a wreck. What the hell was I doing pretending to be some kind of spy? I had no idea in hell what I was doing, but still, I pressed on. Not because of the promise I’d made to the twins, but becauseIneeded to know what kind of man my father truly was. Doubt had wiggled itself underneath my skin, causing a persistent itch. My father wasn’t who he said he was. He’d never been very caring toward me, but I’d always taken his punishments without complaint, believing I’d deserved them somehow.
What your father did is never okay, whether you did something wrong or not.
Those words still rang in my head. I’d never thought of what my father did as wrong. Simply harsh, but I’d been told my entire life that I was deserving of it. That it was necessary. But the more I thought back on the times my father had ordered my discipline. He had never once told me what I had done wrong.
My silent feet led me to his office.
The place I’d come to fear over the years. His office had never been a safe place in this house. The well-oiled hinges barely made a sound as I inched open the heavy door and crept inside, quietly closing the door behind me. The safe was in plain view. He didn’t bother hiding it. There was no need in this house. Not when everyone followed your orders without question. He’d curated a carefully crafted team of devoted sycophants. Men who would do anything for him. Men with both power and means.
There were no buttons on the safe. Instead, it had a scanner for an encrypted barcode that very few people had access to. The problem was recreating the barcode. You couldn’t. Although barcodes weren’t unhackable, encrypted barcodes were hard to simply copy. The barcode itself contained specialized data that the reader readily interpreted. Without that specific data, the safe wouldn’t open.
Unless you were able to short circuit the entire system.
Which I could, thanks to a handy device I managed to sneak in with my luggage. The Kavanaughs’ hacker, Bridgett, had rigged up a small device that resembled a button cell battery. I fetched it from the pocket of my pajamas, running my fingers over the soft metal.
Reaching out, I went to attach it to the safe’s interface when a pair of loud voices filtered into the room from the hallway. Shit. Panic rose inside me as they approached. I needed to find a place to hide. Fuck. My gaze whipped around the room, heart beating rapidly in my chest.
Thump.
Thump.
The door handle rattled as I dove into the coat closet to the right.
“You should have kept your mouth shut, Sarah,” my father hissed as he stepped into the room. “She isn’t as stupid as you think she is. Did you honestly think she wouldn’t catch what you said?”
Sarah snorted mirthlessly. “Please.” Her voice was full of derision. “She’s more gullible than her mother and look how that ended.”
“Killing Elizabeth was a mistake, and you know it,” he hissed. “Your petty jealousy almost ruined everything for me. If Elias hadn’t been able to have Ford cover it up, you’d be in jail.”
A sudden longing skated through me at the mention of Elizabeth’s name.
Who was she?
Why did her name sound familiar?
“Lin was the one who started it,” Sarah practically whined. “You know that. She’s the one who changed her identity and inserted herself into everything. Which is your fault. If you hadn’t spilled your fucking guts about Elizabeth and Toph Eriksen, she’d never have become fixated.”
My father grumbled something under his breath.
“You still need to be more careful,” he warned. “If Bailey finds out the truth before Kenna comes to train her, it could be a problem. It’s bad enough she’s here now. Barret was supposed to track her after she left the body shop and snatch her up for holding at Wonders. We aren’t going to get that chance now. Knight isn’t happy about that. He wanted her to be trained before his son’s upcoming nuptials.”
“We should never have sold her to the Knight boy,” Sarah sneered. “She should have gone directly to auction.”
