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A sense of protection engulfed me, and I used it to focus on the task. I rummaged through all the drawers, finding nothing but office supplies and other journals, each marked with a patient’s name, just like mine. I searched for anything—a false bottom, a hidden safe. I even crawled under the desk, feeling across the floor for any kind of misplaced floorboard that could be hiding something, but I came up empty.
I couldn’t keep wasting time on the desk; it was too obvious anyway. I crawled out from underneath it, my foot catching on her chair. I stumbled backward, my shoulder slamming into the wall behind me.
“Futeacha,” I cursed, terrified that the pieces of art would come crashing down and I’d have a lot of explaining to do. My heart steadied as I noticed none of the paintings moved from my clumsy impact, their frames secured by strong bolts in the wall.
All except one.
I stared at the painting that hung behind her desk: the bright blue and white sky melded perfectly into the dark waves of the Vapalles coastline. Memories flooded through me, from family vacations to the beach growing up to late night bonfires with Ollie and Caleb when we went to celebrate Ollie’s promotional transfer to the Faction there. It was a popular design to say the least, one that wasn’t necessarily misplaced in an office.
Yet, an office was a special place, and the artwork one chose to hang within that space said a lot about them. When first learning about Vanessa, I had been told she had transferred from Ochrat. So why did she proudly display a picture of Vapalles?
Even more important, the other paintings were bolted to the wall. So why had this one moved?
I pushed the frame, the whole painting giving way slightly.
My heart sped up, and I pushed the painting just a bit farther to reveal a weakened stone in the wall. This was it, it had to be. My fingers tingled; using one arm to keep the painting propped up, I tried to pry the stone free from its holding.
“Two minutes,”Nolan warned, the urgency apparent even within our minds.
“I think I found something,”
“Well, hurry, I can smell her scent starting to drift down the hall again.”
My pulse sped up as I stopped trying to be delicate, using all of my strength to rip the stone out, bits of dust escaping and falling against the wall in white and grey plumes. I stuck my hand inside, pushing it farther and farther back into the hole, feeling around for anything that wasn’t the cold, musty rock that should be there. I let out a gasp when my fingers brushed against something smoothly textured, with a familiar, dry crinkle. Parchment paper?
I gripped it, just in time to hear the clicking of heels entering the waiting room. My time was up.
“Stop her!”I yelled into Nolan’s mind without a second thought.
I sucked in a breath, my hand still half in the hole when the doorknob rattled.
“Oh, Vanessa wait!” Nolan’s voice came from behind the door. “You have…”
“Keep distracting her,”I whispered to him, pulling whatever I had grasped in my hand out of the small space.
The stack of papers were covered in crushed stone dust from their hiding space, my fingers sifting through them, my soul stirring with each one I read.
They were fake ID papers and birth certificates. Each one within the same birth year but different names, all of them around the same age I would guess Vanessa was. There were at least a dozen. There could be plenty of reasons why she had all of these papers, few of them good, but it didn’t necessarily lead me to believe that she could be connected to Elliot.
That was, until I got to the last sheet of paper, by far the oldest in the stack judging by its crinkled yellow edges. My throat closed as I read the name scrawled across the top.
Haelyn Vanessa Wells.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Our hallway of offices was in a frenzy by the time Nolan and I returned from my counseling session.
The whole team had been notified before we even got back to Compound, Nolan finding privacy while I finished my session out. I had been trained for years to go undercover; this wasn’t my first time having to fake it through time with a suspect, pretending that everything was perfectly fine. However, this had certainly been the hardest.
A part of me had still hoped that I was wrong, that Vanessa wasn’t hiding anything. In the short time we had been meeting, somehow, she had helped me better understand the toxic decisions I had been making. She had helped me unpack my emotions, showed me how to advocate for myself in a way. From the beginning, it had always seemed like she was genuinely trying to put me and my healing first.
I felt like a fool for believing that my luck had just been that good, to find a psycho-physician that I had clicked with so quickly, especially after never fully trusting my last one. I had thought it a blessing from Lunestia, a sign that my healing journey was ready to move forward; and even though it had, it was still too good to be true.
Vanessa was hiding something.
Nolan hadn’t left my side since I walked out of her office, even making sure I had a few bites of food at theBlood Moonbefore we returned to the Compound. I had tried to convince him that I could handle coming back, but he wasn’t buying it. In his exact words, “We can’t trap her for another week, so you might as well enjoy a decent meal after such a terrible session.”
The food had tasted bland, but at least my head wasn’t as foggy with a hearty meal in my stomach.
