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Dorothy Meyer
Vincent Wilder
Justin Brimsey
My breath stopped. The head of Unsparked Relations. One of the people in the Assembly we’d been hoping to reach.
My gaze darted to the next name. Another I didn’t recognize. But the fifth was Gwen Remington of International Affairs. And the sixth Miriam Travers, a witch who was second in command in the Finances division who we’d also considered approaching.
“What?” Damon demanded. “Can you even tell what he was trying to say?”
“It’s the names of people from the Assembly,” I said. “Including three of the people we thought we could trust to go against the Frankfords if they knew the truth.”
Jin’s eyebrows arched. “What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. I—”
My gaze drifted back to the club. The men in their business suits who’d passed me going in—Charles Frankford would have fit right in with them, wouldn’t he? A sudden certainty closed around my chest.
“Frankford met with these people here,” I said, shaking the paper. “Recently.”
Ky’s eyes lit up. “Gabriel knew we needed a meeting spot to use Frankford’s code.”
“Hold on,” Seth said. “Did Gabriel know we specifically wanted to talk tothesepeople?”
I shook my head. “We hadn’t come up with our list of trustworthy people until after he left. I don’t even know half the people he mentioned here.”
“He was at the meeting,” Ky suggested. “He could tell they weren’t huge fans of Frankford, so they seemed like good names for us to know.”
“We can’t just assume he was doing this in good faith,” Damon said. “He was brutal to Rose and then he took off. He went straight to those assholes. I don’t trust him for a second.”
The memory of my last conversation with Gabriel made me wince. That pain ran deep, so deep I didn’t know if I’d ever quite heal completely. But Gabriel hadn’t been all wrong. I had been changing; I’d been acting in ways I never would have wanted to if I’d been able to think some of those situations through calmly.
And I knew him. I knew the boy who’d drawn me into this circle of love when we were only kids. I knew the man he’d grown up into, who’d crossed the country at my call, who’d bound his heart to mine even after he’d seen the danger a loyalty like that had brought down on the other guys.
For the first time since he’d stalked down the road away from me, a glow of hope covered the wound inside me like a salve.
I hadn’t lost him. Not completely.
“No,” I said. “Everything about this feels genuine to me. He’s trying to help. I don’t know why he did everything else he’s done, but this—we have to listen to this. He’s given us the key we needed.”
Now we had to make sure we used it well.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rose
“Are you ready?” I asked Naomi.
She nodded where she was leaning against the van she’d rented when she’d flown into the state. We’d set up a little base of operations in this field, far enough into the middle of nowhere that no one would notice our little group but close enough to the Frankfords’ seaside property that we could get there in under an hour. The tall grass rustled with the warm summer breeze, carrying the scent of freshly reaped hay from a nearby farm.
“Does this look good?” My cousin showed her phone to me. She’d already composed the text to send to her mother, my Aunt Ginny.I don’t know what to do! Rose is getting ready to make some kind of attack on the Frankfords’ grandson, and I don’t think I can stop her.
“Perfect,” I said. “Go ahead and send it.”
Aunt Ginny was in on the ploy. She’d invited my other aunt, Irene, over for lunch. She’d get the text, act distressed, and “accidentally” leave it where Aunt Irene could see the message. We were pretty sure Irene would pass on a warning about this latest crazy behavior of mine like she had before.
We weren’t counting on a frantic message from Aunt Irene doing all the work for us, of course. I stepped away from the van to join Lesley where she’d been meditating in preparation for our casting. She could feel her spark wearing thinner, she’d told me, but she still had some power left. And the last thing she’d wanted to do was sit this effort out, even if she didn’t have the full picture of what we were fighting against.
