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“What?” she asked, her brows knitting. “I don’t understand.”
Neither did he. What the hell was going on?
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Noelle took in the set of Evan’s jaw and the way he gripped the steering wheel. If he’d been tense and confused before, he was even more so now. So was she. He took his hand off the wheel as he drove, stretching it for a moment and then returning it to where it’d been. “Professor Vitucci came highly recommended by the officers involved in our case,” he told her. “They’d worked with the man. They knew him.”
She thought back to the time right after they’d escaped—the questioning, the interviews, the bright lights, and the somber looks. Yes, Noelle thought she remembered the police offering to give her a recommendation for a therapist too. She’d immediately turned them down, too overwhelmed to consider talking to another stranger at that point.
“Is it possible he was recommended to your father as well?” Evan asked. “He also worked with the police when your mother died. This might be a simple coincidence based on our connection to the Reno PD.”
“Maybe,” she murmured.
Evan had told her a little more about his experience with Armand Vitucci after they’d left Baudelaire’s shop and begun the drive to the professor’s home office, the one Evan had often gone to for sessions. She still had no idea what to expect. Her father had clearly liked theman enough to go to him off and on for several years, but other than that, he hadn’t dispensed any other information, and she hadn’t asked because it’d seemed like a personal relationship that wasn’t necessarily her business. Evan seemed perplexed in general, and specifically about why the professor would have a rare red diamond with the same filigree matching the one they’d found in his father’s safe, but he also seemed intent on defending the man. She could tell by the way he spoke of him that Evan highly respected him.
They’d also discussed briefly what Mr.Baudelaire had said about the Van Daele diamond company and rumors of a massacre. More links between the man who had originally told her the story about the king and his court, Brussels, and some supposed massacre that may or may not have really happened were forming. She sensed the answers that would make it all clear were close but just out of reach.
Forty-five minutes after they’d left the antique shop, they exited Evan’s car and began walking toward a lovely ranch-style home with stone exterior. Noelle glanced over her shoulder as they approached. She was jumpy and out of sorts, and she knew by the grip of Evan’s hand that he was too.
They paused at the front door that was open a few inches. Alarm rose inside Noelle. It felt like an invitation but also some odd threat she couldn’t explain. “Is that normal?” Noelle whispered, gesturing to the cracked door.
Evan shook his head, pushing it open with two fingers. “Professor Vitucci?” he called. No answer. He gripped her hand harder as they stepped inside the open foyer, and Evan called his name again.
“Back here,” came a distant male voice.
Evan nodded to her, and they moved toward the back of the house where the voice had come from.
They passed an open powder room and a short hall that led to what Noelle assumed were bedrooms. A scent met her nose, drifting from thedirection of the room where they’d almost arrived. A cologne.Distinct. Layered.Her heart lurched.
“Evan—” She pulled on his arm as they stepped through the open doorway, a large desk in front of them, where a man sat in a leather chair turned toward the wall of bookshelves.
From her peripheral vision, she could see Evan look at her questioningly, but she could not take her eyes from the man in the chair, turning slowly toward them. An eternity and an instant passed before he faced them fully.
“Hello, little rabbit,” he said, a smile tilting his lips. Noelle let out a tiny gasp. Sitting before them was the man from the photo Baudelaire had shown them.
And he spoke in the voice from her nightmares.The voice from that room.
He was black haired, with a generous amount of gray at his temples.Dashingcame to her muddled mind. Noelle gripped Evan’s hand and moved her other to his biceps, where she held on tightly too.Vitucci?Her father’s and Evan’s therapist was the man who’d ... rented her? The one who’d given them the tools to escape their cages?
Vitucci turned his attention to Evan. “Evan. Hello. Very nice to see you.”
“What the hell is going on?” Evan asked. Though she couldn’t take her eyes from the older man, she felt Evan move slightly and assumed he was going for his gun.
Vitucci smiled again, his gaze moving to the place where Evan was surely removing the firearm. “Don’t be rash, Evan. I’m not planning on harming either of you. I’m quite fond of you, actually.”
“You expected us. How?”
“Baudelaire.” He nodded toward the couch near the wall. “Please have a seat. This is going to take a few minutes. And you’ll have a much better shot from there, should you need to fire at me.”
They both hesitated together, but then Evan pulled her slightly, and she followed him to the couch, and both sat down. She was grateful. Her legs were shaking, and she felt better with a wall to her back rather than an open doorway.
“Baudelaire told a little white lie,” Vitucci said after turning his chair so he faced them, lacing his hands on the desk as though to put them at greater ease. It worked. “He doesn’t enjoy lying, but he’s loyal. He raised me after I barely survived the massacre that happened in the house of horrors I grew up in, otherwise known as the Van Daele manor. My mother was the woman I told you about, little rabbit, whose throat was slit on the ballroom floor. She was hired help there, without family, no real skills to speak of. A throwaway. A nobody. Van Daele and his friends debased her at their parties. They captured her if she tried to run. They broke her eventually, so that she begged them for the drugs they provided. She anticipated her cage for the reward of escape. An appalling paradox, no?” His lips tilted, but the upper half of his face remained stoic.
“I worked there, too,” he went on. “In the kitchen. In the garden, wherever I was needed. I stole their jewels and their books. I learned to read, and I learned to plot.”
Their jewels. House of horrors I grew up in.So ithadbeen his story. And the massacre wasn’t merely rumor, the way Baudelaire had framed it. She remembered how the man sitting in front of her had whispered, murmuring soft and low against her ear, moving subtly through different accents she hadn’t been able to quite identify. He was using a very slight one now, practically imperceptible, but she thought she recognized the cadence as purely Italian. That would make sense, with a name like Vitucci. Then again, nothing about this man seemed to make sense.Who are you really?
Her mind pulled forth the other things he’d said in that room so many years ago.They had only each other.They. The twins. A boy and a girl. His sister? Her gaze moved to his pinkie finger, where a flash of redglinted in the light. A red diamond. One of two. Just like the children themselves, who wore matching gems to signify their ownership by gluttons. “You. You were one of the twins in the story you told me in that room,” Noelle said. She felt Evan go more rigid beside her.
