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My face is pale in the bathroom mirror, washed out against my black sheath dress. My lipstick looks harsh, like I’m a little girl who got into her mother’s cosmetics. I wipe it off with a tissue and sigh.
“You look beautiful,” Trap says, coming up behind me.
I lean back against him, letting his dark suit frame me. His arms around me feel like home.
His cracked ribs are healed now. His swollen eye has long-since gone down. For both of us, our bruises have faded. Our scabs are gone. Gone, but not forgotten. Never, ever forgotten.
“We’ve waited a month to bury him,” I say. “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing.”
“If that’s what you want to do.” Trap says it easily. Automatically. He reallyisgiving me the option.
But as Dr. Martinelli has pointed out more than once in our therapy sessions, my life has been suspended these four weeks. I’ve run on auto-pilot, dealing with lawyers and with the police. I’ve accepted the daily crop of paparazzi at the front gate. My greatest accomplishments have been signing off on work orders for the house, approving the installation of new windows in the kitchen, and authorizing a complete gutting and renovation of the dining room.
This time, no one found any hidden surveillance equipment.
Dr. Martinelli is right. She usually is, on the rare occasions she makes definitive statements. Mostly, she asks questions and waits for me to reply. That’s what a good therapist does.
Trap is waiting. If I give him the word, he’ll call off the minister, tell the funeral home to store the casket a while longer, order the cemetery to pitch a tent over the gaping hole in the ground, or fill it back in, or whatever else I desire.
“Let’s finish this,” I say.
“Good girl,” Trap says. I remember when those words used to kindle something inside me. Not now. Maybe never again.
He kisses the top of my head, and we head outside to where our driver waits with the Mercedes. Charles has more patience than I ever would, edging forward at a few miles an hour to keep from crushing any of the camera-toting fiends outside the freeport gates.
“Fucking parasites,” Trap mutters.
“Will thiseverend?”
“Today should be the last of it. You’ll make your statement, and there won’t be any more life in the story.”
“My statement!” I’ve forgotten the notes we prepared so carefully.
Trap pats the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ve got them right here.”
Of course he does. He has everything I need. He always has. Always will.
His fingers wrap around mine lightly. I lean back against the leather headrest. My eyes are closed when I ask, “Do you think we should have looked harder?”
“For Alix?”
It still feels strange, hearing my name refer to someone else, but I nod. “She should be here.”
“She’s three years old,” he says. “No three-year-old would understand her father’s funeral.”
If she even exists.
He doesn’t say that part out loud. We’ve debated it too many times over the past month.
Trap has paid Harry Asher an ungodly amount of money to track down Leo’s daughter, without a single hint of a whisper of a possibility of a solid lead. We started with my brother’s cell phone. I was able to get into it easily enough, using the four-number password Leo always used—the number of the house where we lived when Mom was still alive, before Dad married Candace, when everything was perfect.
That got us access to his contacts—none. And his emails—none. The entire phone was locked down, stripped of apps, managed with the strictest possible parental controls.
Leo communicated with one person: Jonas Herzog. Texts arrived at irregular intervals, starting November 30, the first year I was held in the New Castle house.
Jonas ZZZ
Finish the shipment by midnight tonight and you’ll get a special reward
