Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
“You don’t owe me an apology,” he said. “I deserved all of it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “but I’m still sorry.” And I was. Not for being angry and hurt but for letting it go on so long. We might not get out of this cellar, and I’d wasted so much time. This man cradling me in his arms wasn’t a villain. He’d made a mistake, and he’d apologized. For so long, I’d said I wanted him to go away, to live a horrible, painful life without me. I’d wished for all sorts of vengeful things.
That was before.
And now?
Now, what I really wanted was Forrest. Not his misery or his abject apologies. Just Forrest. Preferably alive and not dead of exposure and starvation in an abandoned root cellar.
“We’re going to get out of here. Griffen will find us,” I said.
“Yeah, he will,” Forrest said. “And I bet it will be soon.”
I didn’t think either of us believed it.
The light on Forrest’s phone went out.
“Did it die?” I asked, hating the way my voice shook in the dark.
“No, but it’s getting there. I don’t want to lose the light completely.”
He had a point. I hated the dark. And this wasn’t regular, household dark, tinged with a faint glow from power buttons or night-lights. This dark was pitch fucking black, the walls closing in, cold and damp. I wished I’d given up the search earlier and saved my own phone battery. Today was my day for crappy decisions.
“You said you looked at it,” Forrest said into the quiet dark. “The liner of the peppermint tin. Where we found the key,” he clarified.
“I did,” I said. “I swear I did. I know the light in my room isn’t as good as your kitchen, but I looked with a magnifying glass. I should have seen it.”
“But what if you did look,” Forrest said, “and there wasn’t anything there?
“How?” Realization unfurled inside me, and my stomach turned, “You mean—what if the code I found was a decoy? What if this wasn’t sent by your father?”
“Could someone have added that code to the peppermint tin after you brought it back to Heartstone?” he asked.
My mind raced over the possibilities. “Who? I had it with me almost…” My voice died on the word almost.
Almost was a window of opportunity. My room didn’t have a lock. I’d never really needed one. As a kid, I always jammed a chair under the handle when my father had his sketchy business friends stay at Heartstone. And later, we didn’t have any visitors at all, and no one was interested in going into my room.
I’d thought of Heartstone as a safe place. Hawk and Griffen had worked hard to make it so.
“Who do you think it could have been?” I found myself asking, not wanting to give voice to the names floating in my head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know your family as well as you do. I can’t see Tenn or Royal having anything to do with something like this. They love you, and they’re so proud of you. I don’t know your other siblings as well, but the only people I can think of are Ford and Brax,” Forrest said, proving yet again that he was as smart as I thought he was.
Those were the names I’d been trying not to speak. And, of course, between the two of them, I wanted to assume it was Brax. My childhood tormentor, my nemesis. I wanted him to make the most sense because, though we weren’t close, I didn’t want to think Ford would ever do anything to hurt me.
But someone had. And it wasn’t a childhood prank this time. I was getting colder by the second, as was Forrest. Could we really die of exposure in July? I shivered in the cold, damp air of the root cellar and understood that we could. It wasn’t freezing down here, but it was cold enough that the temperature would probably get us before empty stomachs or dehydration, especially once night fell.
I knew how hypothermia worked. It killed faster than anyone thought.
Griffen and Hawk were in a race against time, and I’d made it very difficult to find us.
“Why?” I let myself breathe, trying to sort it out in my head. Trapping us down here wasn’t going to get anybody any closer to Alan Buckley’s fortune. And if the code written on the liner had been added later, at Heartstone, it definitely couldn’t be the Learys who’d set us up to be locked in the root cellar.
“Who has to gain from getting you out of the picture?” Forrest asked. “Anyone aside from your siblings? What happens if one of you dies before the terms of the will are up? What happens to the money your father left you?”
“I think it goes back into the trusts that fund the Manor,” I said. I hadn’t really thought much about it, not planning to die in the next five years. Showed what I knew. “I think the result is the same as if Griffen kicks us out or we stay away from Heartstone for more than two weeks in a quarter. Anything left to us goes into the trusts for the house.” I let out a long sigh. “But to be honest, I was pretty drunk the day Harvey played Dad’s video will. I could have missed some of the details.”