THE DOCUMENT ANTHEA sent me was a list of minerals and other substances with figures and percentages that didn’t have much significance to me. I had no idea whether what I was looking at was normal or concerning. Thankfully Anthea was sharp enough to realize that if I couldn’t analyze the soil myself, I also couldn’t analyze the analysis, so she gave me a call after I’d had a chance to look over the report.
“First off, there’s nothing especially strange here,” she said, getting right to the point. “I wouldn’t blink twice at this sample if it came from a routine check rather than an analysis prompted by current suspicions.”
I only partly relaxed at that remark. “But there’s something that would give you pause because of the circumstances?”
“Yes. They don’t prove any sort of crime, but they’re things I’d keep in mind as I weighed the other evidence.” She took a brisk breath. “First, you can see the ash content listed. That’s somewhat higher than average, but not bizarrely so. Some people use ash instead of lime to improve the soil, and mostly it appears to be wood ash. Do they have a fireplace in the house or a fire pit?”
I brought up the image of the property in my mind’s eye. “They have a fire pit next to the pool.”
“Then it’s probably from their own fires, not something they had to go out of their way to get. Totally normal, if a tad old-fashioned. But the results suggest it’s not all from wood.”
A prickle ran over my skin. “What do you mean?”
“You see the calcium level? That’s again not incredibly high, but unusual for a flower garden. In my line of work, I most commonly see levels in that range when a body’s been burned. From the bones.”
“A body?” I repeated, unable to hold back my shock. That was the last thing I’d have imagined going into my mother’s garden.
“Don’t get too panicked,” Anthea said with a light laugh. “As I said, it wasn’t a tremendous amount. There are totally innocent explanations, like the cremation of a family pet whose ashes were scattered there. Or possibly smaller animals could have died under the ground and decomposed enough that their remains mixed with the ash. It isn’t a red flag, more like a yellow one. Something to be aware of if other pieces start to point you in a worrying direction.”
“Okay,” I said, my stomach sinking. Her report put me basically back in the same place I’d been before, knowing something might be wrong but not being able to prove it one way or the other. I resisted the urge to fidget and had to confirm, “But if you saw these results from a garden no one thought was a problem, you wouldn’t assume anything bad had gone down.”
“Not at all. It’s absolutely possible that there’s nothing at all… untoward going on. But I thought you should be aware of the possibilities. Are you satisfied that your favor has been repaid?”
Her tone had gotten brisk again—probably she had plenty of other things to take care of rather than reassuring me.
“Yes,” I said quickly. “Thank you for taking the time to explain.” I didn’t want her to think I was ungrateful. She was clearly good at what she did—who knew if I might need her help again?
Good will and personal opinion were their own kind of currency in both my father’s world and the criminal circles I was learning to navigate.
I set down the phone and stared at the stone wall, barely registering the lingering cocoa scent in the air from the mugs Garrison had made before he’d left. How much of a chance was there that anything other than a pet had been cremated and tossed in the Maliks’ garden? Even if they’d done something wrong, I couldn’t wrap my head around them being murderers. They hated petty thieves—how would they have been able to justify stealing people’s lives?
But the Hunter had known I’d turn up something revealing in the soil. He’d specifically pointed me to the garden. It might not have been terribly unusual, but it’d been unusual all the same.
There could be other explanations that were unnerving but not as far as murder, right? Or, hell, maybe the Hunter had planted that evidence somehow.
I really didn’t know, and that fact made me itchy.
Julius had gone off to the other end of the room to consult something on his phone while I’d talked to Anthea. When I got up, he glanced over at me. “Going somewhere?”
I rolled my shoulders, trying to work the restlessness out of me. “I think I’m going to drop in on my family. They’re not expecting me. Maybe I’ll find out more if they’re unprepared.” Blaze still hadn’t picked up anything from their electronic communications, but a political family would probably be savvy enough not to say anything at all incriminating where it could be digitally recorded. I had no idea what they said to each other when I wasn’t around.
Julius inclined his head. “Do you need anything from me?”
I shot him a quick smile. “No, but thank you. I should be back pretty soon.”
I summoned an Uber and spent the entire ride stewing over what I’d heard. When we approached the house, I had the driver drop me off a block away so I wouldn’t draw my family’s notice. My father would be at work now—he’d talked about the meetings he had to get to after our brunch—but there almost always seemed to be at least a couple of Maliks at or around the house. This late in the afternoon, my mother should be back from her work, and Carter didn’t have a summer job.
I’d only just set off toward the house, keeping an eye out for any family members who might spot me, when a woman wearing a courier vest sped up next to me on a bike.
“Rachel Malik?” she said, sounding a little breathless.
I stiffened. “Yes.”
“This is for you.” She thrust a small package into my hands and raced off again before I could ask her a single question.
What the hell? I tore open the package, braced in case it was something dangerous, but all I found inside was a basic headset. I studied it, and sound crackled from it, just loud enough for me to hear a voice. “Put it on, Rachel.”
Even as tinny as the voice was through the small speakers, I recognized the Hunter at once. My stomach clenching, I slipped the headset over my ears and stepped back into the shadow of a tree at the front of a nearby lawn.
“What do you want?” I demanded under my breath, abruptly pissed off as well as confused. The only reason I was here at all was because of the garbage he’d stuffed into my head that might not have any truth to it at all. And how had he figured out I’d come to the house right now? Had that woman been hanging around waiting for me to arrive for my next visit—or had he tracked me somehow?
My skin crawled, and I rubbed my arms.
“Ah, Miss Malik,” the Hunter said, as if this was a totally normal call. “It’s wonderful speaking with you again.”
I was done playing his game. “Wonderful for you, maybe,” I said. “I’ve got better things to do than listen to you ramble on about your delusions.”
“Oh, you’ve decided they’re delusions, have you? Didn’t bother to do your research all that well.”
“Or maybe there’s just nothing to find.”
He guffawed. “There’s so much to find when it comes to Damien Malik that I’m starting to think you’re willfully blind.”
“And yet for some reason you can’t tell me any specifics or offer up any proof,” I shot back. “I don’t work for you. I don’t know you, and it’s obvious you have your own agenda. If you’re using me for whatever goal you have, I’m not interested in being your puppet.”
“Then you’re just interested in being theirs,” the Hunter said.
“I’m nobody’s puppet,” I spat out.
“Well, the evidence that I told you about should speak for itself, and you can decide what to do with it. Have you dug it up yet?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but I closed it. He didn’t need to know what I’d learned. I wasn’t working for him, and he claimed to be an investigator. He could do it himself.
“The more you learn, the more you’ll see,” he went on. “You can’t let your desire to have a family close your mind to what’s really going on here.”
I didn’t like having a stranger tell me of my biases, but his remarks echoed what Julius had said to me a couple of hours ago too closely. I did need to listen to people other than myself, because even if I knew I could never have a full relationship with my family, part of me still balked at believing they were awful in ways I hadn’t discovered.
But that didn’t mean that one of the people I listened to had to be this total creep.
“You don’t know anything about what having a family has done to me,” I snapped. Then I tore off the headset and tossed it into a set of nearby bushes.
Let the Hunter come and retrieve it if he wanted it. I owed him nothing, and he wouldn’t continue using me—not without giving me real information.
But I still had my own mission here.
I walked carefully toward the Maliks’ home. A second car was parked in the driveway—not one belonging to either of my parents. It took me a moment to place it as one that belonged to an aunt and uncle. My mom had company.
Well, that meant more people to be having conversations I might want to overhear. If I wanted to get facts, this was the place where I should be able to do it.
I slipped across the lawn and flattened myself to the exterior of the house. The summer day was warm enough that the windows were open to let in the breeze—perfect.
I listened at one window and then another, slinking around the house, prepared to jump away with an excuse if someone happened to step outside and notice me. It didn’t take long to determine that most of them were in the family room while my mother puttered around in the kitchen nearby.
When I peeked inside, I saw Aunt Mabel and Uncle Henry were sitting side by side on the loveseat across from my brother, no sign of my cousin Margaret today. But five mugs had been set out around the teapot and the plate of squares on the coffee table. Maybe they were expecting her later—or one of the other relatives might be on their way. I’d have to keep my ears pricked for cars.
Right now, I was more interested in the voices traveling out to me. When I’d first homed in on their voices, they’d been talking about a golf tournament, but it seemed the conversation had shifted. My aunt was saying something about “proper preparations.” She tsked her tongue. “I mean, it really isn’t the sort of thing you want to spring on someone if they’re not ready.”
Carter slouched in his armchair, what I could see of his face grim. “Are we really going to bring her into all of it? The rituals and everything? She’s barely part of the family.”
“She’s as much family as you are,” my mother said firmly from the kitchen, where I couldn’t see her at the moment. “But it could be a difficult transition when she didn’t have the full upbringing to help her form the right mindset… Your father was able to explain it to me well enough, though. We’ll have to see how it goes.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. They were talking about me, weren’t they? But what “rituals” was Carter talking about? Why would I need a special mindset to understand them?
Uncle Henry cleared his throat. “We have time to sort that out. No need to rush anything. But she’s a Malik. She deserves the chance to claim her full birthright if she’s up for it.”
“As long as it doesn’t threaten the rest of us,” Aunt Mabel said, twisting her napkin in her hands.
“Right,” Carter put in. “I’m just saying we should be careful.”
Threaten them? Be careful? They were talking like I was some kind of danger to them.
Did they know more about me than I’d realized? But the second that thought passed through my mind, I shook it away. If they’d realized I was a killer for hire, I’d have expected much harsher words than what I’d just heard. Hell, I’d have expected them to already have called the National Guard on me.
“We’ll see,” my mother repeated, and then, to my frustration, changed the subject. “Mabel, how was that convention last weekend?”
As Mabel loosened up and started gushing about some event she’d attended about “data retention” or some other concept that related to her job, my gaze drifted through the room from where I was crouched. It snagged on a movement only just visible through the family room doorway.
Margaret had appeared in the hall—next to a door that she nudged back toward the wall with a very deliberate motion. And the second it’d slid back into place… suddenly I couldn’t see the edge of it anymore. The striped wallpaper behind her looked as impenetrable as if no one had ever passed through it.
I stared for several seconds before yanking myself down below the window ledge as she headed toward the family room, where she’d have been facing the window. My heart was suddenly beating faster.
That spot in the hall—it was where I’d noticed the faint wear in the carpet when I’d investigated the house before, wasn’t it? The signs that I’d thought pointed to furniture that’d once been placed there.
But if my eyes hadn’t just deceived me, I’d been correct in my first impressions. The wear had been caused by a door, just one that was concealed so well you couldn’t find it or open it unless you knew the secret.
What kind of family needed an entirely secret doorway within their own home? And where the hell did it lead? No one had mentioned it during their tours of the house, so it obviously wasn’t a fun quirk but something they purposefully kept hidden.
Did it have something to do with the rituals Carter had been talking about?
I rubbed my hands over my face. The more I searched for answers, the more questions I seemed to get instead. How did all the pieces I’d been seeing and hearing fit together? Were the Maliks hiding even more?
Was this what the Hunter had been warning me about?
The second that question crossed my mind, I grimaced. I was all tangled up because of the way he’d been egging me on when I hadn’t noticed anything more than mildly awkward before—and that was mostly my own awkwardness. There could be totally innocent explanations for all of this. The Maliks were in a position with a lot of scrutiny because of my dad’s political standing. Of course they’d keep some things private.
That private, though?
I stifled a groan. Was I getting played by a man I’d never met, or were these secrets just as important and dangerous as the Hunter had claimed?
The one thing I knew for sure was that I needed to see what was in that secret room.
