FOR THE FIRST TIME, I’d been conscripted into helping with the serving of dinner in the Malik household. As Grandma Ruby, Grandpa Bo, Aunt Mabel, and Uncle Henry chattered in the dining room, I grabbed serving spoons and potholders in the kitchen on my mother’s instructions.
Carter dumped a small pan of green beans into a serving dish, and a few drops of melted butter spilled across the marble countertop. Iris had her back to him, but she seemed to innately sense the mess, turning with raised eyebrows.
“I know, I know,” he said, grabbing a paper towel.
She tsked her tongue. “Try to be more careful to begin with. Rachel, dear, would you scoop the potatoes into a dish?”
It was still weird being called by my birth name. I wondered if I’d ever get used to it. It was even harder now that I had all these suspicions about the family crowding my head.
I moved past Carter to deal with the potatoes, glancing briefly out the window in the direction I knew Garrison and Talon were waiting just out of sight. My brother glanced over at me. “You’re roped into the chores now too,” he teased.
“I’m going to eat, so it’s only fair that I help dish it out,” I said with forced cheer. I picked up the tongs and started moving the crisped potatoes from the baking sheet to a decorative white bowl.
“I thought you worked in a restaurant,” Carter remarked. “You kind of suck at that.”
I wrinkled my nose at him with what I hoped was suitably sibling-style annoyance as my heart stuttered briefly hearing my cover story questioned. “I’m a hostess. I lead people to their tables and take reservations, no food handling. But if you think you can do a better job…” I waved toward the tray in offering.
Carter snorted and took the beans over to the dining table. But by the time we’d all joined our relatives in the dining room, me seated next to my brother as usual, he turned to me with a bit of an arrogant air. “You know, now that you’re part of the family, you don’t have to keep a menial job. You can start working toward whatever career you want. Mom and Dad would obviously be happy to help you financially to get you on the right course.”
Before Iris could jump in and agree, I gave a little laugh. “I’m sure they would, but I like paving my own way. Anyway, the job I have suits me just fine for now.”
Carter frowned. “Don’t you want a career that matters? I’m going into law enforcement, and I’ll make a difference there. I know I will. It’s a lot more important than pointing people to the right restaurant table.”
I forced a casual shrug. “Sounds a little too dangerous to me. I’ve had plenty of that in my life already.”
A bit of a hush fell over the rest of the table at that remark. I’d thought the reference to my kidnapping would stop Carter in his tracks too, but he seemed determined to push my buttons, even though I doubted he’d ever find himself facing anything as dangerous as I’d done in my real job a hundred times over.
“But you’ll never accomplish anything with a life working at some restaurant,” he blurted out. “You’ll never get to do anything meaningful. That would be such a sad life.”
“Carter,” our mother chastised. “Your sister is allowed to do whatever she wants with her life. As long as she’s happy, that’s all that matters. Plus, you don’t have to have a career in law enforcement to support your father and advocate for putting away criminals.”
“As long as she supports the family legacy, that’s really all that matters,” Aunt Mabel said as she dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.
Grandma Ruby chimed in. “Protecting the country from evil-doers is our curse and blessing, and it may be yours one day, too. If you decide to stick around with this crazy crew, that is.”
Right. Because the only possible meaningful work had to be throwing criminals behind bars—or breaking their hands, or whatever, I supposed.
My mother smiled in agreement. “We don’t expect you to fully commit to all of this right away, dear. It’s something that we’ll introduce you to over time.”
I bit into one of the potatoes I’d dished out, trying not to show how uneasy the conversation was making me. The tone the conversation had taken sounded even more cultishly obsessive than when my father had brought up the family legacy the other day.
But if the Maliks were this dedicated to the cause and so willing to do everything to defeat crime, I couldn’t imagine how they’d ever be involved in what we found in the safety deposit box. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they’d gotten those photographs to remember just how horrible criminals could get?
But there wasn’t any record of the murderer being caught or the bodies being found. Where had they gotten the pictures from? Why keep them locked away like that?
My head was spinning again. My gaze instinctively followed Uncle Henry as he straightened up over the baked chicken and lifted the butcher knife to carve off some more meat. He plunged the blade into the breast, twisting his wrist in a circular sawing motion that made my breath catch in my throat with a jolt of horror.
The motion looked just like the kind that could have marked those jagged wounds that’d gouged the children’s flesh.
I blinked, and then he was cutting through the meat in totally normal slices, as if he always had been. I watched, looking for any indication of that same twisting cut, but he didn’t do it again.
For fuck’s sake. Had I imagined that because I was so horrified by the pictures, so desperate for answers? This quest was turning me paranoid.
Grandma Ruby must have caught something in my expression that I hadn’t quite been able to hide. “Are you all right, Rachel?”
The words brought me back to the moment, and I nodded, plastering a fake smile on my face instinctively. I knew from experience that they wouldn’t be able to see through it.
“I’m great. I just got a little lightheaded for a second. I probably haven’t drunk enough water today.” I set down my fork and took a gulp from my glass. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a moment and go use the restroom?”
A worried expression crossed my mother’s face. “All this talk about legacy and crime would be enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sorry. You go take care of yourself, and let us know if you need anything.”
I dipped my head graciously and hurried out of the room. As soon as I’d passed out of view into the hall, I tapped a quick message into my phone—the message the men were waiting for. They were going to buy me more time than a simple bathroom excuse could manage.
I strode toward the bathroom and slipped inside, my ears pricked. It only took a matter of seconds. Then a bizarre squawking sound pierced through the walls, like there was a flock of rapid chickens congregating right outside the house.
What the heck had the guys orchestrated? As my relatives’ voices faltered and then their footsteps hustled over to the back door to see what was going on outside, I had to resist the urge to join them. The crew could tell me all about it later. I could just imagine how much Garrison would enjoy conveying the story.
Instead, I darted out of the bathroom and over to the spot opposite the family room doorway where I’d seen Margaret emerge seemingly through the bare wall. My fingers slid over the striped wallpaper, testing it with years of honed experience. I couldn’t expect the crew to keep my family distracted forever. If I took too long, my relatives might return and catch me in my stealthy investigation.
My fingertips caught on the faintest of grooves and traced it up and down, confirming that it was straight and tall enough to mark the edge of a door. My pulse kicked up a notch. There.
But there was no knob, no obvious way of opening it. How had Margaret done it? I hadn’t seen her go in.
There were a few basic mechanisms to concealed doors, so I just had to figure out which one this operated by. Trying not to let the voices filtering in from outside distract me, I gave the door a general shove with my shoulder. Nothing. Then I ran my fingers along the edge of the seam again, pressing every couple of inches.
At hip height, the surface depressed just a fraction. Something in the wall gave a small click, and the door swung open.
My breath caught in my throat. I peeked through the doorway and found a plain flight of stairs leading down into the darkness of a basement room.
Without hesitation, I slipped inside and found a handle that let me pull the door shut. At least no one would be able to figure out where I’d gone, even if they noticed I’d been gone for a while.
I pawed at the walls on either side of the stairwell until my palm hit a light switch. When I flicked it upward, brilliant light spilled into the space at the bottom of the stairs. All I could see was polished wood flooring and the edge of a maroon rug that looked as thick as the ones in the main rooms upstairs.
As I eased down the stairs, a crisp scent—smoky and herbal—tickled my nose. It reminded me of the incense in churches and temples I’d occasionally had to carry out missions in or around. I couldn’t place the exact scent—it might not have been quite the same as any I’d encountered before.
There was no sign of its source when I reached the bottom of the stairs. I came to a halt and stared at the room that opened up beyond the steps.
It looked like a large den. Bookshelves lined two of the walls, stuffed full with thick volumes and antique-looking decorations. In the center of the room, on top of the rug I’d seen the corner of, squatted a large desk piled high with more books and various other documents. A large leather office chair sat behind it, with a few more traditional wingchairs scattered through the rest of the space.
Damien already had a home office space upstairs. Did my mother work down here? I hadn’t gotten the impression that her job would require anything so elaborate. And why would she have kept it hidden?
I slunk closer to the bookshelves and scanned the spines. Most of them appeared to be volumes on law, politics, and criminology. I found one row with stranger titles, things like Channeling the Inner Spirit and The Energy of the Great Beyond. No one in the family had mentioned any kind of spiritual interests, but I guessed they could have those books more out of an academic interest rather than because they believed in the contents.
I snapped pictures of all of the shelves and then studied the items placed here and there in front of the books more closely. Some of them were antiques as I’d thought, a fancy old candlestick here, an intricately carved trinket box there. Others I had a lot more trouble making sense of.
Knitting my brow, I paused over a small shoe that must have belonged to a child. It was a dress shoe, but not particularly fancy or pretty, just a glossy black shell that looked like it was made out of plastic and a narrow strap with a tiny flower over the snap. The toes were lightly scuffed.
Normally when people kept mementos from their children, they bronzed them, didn’t they? And I didn’t see how this could have belonged to me or Carter. It was too large to have belonged to the toddler I’d been when I was kidnapped, and too girly for me to imagine a five- or six-year-old Carter donning it. But the style was fairly modern, so I couldn’t picture it belonging to my parents’ generation either.
Maybe it’d been Margaret’s? But then why would it be here in my parents’ house and not at Aunt Mabel and Uncle Henry’s?
The shoe wasn’t the only oddity. There was a little figure with a face roughly carved into the wood and a scrap of fabric as clothing. What appeared to be a hair clip in cheap metal shaped like a butterfly. A thin, folded cloth that might have been a napkin or a handkerchief.
Why would my parents have used things like that as part of the décor? It didn’t match the rest of the room at all.
By the time I turned to take in the far wall, my skin was already creeping. What I found myself staring at didn’t exactly comfort me. It held a few more framed parchments like the one I’d found in Damien’s office, but these looked progressively newer and less worn, which fit with the numbers I was now more convinced were years. They continued on in a steady progression until they reached the 2000s, at which point they started to double up, two of the same before going on to the next.
The rest of the notations next to them looked like the same unfamiliar code as on the matching document upstairs. As far as I knew, Blaze had never managed to crack it.
Maybe he’d be able to with more examples to work with. I took pictures of those parchments too, holding my hands as steady as I could.
I’d seen a lot of horrible things in my time. I hadn’t actually uncovered anything specifically horrible here. But the whole vibe of the secret room—and the fact that it was secret at all—was making my skin crawl in a way I’d never experienced before. I couldn’t shake the sense that something was very, very wrong.
At the end of the row of parchments, there was one more framed picture. This one was a faded photograph of a house with a broad front porch and vines crawling up one side. It sat on a wide, open property with no near neighbors, like it was out in the countryside. I didn’t recognize anything about it either, and my parents hadn’t mentioned owning a country home. Blaze hadn’t found a deed or other record for it in all his searching.
So what was so special about it that they’d framed this photograph and hung it here?
I frowned at it and added it to my phone along with the rest. Then I turned my attention to the desk.
The papers I could see were printouts of news articles marked up with a few notes in what I could recognize as my father’s handwriting. There was nothing particularly odd about them—they were reports on recent crimes here in DC, with things like the police response time circled. He was analyzing the performance of local law enforcement, which seemed like a totally Damien Malik thing to do.
I would have dug deeper, but just then a floorboard creaked somewhere above me. My nerves jumped, and I froze in place.
The family had come back inside. If I went back up now, they might spot me using the hidden entrance. They might already be wondering where I was.
My hand darted to my phone. I tapped out another quick text to Garrison that an additional distraction was needed ASAP.
I’ll take care of it, sweetheart, he shot back with a blowing kiss emoji I couldn’t help seeing as sarcastic. A moment later, whatever he’d done, the footsteps above creaked away in the opposite direction.
There was no time to examine anything else right now. I dashed up the stairs, placing my feet as quietly as I could, and pressed my ear to the door. When I heard nothing on the other side, I nudged it open and squeezed out.
I shoved it back into place and was just starting down the hall toward the dining room when Grandma Ruby appeared from the back of the house. I swiped my hand over my hair, hoping I didn’t look too rattled.
“Well, you certainly know how to miss a party,” she said with an eye roll that didn’t seem particularly hostile. I relaxed just a tad. If I’d been even a few seconds slower…
“What happened?” I asked in as casual a tone as I could summon.
She shook her head. “I’m still not even sure. We heard the strangest sounds, like there was a whole farmyard out there, and then some shouts for help, but we couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Then just as I’d come back inside, because really, it’s dinner time, your mother shrieked like they were being murdered.” She let out a huff. “It was only a rock that landed in the garden and crushed a few flowers. Nothing worth fretting about.”
Somehow I thought she’d have taken a different tune if it’d been her own garden assaulted. “How strange,” I said innocently.
I joined her back at the table. In less than a minute, the rest of the family poured back in, exclaiming to each other with their theories about what had been going on—neighbors acting out, poultry escaped from a delivery truck, a prank from a political opponent.
They were all so engrossed in their speculation that I didn’t have to say anything at all, just eat the rest of my dinner in silent reverie. My body might have been at the table, but my mind was stuck in the room downstairs, trying to make sense of its strange contents alongside the photographs we’d found in the bank.
Noelle and Anna had always claimed that they were protecting me, that they’d taken me in to shelter me from the cruelty of the world. I knew that was at least partly a lie… but what if there was some truth to it too?
My parents hadn’t died, obviously, but maybe the household really had seen kidnapping me as a way to protect me. Because I was starting to think that whatever my birth family was up to was way worse than anything my former captors had done.
