When I finally got ahold of Max, she wasn’t feeling chatty. I could tell that something was wrong, but not what. She didn’t have a single fake expletive to share on the topic of Thea moving in, and she cut our back-and-forth short without any commentary whatsoever on the Hawthorne brothers’ physiques. I asked if everything was okay. She said that she had to go.
Xander, in contrast, was more than willing to discuss the Thea development. “If Thea’s here,” he told me that afternoon, lowering his voice like the walls of Hawthorne House might have ears, “she’s up to something.”
“She as in Thea?” I asked pointedly. “Or your aunt?”
Zara had thrown me together with Grayson at the foundation, and now she was moving Thea into the House. I recognized someone stacking the board, even if I couldn’t see the play underneath.
“You’re right,” Xander said. “I seriously doubt Thea volunteered to spend time with our family. It is possible that she fervently wishes for vultures to dine upon my entrails.”
“You?” I said. Thea’s issues with the Hawthorne brothers had seemed to revolve around Emily—and that meant, I had assumed, around Jameson and Grayson. “What did you do?”
“It is a story,” Xander said with a sigh, “involving star-crossed love, fake dating, tragedy, penance… and possibly vultures.”
I thought back to asking Xander about Rebecca Laughlin. He hadn’t said anything to indicate she was Emily’s sister. He’d murmured almost exactly what he’d just said about Thea.
Xander didn’t let me ruminate for long. Instead, he dragged me off to what he declared to be his fourth-favorite room in the House. “If you’re going to be going head-to-head with Thea,” he told me, “you need to be prepared.”
“I’m not going head-to-head with anyone,” I said firmly.
“It is adorable that you believe that.” Xander stopped where one corridor met another. He reached up—all six foot three of him—to touch a molding that ran up the corner. He must have hit some kind of release, because the next thing I knew, he was pulling the molding toward us, revealing a gap behind it. He stuck his hand into the gap behind the molding, and a moment later, a portion of the wall swung out toward us like a door.
I was never going to get used to this.
“Welcome to… my lair!” Xander sounded overjoyed to be saying those words.
I stepped into his “lair” and saw… a machine? Contraption probably would have been the more accurate term. There were dozens of gears, pulleys, and chains, a complicated series of connected ramps, several buckets, two conveyor belts, a slingshot, a birdcage, four pinwheels, and at least four balloons.
“Is that an anvil?” I asked, frowning and leaning forward for a better look.
“That,” Xander said proudly, “is a Rube Goldberg machine. As it so happens, I am a three-time world champion at building machines that do simple things in overly complicated ways.” He handed me a marble. “Place this in the pinwheel.”
I did. The pinwheel spun, blowing a balloon, that tipped a bucket…
As I watched each mechanism set off the next, I glanced at the youngest Hawthorne brother out of the corner of my eye. “What does this have to do with Thea moving in?”
He’d told me that I needed to be prepared, then brought me here. Was this supposed to be some kind of metaphor? A warning that Zara’s actions might appear complicated, even when the goal was simple? An insight into Thea’s charge?
Xander cast a sideways look at me and grinned. “Who said this had anything to do with Thea?”
