“How is he?”
Things are supposed to look better in the morning—that’s what people always said. But, in April’s experience, people lied.
A lot.
“He’s worse,” Sadie said even though the sun had come out and the air in the cellar felt crisp and clean, like new sheets on a perfectly made bed.
Things should have felt better.
But the man on the makeshift pallet was sweating and shivering at the same time, and no matter how many blankets they covered him with, he shook like he was still submerged in the icy water. No matter how many times they brought the wet sponge to his lips, he drank like he was lost in a desert.
No matter how many times April prayed for him to wake up and yell at her for bringing two more pesky kids into the sanctuary of his cellar, his eyes stayed closed, and his cries stayed muffled, and his fever never did break.
Luckily, it was Saturday, which meant no French lessons with Smithers or math lessons with Ms. Nelson, and as long as they took it in shifts, no one asked any questions—yet. They had time, April knew. She just hoped Gabriel Winterborne could say the same.
“He’s not waking up,” Sadie said while she paced. “Why hasn’t he woken up?”
“His pulse is strong, and his color is better,” April told her.
“But he’s not waking up!” Sadie shouted, then seemed to feel bad about it. “I’m sorry. I’m just worried.”
“I know,” April said. “Me too.”
“It’s just . . . That’s Gabriel Winterborne. And I was raised that when you find a lost billionaire with a sword sticking out of him, you tell someone. Why is he here? Why didn’t he tell anyone he was back? Why—”
“I don’t know,” April said as Gabriel started tossing again. She tried to hold down his arm so he wouldn’t tear his stitches, but he fought against her, mumbling, “No. No. No!”
“Shh. It’s okay,” April told him, because that’s what moms always said in the movies.
“Have to move,” he said.
“No, actually, you have to stay very, very still,” April said, but he wasn’t listening.
“Not safe. Never safe. Not safe. Never—”
The words were like a mantra—like a prayer—and when April told him, “You’re safe now,” he finally stopped fighting. But that was probably just because he was, once again, out cold.
“April?” Sadie asked after a long time. “What happened last night?”
“I don’t know,” April said again, but the truth was, she did know. Not everything. But she knew about a key and a trip to the mini mansion. She knew the way he’d crouched on the rooftop as the moon glistened off of his blades. She knew how he acted whenever he heard Ms. Nelson’s voice.
But, most of all, April knew he’d saved her. He’d saved her and then he’d told her to save herself and forget about him.
“April?” Sadie asked again.
“He stole my key,” April said before she lost her nerve. Her hand went to the place around her neck where it had hung ever since she could remember. “That key I always wear . . . My mom left it when she left me. It’s got the Winterborne crest on it, so I thought he could help me find whatever it opens. But he got real weird when I showed it to him, and then he broke into our room that night looking for it, and—”
“He did what?”
April hadn’t heard Tim enter, but there he was, looking at her like lasers were going to start shooting out of his eyes.
“He . . . um . . .”
April tried to talk—really, she did. But Tim was pointing at the man on the ground and shouting, “That’s who broke into your room?”
“I mean, technically, he owns the whole mansion, so does he ever have to”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“break in?”
“That man is dangerous,” Tim said, and April didn’t know how to argue. “He could have killed you.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t, and then he saved—”
“He could have hurt Violet!” Tim shouted, because for him that was the only point that mattered. Then he was heading back down the corridor from which he’d just come.
“Hey!” April called, but he didn’t even slow down. “Tim, wait.”
“No,” he shouted back. “That man is dangerous, April. He could have hurt Violet. Or Sadie. Or you. He had a sword!”
“He wouldn’t hurt me. He saved me!” April tried, but Tim didn’t listen. “Where are you going?”
“To do what I should have done last night!” Tim shouted back.
April knew she had to chase him down. Trip him. Tackle him. Pull a rug out from under his feet. She had to do something! Except a teeny-tiny voice in the back of April’s head was whispering that maybe Tim was doing the right thing. Just for the wrong reason. After all . . .
Mr. Winterborne was sick.
Mr. Winterborne might be dying.
Mr. Winterborne needed a hospital and medicine and help, so maybe April wasn’t as fast as she could have been as she ran along in Tim’s wake. So maybe April didn’t do everything within her power to stop him as she followed him down the hall. Maybe she would have let him tell the world exactly who they had in the cellar except, in the next moment, the front doors flew open and Evert Winterborne yelled, “Where is he?”
And then even Tim had to stop in his tracks. April and Sadie crept up behind him, peering over his shoulder as Smithers walked toward the open door.
“Mr. Winterborne. How good of you to call.” Smithers’s voice was still fancy and calm, but there was an underlying edge to the words. Then Evert pushed his way inside.
“Where is he?” Evert snapped, then looked around, as if expecting his nephew to pop out and yell boo. “I know he’s here somewhere. Where . . .” He started, then trailed off, and for a moment he just stood there, staring right at April—who had been caught by the men on Evert’s pier. April, who had been rescued by the man with the swords.
It wasn’t hard to do the math. If Evert knew that Gabriel had been outside his house last night, then chances were he knew that April had been too. She waited for him to raise a finger and yell, Trespasser! But he didn’t say a word to April. He just gave her a look that was sharper than Gabriel’s sword and then he turned to Smithers.
His voice was like frost as he asked, “Where is Isabella?”
And then Evert was off again, charging past Smithers and down the hall, looking into every room. Tim started after him, but April grabbed his hand. “Wait,” she said, and for a second, Tim froze, staring at the way her fingers wrapped around his. “Please.”
“April—” Tim started, but there were footsteps on the stairs and Colin was grinning down at them.
“You’ve got to see this,” he said. A moment later, they were all rushing up the stairs and through the door and in between the dark shelves of books. Colin dropped to his stomach and crept toward the edge of the railing, silently looking down on where Ms. Nelson was working below.
She was surrounded by a laptop and a half dozen newspapers and a notebook that was fatter than it should have been, bulging with Post-it notes and bits of paper sticking out from three sides. She looked as if the house could fall down around her and she wouldn’t even notice. Maybe that was why she wasn’t expecting the sound.
“There you are!”
Ms. Nelson jolted when Evert pushed into the library, Smithers not far behind.
“Mr. Winterborne to see you, Isabella.”
“Thank you, Smithers.” She smiled. She turned. And she, oh so casually, tucked that notebook beneath one of the newspapers before Evert got any closer.
“Where is he?” Evert snapped, looking around like Gabriel might be under the table.
“Who?” Ms. Nelson asked.
“I know he’s back, Isabella. And I know you’re hiding him. Where’s Gabriel?”
Even from the shadows of the second story, April could see all the color drain from Ms. Nelson’s face. She actually looked unsteady as she rose to her feet. “He’s back?”
Gone were Evert Winterborne’s comically large scissors and his sad eyes. He looked like a man being haunted by a ghost. “If you’re hiding him . . .”
She didn’t answer. She laughed. “Of course I’m not hiding him. Why would I ever . . . I want him found just as badly as you do. You know that.”
“Don’t lie to me, Isabella. He’s here. I know it. I can feel him.”
“So you’ll call the judge, then?”
He looked confused. “What—”
“If Gabriel’s back, he’s alive. And if he’s alive, then you shouldn’t get him declared dead, now, should you?” She raised an eyebrow, and the words might have been an arrow straight to his heart for how he reacted.
“I thought we were on the same side, my dear.”
“Of course we are.”
When he turned his gaze on her, she froze.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Isabella?”
And at that, she finally smiled, but her voice and her eyes were cold. “Don’t you know, Evert? If Gabriel were back . . . I’d kill him myself.”
It was always hotter on the second story of the library, but that wasn’t why April was sweating. She felt Tim shift beside her. She watched him start to push himself up from the floor.
“Tim?”
He froze, and for a second, their eyes locked and she could read his mind: five million dollars was a lot of money, but Tim would have handed over the man who broke into Violet’s room for free.
Then, as if the thought had conjured her, Violet slipped through the doors and walked toward the banister where they all lay spying on the scene below. “What’s going on?”
“Shh, Vi,” Colin whispered. “Come down here.” He reached for her hand, but it was suddenly shaking. Her sketchbook tumbled to the floor, fanning out, page after page of thick black crayon over white paper.
Page after page of the same thing: ruined bed curtains, broken windows, and light glistening off a shiny silver blade.
“It’s the Sentinel.” Violet’s lip was trembling, but she didn’t scream or back away. She just kept her gaze trained on the floor below.
Ms. Nelson was walking Evert to the door, saying, “You have my word. If we hear from Gabriel, you’ll be our very first call.”
But up on the second floor, the kids were still and quiet, every eye locked on Violet as she pointed a finger at the man whose face she’d drawn on every page.
“That’s him.”
April had no idea how long they sat there, surrounded by stillness and the weight of about a billion different secrets. But the silence must have been too much for Colin, who smirked and said, “Well, I wonder what that was all about?”
But April knew. On instinct, her hand went to the place her key should have been, and she looked up at Tim. “I was wrong. Gabriel didn’t break in and steal my key . . .”
“It was Evert,” Tim filled in.
“Yeah. And if Evert’s toting knives and breaking into rooms and stealing things . . . If he’s hiring men with guns to do stuff in the middle of the night . . . Tim, if he’s looking for Gabriel, then maybe . . .”
“You think Evert would hurt him?” Tim asked.
Sadie and April shared a look, and a cold chill seeped into April’s bones as she glanced at Violet. “I think he’d hurt anyone.”
“Okay, what is going on?” Colin wasn’t smiling anymore.
But Sadie only whispered, “You’ll see.”