A man who shared Ana’s last name—her father? brother? a more distant relation?—had made a move against the Ames family’s corporation.
Two hours of highway and back-road driving later, I was still mulling that over. As Lillian’s Porsche SUV wound its way past a guard gate, a golf course, volleyball and tennis courts, and a pool, I couldn’t help thinking that Davis Ames had once told me he’d handled the situation with the girl his son had impregnated. There was no telling exactly what that meant, but I had to wonder if business was just business for this Victor Gutierrez—or if it was personal.
Is this about Ana somehow? Revenge? For what, exactly? And why now?
“Here we are,” Lillian declared, pulling into a circle drive. “Home, sweet lake home.”
I had to compartmentalize. I couldn’t be thinking about Ana or the pact or any of this around Lily and Aunt Olivia, not if I wanted to keep pretending that I was fine, and we were fine, and there was nothing for them to worry about or know. So instead, I focused on the sights at hand. When I’d heard the rest of the family refer to the “lake house,” I’d pictured a cabin. Something small and rustic.
I really should have known better.
“This is your lake house.” I fell back on stating the obvious as I stared up at an enormous stone residence. I stepped out of Lillian’s Cayenne, and the front door to the home flew open.
“Sawyer.” Lily was smiling. Not her polite, default smile, not her pained “you can’t hurt me” smile—an honest-to-God, cheek-to-cheek grin. “You won’t believe—”
Our grandmother stepped out of the car, and Lily cut herself off midsentence. “I hope traffic wasn’t too horrible, Mim.” That sounded more like the Lily I knew, but her dark brown eyes were still dancing. She waited a beat, then turned to me. “Come on. I’ll show you our room.”
Somehow, I doubted the energy I could hear buzzing in her voice was a reflection of her excitement at the idea of the two of us sharing a bedroom.
“What’s going on?” I asked as we made our way to the front door and into the foyer.
Lily shushed me. Deciding that I didn’t want to know what had gotten into her badly enough to be shushed twice, I focused on the house instead. The staircase winding its way upstairs I’d expected. The stairs going down I had not.
“Three stories?” I asked Lily. “Or is the basement just a basement?”
“It’s just a basement.” Lily paused. “With one bedroom. And a game room.” She paused again, slightly embarrassed, because properly bred young ladies were always slightly embarrassed by the size of their vacation homes and the overall privilege to which they’d been born. “And a media room. A pool table. Ping-Pong . . .”
Deciding she’d said enough, Lily took to the stairs—the ones going up, not down. I followed, and together, we arrived at a small landing. Compared to the scale of the house, the second story was cozy: one bedroom with two twin beds, a bathroom, a closet. Aside from what I suspected was antique furniture, the room looked like it belonged in the cabin I’d imagined.
“I know it’s a little small,” Lily said softly, “but I’ve always loved it up here.”
I walked over to the window and stared out at the lake below. “Who doesn’t love a turret room?”
From this vantage point, it was obvious that the house had been built into the side of a hill. There was a steep drop-off, then the land sloped gently toward the rocky shore. The view of the water was breathtaking.
“Well?” Lily demanded.
“Well, what?” I asked, unable to tear my eyes away from the whitecapped waves as they broke and rolled slowly toward what appeared to be a private dock. Our cove was as big as I’d expected the entire lake to be, and from where I stood, I could see past the cove’s entrance to the main body of Regal Lake.
The name didn’t seem as ridiculous as it had on the drive up.
“Well . . .” Lily prompted primly. “Ask me again.”
“Ask you what?” I played dumb. She’d shushed me. This was the price of shushing.
“Ask me what’s going on.” Lily came to stand beside me in the window and held up a long, flat box—too big for jewelry, but too narrow for almost anything else. “Ask me,” she instructed, “what this is.”
I took the box from her outstretched hand. It was matte black, with a card stuck to the middle. The card was made of a thick off-white paper—the kind I associated with wedding invitations—and a single word had been embossed on it in raised black cursive.
Lily’s name.
I went to remove the top from the box, but Lily stopped me. “Don’t open mine.” She nodded toward one of the beds. “Open yours.”
A second box—this one bearing my name—sat near the pillow. I crossed the room, picked it up, and opened it. Nestled inside, I found a single elbow-length white glove. Pinned to the glove, there was another note, this one written on thinner paper in blood-red ink.
The Big Bang, 11 p.m., back room.
“Lily,” I said calmly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but is this an invitation to an orgy?”
“A what?” Lily Taft Easterling did not, as a rule, shriek, but this time, she came close.
“The Big Bang,” I replied. “Doesn’t exactly sound PG to me.”
Lily glared at me. I grinned. Sometimes getting a rise out of her was just too easy. A pang came after a brief delay, and the grin froze on my face.
I could lose this. Lose her.
Putting those emotions on lockdown, I examined the contents of the box more closely. The pin holding the note to the glove was made of silver. Carved into the end, there was a small rose, and wrapped around the rose’s stem, there was a snake.
“An orgy,” I repeated, forcing a grin and trying to get the moment back. “With serpents.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “When you’re done repeating that word ad nauseam, I’d be happy to inform you that The Big Bang is a local establishment.”
“A brothel?”
“They sell hot wings,” Lily said defensively. “And beer. And… other beverages.”
“So you’re saying it’s a bar.” I’d grown up in a bar—almost literally. My mom and I had lived over The Holler until I was thirteen. “Someone wants to meet the two of us in the back room of a bar at eleven p.m.?”
I was skeptical. The world Lily had grown up in—the world I’d reluctantly taken my place in this past year—was a place of charity galas and twin sets and pearls. A bar wasn’t exactly the natural habitat of an Easterling or a Taft.
“Not just someone,” Lily told me, removing the contents of her box and cradling it reverently in one hand. “The White Gloves.”