I tightened my fingers on the photograph, thumb pressing a crease into Samson’s boots. While the picture was grainy, Samson had obviously been somewhere warm when it was taken. He was in motion beneath a bright sun, walking down a sidewalk someplace with what looked to be office buildings on his right and a busy street on his left. Everyone around him wore knee-length dresses, sleeveless tanks, and polos with khakis. The woman stalking behind him with a knife donned a sundress and flip-flops. Not what I would expect a would-be killer to wear.
I peeled my gaze from the blade to Samson’s thick coat that stuck out just as badly as it had in Manhattan last August. His hair, mussed with clear finger tracks, still looked somewhat trimmed. Maybe he taught himself to use the clippers I bought him.
It had been three long months since I’d seen Samson, but I thought about him every day. I thought about his hands on my face, his lips on mine, and the memory of him holding me after I stabbed Hudson through the jugular. His eyes like the ocean. His promise to come home.
My gaze flickered from detail to detail. While he had been somewhere warm at some point, there was no telling when or where this picture had been taken. Samson could’ve been wherever this was in late September, and now it was almost Christmas. Who knew where he was now?
Tremors rattled up my arms as an amalgam of rage and fear lasered in on the threat looming behind him. The woman. Tall. Thin. Her dark-brown hair hung over her shoulder in a long braid, dangling over a bright-yellow dress.
In her right hand, resting against her side, was a knife. So blatant. Deliberate. Like she didn’t give a damn who saw it.
A lump grew in my throat. Oh my God. Was Samson still al—
“Matilda. Thank God!”
The tight, masculine voice sent my heart into my esophagus, and the photo slipped from my fingers. My pulse climbed as my brain worked to identify who’d said my name. Warm beige skin. Dark hair cropped close to his scalp. Midthirties. Black suit.
Diego Fuentes, the new CFO.
“Sorry.” I squatted down and picked up the picture and the envelope. Diego reached forward and stopped the elevator doors from closing on me, Rolex peeking out from beneath his jacket sleeve. “I got up here as fast as I could.”
“I’m not sure what to do with him.” Diego sighed and held the elevator door open until I stepped into the executive suite. “He’s so…volatile.”
I tucked everything into my purse, hoping Diego had been too preoccupied with Gerard to notice it or my shaking hands. “I know. I don’t know what to do about him either.”
Diego continued grumbling and walked with me toward Gerard’s office. It had taken two months to get the executive suite released by the police, and another month to have the inside completely peeled back to the studs and replaced. There had been too much blood, both fae and human, and Gerard and I had no intention of working in a place where Hudson’s blood had seeped into the carpet fibers.
The thought of what happened here made the photo in my purse inordinately heavy. While the pictured implied Samson might’ve been hurt—maybe even killed—I refused to entertain it. I’d seen firsthand how good he was at taking care of himself. However, I didn’t have much of a choice about the other questions that needed answers.
Who had taken the picture of Samson, and why had they sent it to me? Actually, they didn’t send it to me. There wasn’t an address on it. They must’ve walked into the building and dropped the damn thing off. Who in their right mind would walk into the Ashby Building and deliver a photo of Samson a breath away from being stabbed?
My vision tunneled. Oh my God. What if he had been stabbed?
“Everyone has been trying to work with Gerard because they know what happened.” Diego’s voice crashed through my blistering panic. “But that patience will run out.”
People thought they knew what transpired in this office. The truth was not many people knew a creepy, man-eating fae had died in this room, or that Samson had mind-controlled Richard to shoot himself. Most people couldn’t handle it. I barely could handle it, and I was almost killed by supernatural insanity last summer.
Even though I knew Diego was right about people’s tolerance for Gerard, it didn’t help the sinking feeling in my stomach. While Gerard was exhausting, it wasn’t like he gave himself a traumatic brain injury.
“Where’s Cathy?” I asked, noticing her empty desk. This mess with the reporter might not have occurred had Gerard’s secretary been here to intervene.
“I’m not sure. She wasn’t here when shit hit the fan, and I’ve been…well…” Diego threw up his hands limply.
That helpless, bone-weary tired that never went away no matter what you did was something I understood all too well.
I tried to squelch the dread festering in my already sick gut and followed Diego into the CEO’s office. How was I supposed to deal with Gerard’s nonsense on top of the picture of Samson being stalked by a knife-wielding—probably supernatural—psychopath?
Like an Ashby, I figured. I’d been raised to handle everything and anything. If I could walk away from homicidal monsters with my life, I could survive this too.
Gerard’s office was a world of a difference from our father’s. The heavy bookcases and scholarly tomes were gone, as were his high-backed chairs and mahogany desk, and replaced by a more modern, albeit chaotic, alternative. The only things that remained from Milton Ashby’s collection of furniture were the glass table and chairs, which were now covered in file folders and legal pads. Since I’d murdered Hudson in here, I was glad the mementos of that night were long gone.
“There you are.” Gerard stood so fast his chair shot into the wall. His sleek white desk looked worse than the glass table did. The only bit of cleared surface was a sliver above his keyboard.
I dropped into one of the chairs in front of his desk. The quicker I figured this out, the sooner I could do something about the creepy picture. Diego took the other chair beside me, mouth twisted in a grimace.
“What happened?” I asked.
“That woman happened.” Gerard forcefully motioned to the door with his hand. His gray suit jacket hung on the back of his chair, leaving him to look like a harried mess in his rumpled dress shirt and loose tie. His hair, now cropped short thanks to the haircut he got in the operating room, couldn’t hide the red scar twisting along the left side of his head in a backward C.
“Women are allowed to exist.” I leaned forward and adjusted my coat while setting my purse by my feet. The picture peeked out of the top, taunting me. “What exactly did you say?”
“She said we had an appointment. We didn’t. I told her as much when she wouldn’t stop insisting that we did.” Gerard dropped his gaze to the floor, and my stomach turned. Diego shifted in his chair.
I swallowed and tried to ignore the dryness of my throat. “Have you checked your online calendar?”
“I don’t know how to use that program. But it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t on this calendar.” He plucked his small planner off his desk and held it up. “We didn’t have an appointment.”
His ability to retain new information had certainly changed since the surgery, so none of this was terribly surprising. The situation was even more complicated, however, because he refused to acknowledge he had a problem.
Unsure how to proceed, I licked my lips and went for the safer question. “Where’s Cathy? I didn’t see her out there.”
Gerard blinked. “Who?”
The silence that suddenly hung in the office reminded me entirely too much of that moment my father had told us about his cancer. Heavy. Suffocating. The sort of quiet that made your ears ring.
After that moment, I’d fallen into a thousand tiny pieces in the elevator with Samson at my side. The memory of his thumb brushing over my knuckles as I sobbed struck me viciously. Was Samson even still alive?
“Cathy?” Diego’s voice sliced through the warring emotions building inside my chest. “Cathy…your assistant? Her desk was empty outside.”
I pulled in a slow breath. Samson needed help, but Gerard did too. My brother was in front of me, so I needed to focus and help him first.
Gerard’s brow pinched, and he slowly lowered himself into his seat. A stack of papers slid off the side of his desk onto the floor, but I’m not sure he noticed.
“Shit.” Gerard kept his eyes on the top of his desk. “I did it again, didn’t I?”
He didn’t wait for us to answer before shaking the mouse on his desk to wake up his desktop.
“Gerard.” I stood up and walked behind the desk, chest tightening as he randomly clicked around on the desktop. “Gerard—”
“Where’s the calendar?” He kept clicking, opening folders and documents.
“Let me see it.” I kept my voice level despite the pity bubbling up in the back of my throat. When he didn’t relinquish the mouse, I put my hand on top of his. “Gerard. Let me show you.”
He pulled his hand back and dropped it into his lap.
“It’s an online calendar. It’s connected to Cathy’s computer.” I forced myself to open the program.
Diego glanced at me, regretful. We both knew what would be on it, and unfortunately, we weren’t wrong.
The appointment.
Gerard stared at the screen, jaw tight. He propped his elbows on the desk and dropped his head in his hands.
I looked at Diego and made a face. Thankfully, the new CFO managed to only look remorseful. Despite being an employee for a few months, I distinctly got the impression that he cared. It was a strange thing to see in the executive suite after dealing with my father and Hudson my entire life.
“Can you call the reporter please?” I asked Diego and placed a hand on Gerard’s shoulder. He kept his face smothered in his palms.
Diego nodded and stood. He was the only reason the Board hadn’t found out about Gerard’s lack of improvement, which said a lot about him. He could make Gerard’s life a living hell if he wanted to. After the disaster that was Hudson, and the shock of my father’s cancer diagnosis, the company could buckle beneath the weight of Gerard’s health if Diego gave them the dirty details. I wasn’t sure where the Board managed to find him, but I wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t really an angel or some other overly benevolent being.
It said something that I now suspected everyone but me wasn’t human.
Gerard and I both kept quiet as Diego walked out, overwhelmed with emotions that the new CFO couldn’t possibly understand. Our lives had been completely destroyed three months ago, and those pieces hadn’t been—couldn’t be—put back together. Not as they were.
“I have three degrees from MIT.” Gerard’s voice cracked in the back of his throat as he pulled his face from his hands. “Now I can’t remember meetings? I forget a whole goddamn person?”
The muscles in my shoulders tightened. “You’re being too hard on yourself. You had a major surgery. Head trauma.”
He shook his shoulder, knocking my hand away. “You got hurt too.”
“I wasn’t almost beaten to death, Gerard.” My gaze flickered up to his scar. How could Hudson have done that to him?
“Hudson tried to strangle you.”
The phantom pressure of our brother’s fingers squeezing my neck sent a chill down my back. While that had certainly affected me, not being able to wear scarves or necklaces anymore was a world away from having brain damage. “I know.”
Gerard swiveled in his chair and looked up at me. “I’ve seen how you bolt out of here. Your race to beat the sun.”
The clock on the wall read five o’clock. There was no way I was making my appointment anymore. Not that I would’ve anyway. I still had to figure out what I was supposed to do about that picture. “Being afraid and being hurt aren’t the same thing.”
Gerard shook his head. “If I could reanimate Hudson and kill him again, I would. It’s unfortunate that Richard took that from us.”
My heart rate escalated. What would Gerard say if he knew I had been the one to stab Hudson that night?
“I play those memory games to try to mitigate this clusterfuck going on in my head. I lose over fifty percent of the time,” Gerard said, changing the subject. “I have a log going in a journal because I’d forget my record if I didn’t.”
While my anxiety was thankful for the change in subject, my heart ached at the words. What was I supposed to say?
Gerard fell back against his chair, hands in his lap. “I don’t think I can run this company.”
I shook my head, ponytail grazing my neck. “You aren’t being fair to yourself.”
He kept his gaze forward and said nothing.
“You’ve got to start relying on us. On me. Diego. We’re here to help you. Let us help you.” I bent down a little to catch his gaze. Gerard reluctantly looked at me.
I didn’t wait for him to give me permission and grabbed a stack of Post-it notes. “For starters, let me write down the instructions for your online calendar. Later we can tape a picture of Cathy to your desk.”
“This company is a fucking cancer,” Gerard said, ignoring my suggestions. “But despite that, I’m not sure what we’d do without it. No one would hire me to do anything else anymore, and you’re so damn scared of everything now I don’t think you’d ever leave your condo if not for this job.”
His words hit me in the chest and clung to my ribs. I cleared my throat and started writing his calendar instructions. “That’s not true.”
“It’s true, and you know it’s true.” Gerard smiled. I could hear it. Not in a malevolent, taunting sort of way, but rather an I have eyeballs, you moron sort of way. When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “Fine. If it’s not true, then what’s your plan? You only have a few months until you’ve met the will’s stipulations. What does Matilda Ashby, heiress and former doormat, intend to do with her freedom of this godforsaken place, provided you take it?”
I swallowed and thought of the picture in my purse. Gerard’s question had been something I’d thought about a lot since our father passed. After being raised to work for the Ashby Corporation, no other options readily came to mind. Nothing that felt good or right. A large part of me, whether I really wanted to admit it or not, had hoped that time could be spent with Samson. But as it stood, I wasn’t sure if he thought about me at all. Or, as of twenty minutes ago, if he was even alive.
“I’m not sure yet.” I continued writing down my instructions for Gerard, but my brain had long since wandered, and my handwriting suffered for it.
Gerard snorted. “You’re getting independence from our terrible family legacy for the first time in your life, and you have no idea what to do with it?”
“I suppose not.” I peeled the Post-it note from the pad, slapped it on the side of Gerard’s desktop, and propped my hands on my hips. “All I know is this company. All my worth is here, you know?”
Gerard, the ass, looked awfully smug.
“Your worth is certainly not limited to this place. I promise you that.” Gerard’s expression tempered somewhat. “Diego keeps telling me not to focus on the long haul of my recovery. He says to just focus on the day. So that’s what I’m going to tell you: focus on what you want for the day. Maybe the long haul will figure itself out if you do that long enough.”
I stayed in my brother’s office until Cathy returned and Diego talked the reporter down, but Gerard’s words hung with me after I left his office and nipped at my heels all the way to the Mercedes in the parking garage. I might not know what my future would look like, or what I even wanted, but I did know what I wanted to do right then, and for the first time in months, it wasn’t to hide from the night.
Samson was out there trying to find a way to kill a demon, and I had evidence that someone tailed him and wanted to hurt him. They could have already.
Even if he never intended to speak to me again, I needed to warn him. Find him. Something. Anything.
And to do that, I needed to go see the last person in Manhattan I wanted to face again.
I had to go back to Vespertine.