SEBASTIAN WAS LEAVING a detailed message for Ron, highlighting the important aspects of Faye’s conversation with Candice Jackson and explaining their next steps, when he saw Faye come out of the hotel’s revolving doors, looking around like Paul or one of his boys was going to pop out of a car and start shooting.
He slid out of his spot. She saw the Jaguar coming her way and hustled toward it.
“You hear everything?” she asked when they were moving.
“Every single word,” Sebastian said.
“She’s really—”
“Yeah, Paul did quite a number on her.”
“Paul?” Faye whipped her head to him, Sebastian seeing the color flaring in her cheeks. “It’s your blood that caused that. And now that shit’s running through my veins.”
“Paul didn’t give her Pandora.”
“Then what did he give her?”
Sebastian hadn’t shared Paul’s sick grand plan with anyone except Frank, wanted to keep that nightmare locked down tight.
Faye said, “It has something to do with female carriers, doesn’t it?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From Anton. That day he met Paul. On the way home Anton told me Paul needed female carriers—the younger, the better. What makes their blood so special?”
“Look, you—”
“Either he does something to it, enhances it in some way, or it has something to do with female reproduction. Which is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.”
Sebastian turned his head and shot her a glare, one that made it clear it would be in her best interest to shut up.
Faye ignored him. “I’m putting my life on the line for you, in more ways than one,” she said. “I’ve got a right to know what you did to me.”
“I promise you, as God is my witness, that what happened to Candice Jackson will not happen to you. Pandora is one hundred percent pure. Untainted. No blood expanders or fillers or any other chemicals. Why do you think my product is in such high demand? You think I’d keep getting repeat customers and have a waiting list a mile long if I scrambled people’s brains, made them do degrading shit to themselves? You think that’s the type of business I’m operating here? Blowing up people’s lives?”
“What, you have ethics?”
“I’m nothing like the Armenians or Mexicans.”
“What makes Pandora so unique? So special?”
“Kindness,” he replied. “And clean living.”
She glared at him, incredulous, her gaze roving over his face.
It was true, what he’d said. Kindness and clean living were the final part of his secret recipe, what made Pandora so different, and in such high demand. He had figured it out early on, when he and Frank had started, by reading studies on cattle, how they experienced high levels of stress from overcrowding and the fear they experienced on their way to being slaughtered—the stress hormones changed the taste of the meat.
The same principle held true for carriers. Stress hormones affected blood, and in order for him to harvest the most efficient blood, to maximize its potency, his donors had to be in peak physical and mental shape. That meant clean eating, rigorous exercise, things like meditation and being treated like a human being, a partner, not being locked up inside some cage in the dark like a veal calf.
“If you’re not going to level with me—” Faye began.
“I am leveling with you.”
Faye looked straight ahead, out the windshield. “Did anything Candice say mean anything to you? Help you in any way?”
Sebastian nodded. “That thing she said about the house in Santa Paula, the owner—his name isn’t David. It’s Wayne Dixon. Met him a couple of times, almost did some business together. Idea of him hosting private sex parties doesn’t surprise me—the old prick always struck me as a perv. It all makes sense now.”
“I’m not following.”
“Paul wanted money from me in the beginning, to get started. You need a lot—tens of millions—to start a blood operation, do it right. Stay protected. Last night, he had no interest in money, which tells me he’s managed to get an investor, someone with really deep pockets. You did good work back there. Really good work.”
“What’s the plan now?”
Good question, Sebastian thought. In a situation like this, normally he’d have Ron getting to work on bugging Dixon’s house, phones, and cars, his place of business. As they waited for Paul to call, Ron would put together a small army to stake out Dixon, see where he went, who he talked to, everything.
But that kind of operation took time, and with Grace in the equation, Sebastian didn’t have time. “I’ll talk it over with Ron, best way to handle this. I left him a message, told him to meet us at the house.”
His phone rang. Not the one he was carrying, but the new burner he had given Ava the number for. It didn’t have Bluetooth, so the car’s communication system ignored it, thank God. He wanted to talk to Ava privately—or in as much privacy as possible.
“The kidnapper,” Ava began, her voice low, almost a whisper. “He reached out this morning, around four. He said to watch out for something special in my mail.”
Mail. The word triggered a memory from yesterday’s conversation. Why give up Ava’s little girl when I can do so many wonderfully creative things with her? Paul had said. Like, say, drop a finger every now and then in the mail to her mommy. Or you. Do you think Grace could hold her baby without any fingers?
His blood ran cold and his breath seized in his throat and the road in front of him turned hazy. “Did he say why? The kidnapper.”
“No. He called, said to watch out for something special in my mail, and hung up.”
Sebastian struggled to speak. “My money guy—he’s going to reach out to you this morning. I talked to him yesterday, got everything set up.”
“Okay. I’m sorry, but I have to go. The police don’t know I’m making this call, and I don’t want them to, you know, start asking questions.”
He wanted to be there with her. It was stupid and foolish, and he knew he couldn’t do it, and yet he still wanted to ask, wanted her to know she was in his thoughts, always had been, even after all this time.
But he couldn’t ask. Ava had already hung up.
Sebastian gripped the steering wheel with both hands as a cold, hard, and inescapable truth drilled into his marrow: Ava was suffering because of him. Grace, too. And Paul, the psycho son of a bitch, had no intention of returning her.
His daughter was in the hands of a sadist, and Paul, Sebastian was sure, had already arranged something that would kill Ava. Or maybe he wanted her to suffer a bit longer. Maybe Paul had engineered something that would make her wish she were dead.
And I’m the only one who can stop it.
He had to find Paul—fast.
He returned home, finding it deathly silent.
Sebastian figured at least one of the two guys who had been living here around the clock would have returned by now. Sebastian knew their first names, but he didn’t have their numbers. He dealt only with Ron. Sebastian jogged up the steps, walked down the hall to his home office.
All of Ron’s equipment was gone.
Sebastian thought back to what Ron had told him last night about how he had a lot of money, more than he could spend in several lifetimes. Ron was telling him he’d had enough, and Sebastian had told him—practically begged him—to stay on. Only Ron didn’t give me an answer, Sebastian thought, dialing the number for Ron’s burner. Just stared at me from across the table.
Ron didn’t answer, and his voicemail didn’t pick up. Had he thrown out the burner?
Sebastian called the direct number for Ron’s secretary.
The number, an automated voice said, was no longer in service.
I’m going to pick them off one by one, Paul had said. Ron. His people—
“Sebastian.” Faye’s voice was calling from downstairs. Not nervous or scared or anything, just loud. “There’s something down here for you.”
He left the room on shaky legs, riding waves of anger and fear, rage and terror, trying to keep the emotions from reaching his face. If Faye saw a trace of anything, she might bail. She was smart, okay, but that didn’t mean she’d sign up for some suicide mission. If she found out Ron and his people had abandoned him, she might, too.
Faye stood in the kitchen, coffee percolating. “I was making coffee and found that,” she said, pointing to a white envelope with his name written on the front, in big, bold black marker so he couldn’t miss it. “It wasn’t there this morning—I’m sure of it.”
The envelope rested up against the bottle of Scotch Paul had brought to the house. Sebastian had left the bottle next to the coffeemaker, wanting to see it every day and give it the finger, prove how strong he was.
He didn’t feel strong now. He felt weak. Frightened.
Sebastian opened the envelope. Inside was a folded piece of paper—the nice stationery he kept on a shelf in his office down the hall. He recognized the handwriting.
Some famous writer from a long time ago said either you’re busy living or you’re busy dying, Ron had written. If you’ve checked your email, you’ll see which one I had to choose, and why. I’m sorry.
No, you’re not, Sebastian thought, and wondered if Faye had read the note. The envelope hadn’t been sealed. He’d check the cameras upstairs, on the computer.
Faye got mugs from a cabinet. “Everything okay?”
Stop asking me that. “Nothing we can’t handle,” he replied, his voice soft.
She looked at him, silently analyzing his words.
“The reason I got into this thing,” Sebastian said, picking up a mug from the counter. “At some point the government is going to get involved, take over the blood business. Regulate it. They have to. Cat’s out of the bag, people are being snatched, people are dying. The real money is going to be in real estate. In a decade, maybe even sooner, you’re going to see carriers living together in special neighborhoods, with their own schools and grocery stores and doctors. And they’ll be living behind these great big walls to keep the noncarriers out.”
“That’s why you picked real estate as your cover.”
Sebastian nodded. She was smart—and quick. Like Ava.
He picked up the bottle of Scotch and poured some into her mug. “They’re going to be living in these properties. I’m going to build a world where people like you are safe. Where you’re not hunted.”
He poured some Scotch into his mug—just a little, just a taste—and raised it to her and said, “To the future.”
“The future.”
The mugs clinked together.
Sebastian brought his mug to his lips. He tilted it back, about to drink a healthy amount, the booze hitting his lips when his mouth simply clamped shut. Some of the Scotch was in his mouth, and he wouldn’t swallow it. He didn’t know what was happening, but his brain provided an answer in the form of a picture—the one of Grace that Paul had sent him. Grace needed the best version of her father right now. She didn’t need a drunk who was afraid to see what was waiting for him in an email. She needed a man, not a frightened little boy.
Sebastian covertly spit the booze back into the mug. He put it down on the counter and said, “Help yourself to whatever. I’ll be right back.” He headed upstairs, to his home office, and sat in front of his Mac laptop.
He found the email easily. The subject line read, “Maya.”
Not a picture this time, a video.
She’s not dead, Sebastian told himself. God had brought him this far. He wouldn’t let him down now. He wouldn’t. He double-clicked the file.
Maya Dawson was tied down to a dining room chair, her mouth gagged. She was in her home—her living room. Sebastian recognized the couch in the background.
Maya was sobbing, her eyes pinched shut and her head turned away from whoever was holding the phone, recording whatever was about to happen. It didn’t take Sebastian long to figure it out. Someone moved behind her chair, and he saw a blue-gloved hand grab Maya by the hair and yank it back, exposing her throat. Sebastian looked away when he saw Paul’s tactical knife.