CHAPTER SEVEN
I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the dirt floor, my mind attempting to sort through the chaos, but once I picked myself up, I decided to look at a few texts from the shelves. Many were handwritten in Latin on old yellowing paper. Maybe journals. There weren’t any chapters or headers. Some were printed books written in Greek, Latin, and French. The scrolls were a mixture of the same.
“Guess I know why he didn’t kick me out,” I mumbled, sitting at Rook’s old desk, wrapped in his brown wool robe that smelled like a mixture of his cologne and earth. There was nothing in this room I could read, and if by some chance I spoke French or Latin, I guessed the languages weren’t modern versions.
Or maybe he really truly doesn’t give a shit. He was beginning to convince me that he didn’t have anything to hide, and that I’d made up stories in my mind just to cope. Or to distract myself.
I took the last scroll, carefully rolled it up and placed it back on the shelf. I sat on his lumpy hard bed and began contemplating my next move.
Well, I wasn’t in a position to throw in the towel. I had to ladder up and think about my options. I could leave and try to put the past behind me, but I would still have to deal with Warner. He’d given me one hundred thousand dollars in exchange to be his inside “man” and help him buy or steal Rook’s Island. I knew I could return the money—Rook said he would refund my guest fee—but that wouldn’t suffice. Warner wanted the island for money laundering or drug smuggling or whatever that man did for a living. I could make up a lie about the island already belonging to someone he didn’t want to mess with or tell him it had legal problems—the sort Warner would not want to drag himself into—but those came with risks, too. A man like Warner might kill me anyway simply for having wasted his time.
No, going home empty-handed didn’t seem like a great choice, though, it was a choice.
The next option would be to allow myself to believe that Rook was a good guy, and the things I’d seen or that feeling in my gut were nothing but my own fiction. I could live here indefinitely and hope Warner Price never found me. But then he’d go after my friends. Maybe Dad, too. Not an option.
The final choice was to keep going and trust the feeling in my gut telling me this was all a sham and that something unnatural was happening here. Something Rook didn’t want me to find out. Maybe Cici found out. Maybe Rook couldn’t let her go home.
I sat for another long moment, every cell in my body playing tug-of-war. Being deceitful wasn’t in my nature. Neither was revenge, at the end of the day.
So what did I really want? I guess justice for Cici.
I drew a slow breath. Okay, I had less than two weeks to shake the truth from this place. I would push as hard as I could—push Rook’s patience to see if I could get him to crack or slip up, push the staff to trust me, push myself to keep it together. I would not lose focus. I would not think about the sound of Rook’s voice just now when he told me he wanted to give me a home. I would not think about how the air left my lungs when he entered a room or how pained he’d looked when he knew I needed him.
I stood and tightened the sash of the robe around my body. The thing was so long that a foot of fabric puddled on the ground.
“How can he stand wearing this?” I scratched my neck and arm. Wool in the jungle. And how strange he’d let me borrow it. On the other hand, he’d literally said I could have anything on this island. Anything except him.
I opened the rickety wooden door, and a beam of sunlight sliced through the room. I looked down and noticed something solid beneath a thin film of loose dirt. I kicked at it with my bare foot and then bent over, sweeping away the loose soil to find a flat metal hook drilled into the surface of something.
What the hell is this? I pulled, and a square, three-foot-by-three-foot panel lifted, exposing an opening.
I got on all fours and lowered my head inside. There wasn’t much light, but I could see a narrow ladder leading down.
Ohmygod. This has to be it.
I quickly turned myself around and descended. It took several long moments for my eyes to adjust, but the moment they did, I knew what this was: Rook’s real home.
Fucking liar.
It didn’t take long to find the light switch or the room with monitors not dissimilar to the one in the offices. Only this one had a view of the office spaces themselves, the staff common areas in the apartment complex, people’s living rooms—including mine and Luke’s—the docks, shorelines, and everything inside Rook’s mansion.
He was watching me when I’d stayed there. I didn’t see views of the bathrooms—thankfully—but he’d been able to watch me when I slept and now when I worked.
All right. This merely confirmed what I’d already suspected and he’d partially confessed to once—he kept an eye on things.
Carefully, I closed the door and went to the next room. It was his bedroom—comfortable and clean with beige tile flooring, a king-sized bed covered in white linens, and a closet filled with expensive suits. A full-length beveled mirror hung on one wall and an abstract painting of a red butterfly on the other. I studied the painting’s violent splashes of flaming reds and oranges exploding from a sea of deep blues, almost like a butterfly escaping an icy hell.
A ribbon of goose bumps fluttered down my arms, and I jumped, sweeping my hands over the skin. There was nothing there, but, Goddammit, this fucking island! Creepy to the core. I shut off the lights and went to the last room at the end of the hall. My fingertips found the switch, and with a flick, I nearly fell sideways.
Holyfuck. I stepped inside the cavernous room containing rows and rows of books and a spiral staircase in the corner.
“Oh my God.” I walked to the wrought-iron railing and leaned over. One, two, three… I counted ten floors beneath me. What is this?
My bare feet clapped down the stairs, and I skidded off the last step. Shelves extended as far as the eye could see in every direction. The entire floor had to be the size of four tennis courts.
“And there are ten of these?” I muttered to myself.
I grabbed the first book I came to and looked it over. It was thin, like a ledger, with numbers on the spine.
I cracked it open to the first page.
Meg Purdue
Age: Forty-four
Fantasy request: Scottish Castle
Guest description: Meg is recently divorced. Her daughter just graduated from college.
I slapped the book closed and went for the next, my eyes scanning frantically. Emily Johannsson. Her profile mentioned her shyness and the request to have the Tarzan fantasy.
Okay. Wow. These were guest records.
I walked to the spiral staircase and once again leaned over. There had to be hundreds of thousands of books to dig through. I would have to come back later when I knew Rook was tied up for several hours.
I turned to leave, but stopped. The books were in order of the visit dates. I quickly shuffled through the row corresponding to my group from last week.
My record wasn’t there, and upon inspection of Cici’s group, neither was hers.