Caden listened as Gail continued to “talk shop” with Isaiah about all the improvements in the works as far as renovations to Monticello were going. Apparently, Isaiah was a prominent member of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and a great deal of his research regarding the third president and his affair with Sally Hemings was being used as part of the information shared with visitors to the famous estate.

Gail had mentioned more than a few times that she was convinced their sharp increase in visitors was directly a result of Isaiah’s books. Tourism was at an all-time high, and she remarked that it was rare to not have someone mention his fictional detective during one of the guided tours.

Isaiah had managed to secure the private after-hours tour by claiming he needed a bit of time to study the parlor in order to get the description right in the book he was currently writing. Gail had nearly had an apoplexy when she heard Monticello was actually going to be part of the setting of the next story. Caden knew it was a lie because Isaiah had alluded to having a bit of writer’s block.

They’d arrived an hour or so early, wandering through the gift shop and grabbing some homemade soup from the sandwich shop at the visitor’s center.

The problem with Gail’s outright fan worship was that she wouldn’t leave them alone during the private tour. Isaiah had dropped no less than half a dozen subtle hints about needing to take notes, but the woman had missed every single one, constantly lobbing question after question at him.

Mercifully, after a mind-numbing hour, Gail’s phone rang. “Oh my. It’s my husband. I put him in charge of dinner and the kids. I should have known better.” She excused herself to take the call, stepping out of the room.

“Move fast,” Caden said. “I don’t think she’s going to leave you alone for long.”

“Jealous?” Isaiah teased.

Caden rolled his eyes, patting Isaiah’s ass with enough force to make it sting. “Behave.”

Isaiah laughed, ignoring Caden’s warning. Tess reacted the same way whenever he tried to correct her.

After so many years as a Dom to be feared, Caden couldn’t decide if he was relieved or annoyed by their complete obliviousness to his commands. Everything he said just bounced off them.

“I’ll keep watch at the door. If Gail comes back, I’ll ask her to show me to the restroom.” Tess moved into position as lookout as Caden and Isaiah stepped over the belt held in place by two stanchion posts.

“This one is ‘Hope with Cupid.’ Jefferson gave it to his daughter, Martha. It’s one of the few original pieces that managed to remain in the Jefferson family’s possession.”

“Sort of like the poem that’s remained in Tess’ family.”

Isaiah nodded. “There’s definitely been some serious effort expended in keeping these artifacts accessible to the right people.”

They leaned close to the statue, studying it. Caden pulled out his cell and flashed his Droid light on it. “Seems to me if there’s a clue, it’s not going to be visible to the naked eye. This place has thousands of visitors through here every year.”

Isaiah agreed. “Yeah.” Tess had picked up a black light among other things when they were at the Smithsonian, figuring they should be prepared to try anything.

The black light revealed nothing, so Caden reached out, intent on turning the statue around.

“What are you doing?” Isaiah asked, aghast. A quick glance toward Tess proved she was just as horrified.

Caden snorted. “You freaking history buffs are all alike. It’s a porcelain statue without a speck of dust on it. You think there’s not someone in the place touching it at least every few weeks or so to clean it? I’m not going to break the damn thing.”

He turned the statue around carefully and they flashed the lights on the back as well. Still nothing.

Caden gave Isaiah a shit-eating grin. “You gonna lose your shit if I lift the thing up?”

Isaiah shot him a dirty look. “Don’t drop it.”

They tilted it over, revealing the bottom. Tess apparently figured out she was missing all the good stuff and left her post, leaning in close as well.

“It’s made of biscuit,” she said.

When Caden gave her a curious look, she explained, “Unglazed soft paste porcelain.”

Caden turned his attention back to the statue. “Not sure how anyone could write something in porcelain that wouldn’t have already been seen.”

“I know, but maybe we can feel—” Tess stopped, moving closer to the statue. “What’s that…crack?” She ran her fingernail over the bottom and several paint chips fell away.

They all exchanged glances of surprise, but said nothing as Tess continued to chip away at the paint.

“No one ever explored this?” Caden murmured aloud.

Isaiah didn’t find that fact particularly shocking. “No historian is going to set out to destroy an artifact. At a glance, that paint matched the porcelain perfectly and that just looked like a hairline crack in the glaze. Besides, this statue isn’t valuable monetarily, just historically. If it were, it would be under glass in an art museum. These biscuit statues were very popular in Jefferson’s time, mass produced even. I doubt anyone’s really paid it much attention other than to keep it here to add to the authenticity of the historical period.”

“Whoa,” Tess whispered.

“What is it?” Caden asked, trying to peer over her shoulder.

“A series of letters. Scratched lightly into the porcelain. Six of them.” She nodded toward the phone in Caden’s hand. “Write these down as I call them out.”

He opened up notes and started to type in the letters.

“MCEXDX.”

“What the hell is that?” Caden asked.

Isaiah carefully dusted the paint chips into his palm, tucking them into his pocket to hide the evidence of what they’d done. “I don’t know, but the clue on the fan seemed to point to both statues. We’re running out of time. Let’s see if there are letters on the bottom of the Venus statue as well. Maybe we need both sets to make sense of them.”

They crossed the parlor and waited with growing impatience as Tess scraped away the paint. There, scratched on the bottom, were six more letters. Caden added them to the others as she called them out. “PEOPPC.”

Isaiah had just cleaned up their second mess, the three of them climbing back over the stanchion belt, when Gail returned to the room.

“Well,” Isaiah said, “I think I’ve got all I need.”

Gail looked disappointed to hear they were finished. She walked with them toward the exit. They’d parked their car in the lower lot, so they said their goodbyes at the door to Monticello and walked the half mile back to the visitors’ center.

As they walked, they tried to puzzle out the letters. “The first six could be Roman numerals,” Tess suggested. “Except for the E, of course.”

“I thought the second set was going to spell out the word people when you were calling them out,” Isaiah said. “You think it’s an anagram?”

“Possibly.” Caden had considered the same thing as well.

“When we get back to the hotel, we’ll play around with them. See if we can come up with something that makes sense,” Tess suggested.

Dusk was just setting in as they reached the bottom of the hill, so they headed through the lighted visitors’ center courtyard toward the dark parking lot. The place was deserted at this hour, their car the only one in the lot. Isaiah had stopped at the entrance to grab a map of the park from a brochure rack, claiming the letters could possibly point to another place on the grounds.

Caden paused on the sidewalk to turn on the flashlight on his phone when he was briefly blinded by a sudden light.

A car he hadn’t seen turned on its high beams at the same time it peeled tires and headed toward them. Tess was a few steps ahead of him, starting across the road to the parking lot.

Caden started toward her, intent on pushing her out of the way, but the car was already there.

His life passed before his eyes as he heard Tess scream.

She tried to move out of the way, but wasn’t quick enough. At the last minute, she jumped, but the corner of the vehicle struck her left thigh and she went flying along the hood, slamming into the left windshield before sliding to the pavement.

The car never hit the brakes—and that was when Caden realized it was a black town car, just like the one he’d seen in New York.

He started to chase after it, hoping to get the license plate number, but the car was moving too fast, and it was too dark.

When he turned around, Isaiah was kneeling next to Tess, who was trying to sit up.

“Stay down,” Caden said, as he rushed to her side. “I’m calling for an ambulance.”

“No,” she winced as she sat up. “I’m fine.”

Isaiah wrapped his arm around her shoulders to hold her up. “We’re going to let a doctor tell us that, Tess.”

She gave him a pained grin and pushed herself up, standing on unsteady legs. She shifted her weight a few times and wiggled her arms and fingers as if doing a personal inventory. “Caden didn’t have to go to the hospital when that guy bashed him over the head.” She looked at Caden. “You said you were fine. You’re going to have to trust me to know the same thing. I’m sore and I’m probably going to be black and blue tomorrow, but nothing is broken. Couple of Advil, some ice, and a bed. I can deal with it. Honest.”

“Tess—” Caden started.

“Never been hit by a car,” she said, her voice weak even as she tried to joke away what had just happened. “Kind of cool, when you think of it. And the way I jumped up and slid along the hood. Makes me sort of badass, right? It was like something you’d see in a movie.” She looked at Isaiah. “You should write that into your next book. Nerdy Evie could get hit by a car. It would up her coolness factor.”

“Jesus, Tess,” Isaiah muttered. “I just lost twenty years off my life. Too soon on the jokes.”

Caden watched as Isaiah placed a supportive arm around her waist, the two of them slowly making their way toward the car. Isaiah was still pushing for her to let them drive her to the emergency room, but Tess refused.

Caden remained in place, his blood turning to ice as he replayed the car striking her over and over.

The Hancocks. This was their doing.

A murderous rage filled him as he plotted exactly how he would kill the senator and his wife. They wouldn’t get the privilege of dying fast. He’d regretted the lack of suffering he’d allowed Elroy and Barton. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

He forced himself to walk to the car and somehow, he managed to contain the red-hot fury pulsing through him.

Isaiah and Tess, as always, seemed in tune with his current frame of mind. As such, they remained silent on the ride back to the hotel.

Isaiah drove, while Caden sat in the back with Tess. She was putting up a brave front, but he knew she hurt all over. He never took his gaze off her as he forced himself to breathe, concentrating on every inhale and exhale until they finally made it back to the resort.

Several hours later, Caden still paced the floor of the suite, trying to push down the anxiety that had plagued him since they’d returned from Monticello.

Isaiah and Tess had immediately taken up residence on the couch, each armed with a pen and notepad, trying to work out what the letters on the statues could stand for. None of the anagrams they’d created made any sense.

They couldn’t come up with a single word that used all twelve letters, though they’d amassed a fairly lengthy list of words that used some of them, and now they were trying to combine them with no success.

“Codex. Codec. Code. Popped. Mopped. Comped.” Tess sighed. “This is hopeless.”

They’d skipped dinner, none of them wanting to stop to take the time to eat. So now, they were frustrated, tired and hungry. Not a great combination for Caden, who was barely holding it together. He felt the strong urge to punch something.

That or…

He dismissed the idea of tying Isaiah or Tess or both of them to the bed as he folded his belt in half and…

Fuck. No.

He closed his eyes, hating where his thoughts were taking him. He couldn’t go back there, needed to find another way to get through this.

“Ugh.” Tess tried to covertly rub her side, a sure sign that she was still in pain. She had spent the better part of an hour trying to make her original idea of Roman numerals work again, but to no avail.

“What’s this?” Isaiah asked, picking up a bag Caden had absentmindedly tossed on the coffee table when they’d returned.

“A cipher wheel. I picked it up in the gift shop at Monticello. Thought my sister, Tabby, might get a kick out of it.”

Isaiah took it out of the bag, sitting up excitedly. “Holy shit, Cade. This is it! Why didn’t you tell us about it?”

“What?” Caden had forgotten he’d bought the thing just before their tour. While Isaiah and Tess had dismissed her brush with death, too intent on cracking the code, Caden couldn’t think of anything but that car as it struck her. Couldn’t stop feeling like she’d been hurt because of him. Because of his failure to protect her.

Just like he’d failed to protect Rose.

He should have worked the double-agent angle. And he should have kept an emotional distance from Tess and Isaiah. Something he’d done had given his feelings away, and now they were in danger.

“It’s a Jefferson disk,” Isaiah said, opening the package. “Twelve dials.” He spun them around as Tess leaned closer to watch.

Caden didn’t miss the way she winced when she moved. She’d taken a couple of Advil when they’d gotten back, but she still refused to let him see how badly she was hurt.

He walked toward her, intent on pulling her clothes off to see what the damage was. She’d shoved him away when they’d first gotten back and he’d insisted on looking at her injuries. She wasn’t going to deny him again. If it was too bad, he was taking her to the hospital—and he didn’t care if she kicked and screamed the whole way.

Before he reached her, Isaiah rose. “That’s it. Caden, you did it!”

He paused. “Did what?”

“Solved the mystery of the letters.”

Caden hadn’t given those stupid letters a second’s worth of thought since returning to the hotel. How could he? Tess had nearly been killed because he hadn’t taken the threat seriously. It had been stupid of him. He, of all people, knew exactly how dangerous people like the Hancocks, like his parents, were.

“Cade? What’s wrong with you, man? You’re in no-man’s-land. Focus.”

Caden forced himself to look at the cipher wheel. Isaiah had lined up the letters from the statues. “Okay. They’re just as meaningless on that wheel as they are on the paper.”

“Look down one row.”

Caden followed his directions, his eyes widening. “Hancock safe?”

Isaiah nodded. “Followed by the omega symbol. This is it. End of the line. The last name in the poem.”

“And it’s Hancock.” Caden perched on a chair by the table, running his hand through his hair. They were fucked.

Tess stood, but Caden didn’t miss the momentary unsteadiness, despite the excitement in her voice. “We just have to figure out if there was something passed down through the ages in the Hancock family, maybe a portable safe or something. Adams wrote the poem, then gave the Hamiltons the fan, the Jeffersons the statues, and the Hancocks the safe. The whole thing works. I guarantee you…what we’re seeking is in that safe.”

“Great, Tess,” Caden said sarcastically, his nerves shot. “So what’s to say the Hancocks didn’t open and dispose of whatever was in that safe a hundred years ago?”

“They might not realize,” Isaiah said. “Maybe there’s a code to open the safe, something the Hancocks don’t have.”

Caden shook his head. “Spoiler alert, Isaiah. Neither do we.”

“Caden,” Tess said, stepping closer. She limped slightly, and he lost it.

“Take off your clothes,” he barked.

She scowled at him. “What?”

“I want to see how badly you’re hurt, Tess. You and Isaiah can sit around here and act like everything’s fine, but it’s not. There are some seriously evil people out there who want what we have—even if it is fuck all. They will kill to get it, and I swear to God, hell will freeze over before I let them hurt someone else I care about. So take off your fucking clothes!”

Tess remained motionless in the face of his fury. Then, before he could apologize for his anger, she shrugged off her shirt and jeans, standing in front of him in just her panties and bra.

Isaiah gasped, which strangely comforted Caden. At least he wasn’t alone in his horror.

“Jesus, baby. You should have said something.” Isaiah rose from the couch, walking around her. She was covered in a dark black bruise that started just below her rib cage and went all the way down her left side to above her knee, which was swollen and puffy. There were a few bumps on her right side, as well as three fairly painful-looking scrapes on her arm, which explained her sudden need for a sweater once they’d returned to the suite.

She’d truly been suffering in silence.

Caden had seen the hit, knew it was hard, but somehow Tess had managed to shake off the worst of it and hide exactly how bad it must hurt for hours.

“Get in bed.” Caden didn’t even bother to soften the Dom. He was furious with her, and if she wasn’t already a mass of bruises, he would be adding a few more to her backside. How dare she hide her pain, try to shield them from how seriously she’d been hurt?

That was the flip side of being a Dom, something his parents hadn’t taught him, something he’d learned from other members of the scene—being a Dom meant caring for a sub, taking care of them. It hadn’t ever been something he thought about much, but with Tess, he wanted to care for her, protect her.

Tess sighed and looked slightly annoyed. He might have been fooled by that exasperation if she hadn’t obeyed the order instantly. It was obvious she wanted to lie down.

He and Isaiah followed her to the bedroom, both undressing as she climbed onto the center of the mattress. Now that they’d seen the damage, she lowered her guard, gasping in pain whenever she put pressure on the wrong spot. They joined her, moving as closely as they dared, neither of them wanting to jar her or press against her injuries.

There were tears on her lashes, but she batted them away quickly. “Didn’t you say your foster sister, Rose, was a Hancock?”

Caden swallowed heavily. “I don’t want to talk about the safe anymore tonight, Tess. I want you to rest. And if those bruises look worse in the morning, I swear to God, I’m dragging you to the hospital no matter what you say.”

She brushed off his words with a single shoulder shrug. “I think we should call her. Ask her about the safe.”

“No.” Caden couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that. He couldn’t see Rose again. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop seeing Tess’ bruised body and comparing it to Rose’s. He’d seen her beaten black and blue. When they were younger, Elroy and Barton would punish her to “motivate” Caden, his father using Rose as a whipping boy.

But what about what he’d done? How many times had he bruised her skin under the guise of pleasure? Had she fought to hide the true pain he was causing as hard as Tess had all night? Had she ever gotten a moment’s pleasure from their sex play at all?

The fears racing through his brain made him physically ill, so he lay as still and quiet as possible. Once they were asleep, he’d sneak out to the couch. He wasn’t getting any sleep tonight.

Unfortunately, Isaiah couldn’t shut down his enthusiasm over what they’d found any easier than Tess. “I think she’s got a good point, Cade. We’ve hit the end of the line here. We obviously can’t call up the senator or his bitch of a wife and ask about a safe. Rose was your foster sister and she’s married to your brother. She’s the best—only—person we have to ask.”

Isaiah didn’t have a clue what he was suggesting, and Caden wasn’t about to enlighten him. Seeing Tess hit by that car had reminded him why he would have been smarter to maintain a distance from the two of them. People close to him got hurt. Period.

Wes. Rose. Now Tess.

There was no way in hell he’d go back and repeat the pattern by dragging his brother and Rose into this mess. They were married and finally finding the true peace that had eluded all of them for years. Caden was happy for them and not about to yank it all away.

They’d have to find another way.

Somehow.

However, even as his partners drifted off to sleep, Caden knew they were right, knew he’d hit the end of the line. They’d run out of options.

Rose was their only hope.

And with that hope came his destruction. Because he couldn’t keep lying to Tess and Isaiah through omission…and they’d never accept the man he truly was once they knew the full truth.