“Thanks for coming, sir,” he said.
“What’s up?” I stepped inside, standing over his shoulder.
“Got this not long ago.” He held up a piece of paper. “Thought you’d want to see it right away, sir.”
I read it once, read it twice, and nearly fucking threw up.
I had to step back and lean against the wall. I hoped that Cox didn’t notice how much that note was affecting me, since that would be a dead giveaway. I knew that I needed to get my shit together, but I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The timing was too perfect, or maybe it was too fucked up.
I look down at the piece of paper again and read it slowly to myself.
Back down or die. Which do U rly want: Mom or Daughter?? Back down or die.
Somebody knew. Or at least somebody was making a very, very good guess. I went back mentally over my time with Emily, and was coming up with a blank. Nobody had actually seen us together as far as I was aware, and we had been careful.
Except for at the charity event. There had been that waiter, though he came after we were already finished. There was the possibility of a drone, but I hadn’t heard anything nearby, and besides, if the media had a picture of my stepdaughter going down on me, they would be printing it in every single major newspaper.
No, this was somebody closer. I bet it was somebody in the mansion that saw the way I looked at Emily and was making some lucky fucking guess. Probably the same person that decapitated the dog robot.
“What are you looking at?” I asked Cox finally, getting my shit together.
“It’s the perp, sir.”
I got closer and watched him play it again. The screen was a shot of the front door, and everything looked normal for a few seconds. Then a person wearing a black sweatshirt with the hood up and a pair of jeans walked into view. He wore a white mask, very plain and creepy, as he taped the note to the front door. Finally, he rang the bell and ran off.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “None of the guys working the perimeter spotted him, which suggests that he’s either an insider or very skilled. We searched the area, but we didn’t find him.”
“When did this note appear?”
“An hour ago.”
I nearly gagged. A fucking hour ago? “How many people saw it?”
“None,” Cox said. “I answered the door and found the note.”
“Good.” I shoved it into my pocket. “This sort of insinuation can ruin me, especially at this point, even if it isn’t true.”
He nodded but said nothing, watching the video again.
Somebody was coming at me and coming at me hard. Cox said he thought it could be an insider, and I completely agree with that assessment. I was sure that he was going through every single person in the mansion and checking their backgrounds over again, but I doubted that would turn up much of anything. Whoever it was, they knew what they were doing.
Cox was good, and he had brought in new men, but how much could we trust the new guys? As far as I knew, they were men that Cox vetted and hired, but people made mistakes. Evelyn was uncomfortable around them, and I didn’t blame her. Just having a bunch of new people in the mansion that I didn’t know annoyed me and put me on edge, even if they were security.
But I couldn’t go on some wild witch-hunt. That wouldn’t do any good, and it would only tip off the media that something was happening. I needed to keep my head down and trust that Cox would catch this guy before something bad happened.
“Update me on what you find. I’ll be in the lab.”
Cox nodded and I quickly left the room.
As I walked, I pulled the note from my pocket and read it again. It was composed of cut out letters from magazines, which is such a classic bad guy note that it almost seemed comical. If it weren’t for the content of the message, I might really laugh at it. Unfortunately, it was too on the nose, too fucking accurate to be anything but seriously threatening.
I had to back off. I didn’t want to, but Evelyn was right. If anyone got a serious whiff of Emily and me, I’d be destroyed, Evelyn would be embarrassed, and Emily would be a laughingstock. It wasn’t just about me anymore; I had to think about Emily and Evelyn.
I couldn’t be a selfish prick anymore, not if I wanted to deserve a girl like Emily. I had to do better. If that meant resisting her and keeping my head down, well, I was going to have to fucking try.
Even if it went against everything that I wanted.
17
Emily
It was everything I imagined it would be. His body felt right, perfect against mine, and his dominating presence only intensified every single gesture, word, and feeling. The setting itself couldn’t have been more perfect with the steam slowly rising in that gorgeous Turkish bath.