Page 76 of Devil's Riches

“Answer the fucking question, and you can have that whole container,” Nate replied, staring down at her impassively.

“I… I can’t. I don’t want you to find them. They’ll kill you.”

I pulled on Nate’s shirtsleeve and took him aside. “I think we have to give them something, because they’ll literally die if we don’t,” I whispered. “But they’re still refusing to talk. So what should we do?”

His lips twisted as he considered it. “Let’s just give them a few bites now—enough to stop them from dying on us—and then we’ll leave them for another couple of days. See if that’s enough to break them.”

“Okay.”

I went back over to Annalise and Greg and opened the container again. Nate pulled a fork out of his pocket and used it to slop a few morsels of the deliciously-scented casserole onto the concrete floor.

“Enjoy,” he said with a cold smile. “We’ll be back when you’re ready to talk.”

We returned to the mansion and trudged upstairs to Nate’s bedroom. “Let’s sleep for now,” he said. “We’ll figure out what to do tomorrow.”

I nodded with assent. It was after two in the morning, and I was thoroughly exhausted after everything we’d done over the last ten hours. Some sleep would help to remove the fuzz from my brain. It might even allow me to figure out what the hell Greg meant when he said that we’d missed something huge.

I climbed into bed and fell into a fitful, tormented sleep, filled with nightmares. When the morning came, I opened my eyes to see Nate walking into the room with two coffees and a plate of my favorite croissants. I was naked, because I was too tired to get into pajamas the previous night, but Nate didn’t look at my body.

A line seemed to have been drawn in the sand when I told him I couldn’t forgive him. Because of that, I doubted he would try to have sex with me again. That would make it a lot easier for me to tamp down my feelings for him, so in the end, I knew it was a good thing. However, at the same time, I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that I’d lost something.

After breakfast, I got dressed and went to the library with Nate, intent on figuring out the big thing we’d supposedly missed. Nate thought Greg might be messing with our minds to throw us off, but I disagreed. I thought Greg looked genuinely smug when he spoke to us last night, which meant we really had missed something major.

We looked through our notes and talked things through over and over, but after a whole day of that, we had nothing to add to what we already knew. We took a break at seven to have a quiet, melancholy dinner, and then we decided to go to my old apartment in Avalon City to look through the original copies of my father’s research notes. I figured there could be something in them that I’d simply forgotten to write onto the copies I’d created. There could also be something in the water-damaged pages that Nate could glean, even though I’d been over them a thousand times.

Sascha wasn’t home when we arrived at the apartment. I texted her to let her know that I was there in the hope that she’d come back to see me, but she didn’t reply.

“She’s probably out with her friends,” Nate said, correctly interpreting the look of disappointment on my face as I slid my phone into my pocket. He lifted a hand and let it linger near my lower back like he wanted to rub it, but then he pulled it away. “You can come and see her another time.”

We went into my bedroom to pack up my books and notes into shoeboxes. Then we headed back to the Lockwood estate.

Once we were settled in the library again, we searched through the boxes, going over Dad’s old notes and checking for anything I might’ve missed in the past—tiny comments in the margins, scrawled pictures, visible words on the water-damaged pages where the ink hadn’t run too much, or anything that could be a coded message like the ‘stars’ comment in the prison letter.

We kept this up over the next two days, and with every hour that passed, I grew increasingly despondent. There was nothing new in the notes. I’d copied everything I remembered correctly, and Nate hadn’t discovered anything in the water-damaged pages that I didn’t already know about.

On the third day, the answer finally hit me. Literally. I was looking at my father’s notes again, and I cussed and threw them in the air out of frustration. The dotted circle picture with the ‘Bodies???’ notation above it fell down and hit the tip of my nose before falling back onto the table. My blood started prickling at the sight of it, and the back of my neck tightened. Suddenly I felt as if a pair of blinkers had been removed, restoring my full vision.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, abruptly standing up.

Nate glanced up from his side of the table. “What?”

My mind whirled as I stared down at the page. I could feel the logic of it clicking into place, like a key piece of a jigsaw puzzle I’d been staring at for hours without solving.

“Alexis?” Nate said, brows rising.

I finally spoke up. “Greg wasn’t lying. We really did miss something huge,” I said, voice shaking with excitement. I shook my head and scrubbed a palm over the lower third of my face. “I actually feel really stupid right now.”

“Mind telling me so I can feel stupid too?”

I held the page out to Nate. “You remember this picture, right? The one I used to think was a clock?”

“Yeah, of course. We’ve looked at it a hundred times.”

I sat down again. “Even though we figured out that the dots were meant to represent star signs, meaning it’s not a clock, I still kept thinking of it as one for some reason. And I always thought that this dot here…” I paused and pointed to the dot in the middle of the circle. “I thought it was just meant to be something that marked the point where the hands would turn from.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s not a clock, remember? So it has to mean something else,” I said. “Also, this part here—the ‘Bodies???’ comment. That’s what made it hit me. It’s been staring us right in the face the whole time. Think about it. Think about Blackthorne.”

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