Page 458 of Shadowblood Souls
Not a basic supply room, then.
Keeping my ears pricked for any sound of approach, I move to the boxes next. My fingers unfold the flaps on the first.
I find myself staring at a heap of folded clothing. Tentatively, I pull the top piece out and let it unfurl from my grasp.
It’s a dress—light and casual in blue cotton. Made for someone maybe a few inches taller than me.
A faint, clover-like scent drifts off it. The remnants of that someone’s perfume?
The next couple of articles—a blouse and another dress—look to be part of the same wardrobe. The next item I lift up is a band T-shirt that’s a very different fashion statement.
It’s bigger, too. I don’t think it’d fit the same person who wore the dresses and the blouse. The cargo shorts and scuffed jeans I unearth next give me distinctively masculine vibes too.
My mind darts back to the photograph I saw in the western wing. Balthazar with the woman and the little boy.
That was from a while ago, based on Balthazar’s and Toni’s more youthful appearances. The boy would have grown up.
But why would our captor be keeping pieces of clothing from his wife and son in a locked storage room… and opening the box up to check on them regularly?
My uneasiness grows as I dig farther. In the bottom of the box, I find a wooden jewelry box that holds a few necklaces, rings, and a bracelet that don’t look like something you’d just toss aside.
Unless the owner wasn’t able to wear them anymore.
Balthazar’s wife doesn’t need to approve of what he’s doing these days if she isn’t around to see it.
I swallow hard and return the clothes to the box in as close to their previous order and state as I can manage. After closing it up, I move on to the other recently opened container.
The second box only adds confidence to my suspicions. The books, the deck of cards, the grubby baseball, and the other objects inside all strike me as keepsakes. Memorabilia of times past.
That room in the western wing might simply be a larger version of the same idea. His son’s childhood bedroom, preserved like it’s in a museum.
How long has Balthazar lived in this villa? What did he do here while his family was with him?
A corner of what looks like a photograph pokes out from the largest of the books. I tug at the faux leather cover to free it and realize it’s a scrapbook.
More of the sweet clover smell drifts up when I ease the book open. Did Balthazar’s wife put this together?
The scrapbook appears to document their lives after the birth of their son. It starts with photos of the delicate-looking woman I saw before with an even more youthful Balthazar, her belly bulging with pregnancy.
Then there are a couple of pages of the couple with their newborn baby, and more as their son grows from toddler to child to teenager. Family trips, birthday parties, random candids…
My gaze snags on one birthday cake. I can just make out the lettering on the icing:Happy Birthday Peter!
Peter. Didn’t Andreas mention something about that name when we shared all our observations in the pool?
Ajax had heard it in Balthazar’s thoughts years ago, in a memory Drey peeked into. He thought our captor might have been thinking about a colleague.
But he wasn’t. Even in the facility, overseeing his work, he’d had his family on his mind.
Continuing through the scrapbook, I pause over a couple of pictures that might hold clues to Balthazar’s interests beyond his family. There’s one with a slightly older man who might be a colleague, but I don’t recognize his face.
In another, Balthazar and his wife are poised outside a building with a polished marble face. A stylized metal symbol like a wave arcing over a cloud is fixed to the wall next to the door, maybe some kind of company logo?
Balthazar has his hand resting on it with a proprietary air. But I’ve never seen the symbol before, not in or around any of the facilities.
Every photo is painstakingly fixed to the pages with stickers and decorative tape chosen to match the theme. Running my fingers over the textured surface, I can almost taste how much love and care the curator put into her creation.
There are a couple of photos in which the son looks about the same age as Nadia and Booker—late teens. I turn the page and freeze with a hitch of my pulse.
