Page 17 of Killer Heart (The Chaos Crew 3)

“Oh, by all means. You remember where to find it, right?”

I stood with a bob of my head. “I believe so. I’ll be right back.”

Thankfully, no one offered to join me on my trek into the house. The second I stepped past the door, I darted down the hall to maximize the time I had before they started wondering why I was taking so long.

First I closed the door on the downstairs bathroom so it’d look like someone was inside. Then I slipped up the stairs. I’d already seen all of the rooms on the ground floor, but there were a few upstairs that I hadn’t been shown into. My parents’ and Carter’s bedrooms I wouldn’t expect to get a tour of, but what was behind the third?

The door at the front of the house led to the master bedroom, and Carter’s had a cheeky DO NOT ENTER sign pasted on it. I’d bet Iris just loved that. But hey, he was a teenager. Pissing off his parents was his job, as far as I’d gathered from my limited TV and movie consumption.

I never really had the option to piss anyone off while I was a teenager living in the household. Not that I’d had parents there anyway.

Two doors down from that was one of dark wood with a knob that jarred at my twisting hand. Locked, as I’d expected.

Because I’d expected it, I’d come prepared. I pulled two small pins from my hair—an excellent hiding place for these basic tools—and stuck both into the lock, using one for leverage. I felt my way around the mechanism in a matter of seconds, jerked one of the pins, and the contraption gave with a click, the bolt sliding over.

I palmed both pins and pushed the door open.

The sharp smell of masculine cologne wafted over me, and I recognized the scent my father often wore. It lingered in this room as if he spent a lot of time in it.

Which I’d guess he did. The space was clearly a home office, with built-in bookshelves along two walls and a sturdy mahogany desk stacked with papers—a little more haphazardly than I’d have imagined my straightlaced father would have stood for. I glanced over them carefully, getting a sense of a personal system of organization that I couldn’t decipher immediately.

The wall behind the desk held several framed photos, a few of family, others of important work events, including one where Damien had met a previous president and shaken his hand. I took out my phone and snapped a few pictures as my gaze skimmed over them. My attention settled on a larger frame to the right of the photos.

This frame held a piece of parchment that was yellowed with age, though otherwise in excellent condition. It held a column of writing in brown ink, most of the characters symbols I didn’t recognize. Next to those symbols were an ascending sequence of four-digit numbers: 1903, 1904, 1905… all the way to 1928.

Were those years? Why did my father have a paper about something from a century ago in his office? Did it have some political or historical significance? Nothing about it made sense to me, and that unnerved me just a little.

I took a picture of that document too, just in case the guys knew what to make of it.

I only spent another few seconds scanning the surfaces in the room before backing into the hallway and relocking it. I was running out of time, and I couldn’t risk someone finding me snooping around. I padded back down the stairs quietly and turned toward where my family waited for me outside, taking a brief detour to open the downstairs bathroom again.

The sunlight had just started beaming straight through the bathroom’s large, glazed window. It streaked across the hallway on an angle. As I walked through the swath of brighter light, my eyes caught on a detail on the floor that made me pause.

Something about the carpet by the wall just a few feet down from the bathroom was… different from the surface around it. Just a tad flatter than the rest. A slight indent that was a ghost of the more obvious wear in front of the bathroom door I’d just left behind.

As if there was another doorway here that had seen periodic traffic.

All I could see next to that spot was a seamless wall with its striped red-and-gray wallpaper. I frowned, tilting my head to the side as I stepped in to take a closer look—and my mother’s voice echoed through the house.

“Rachel, are you all right?”

I jerked back my reaching hand as if I’d been burned. I couldn’t delay here any longer. Besides, there might not be anything unusual about the spot I’d noticed at all. Maybe a piece of furniture like a side table had once stood there, and it’d caused the wear.

“I’m coming,” I called, forcing my voice to sound friendly. I turned on my heel and strode back toward the lunch my family had prepared for me.

I’d found nothing. Nothing to prove the Hunter’s warnings right, and all possible evidence that I had a loving, concerned family.

I couldn’t let myself get so paranoid that I wrecked everything good I’d found for myself over the ravings of a stranger.

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