Page 94 of Kings & Chaos

The rest of the drawers were equally unhelpful, and I scanned the room, looking for something else that might lead me to Emma.

Talk to me Emma. Help me find you.

I didn’t think about what it meant that I was now talking to Emma like she could hear me.

I couldn’t.

Mrs. Giordana raised her voice from down the hall outside the study, along with the voice of a man.

Unsurprising, but it meant my time alone was coming to an end.

My gaze snagged on the bookshelves. There were books there, obviously, but there was something else, on the bottom shelf.

I hurried across the room and bent to take a closer look.

Binders. Four of them.

Labels had been neatly printed on each one: GENARRO, RAA, GLOBAL LTD, NEON CORP.

I didn’t have time to look through them all. I was guessing I had about three minutes before Ruth Giordana came walking through the door expecting me to be finished taking pictures.

I pulled the binder labeled GENARRO because it felt familiar, because duh, my family was Italian.

I opened it right there on the floor and immediately came to a topographical map. It took me a few seconds to orient myself around what I was seeing, then I saw the big structure at the center and understood.

It was a map of the woods surrounding Aventine. The school’s campus was almost at the center. Blackwell Falls was at the far edge of the map, outside of the trees, the quarry almost opposite, not quite as far from campus but still a long way away.

In the woods, I spotted the cabin that had burned down, the word GENARRO scrawled across it.

And there was something else — lines drawn from the cabin labeled GENARRO to three other structures just like it.

There were three other cabins.

These ones had names too — familiar names — and I looked at the binders on the shelf and found their matches.

GLOBAL LTD, RAA, NEON CORP.

Each cabin had a binder.

I took a picture of the map, flipped the page on the GENARRO binder, and was immediately assaulted with a bunch of legal jargon.

Fuck.

I started snapping pictures of every page. I would have to read them later, when I was out of the Giordana house.

I was ten pages in when I heard the front door close.

I took two more pictures, shut the binder, and put it back on the shelf. I was still on the floor when Mrs. Giordana walked into the room.

“I’m sorry, but I think it’s time for you to—” I scrambled to my feet. “What’s going on?”

“Oh my god,” I said. “I thought I dropped my earring under the bookcase — my parents gave them to me on my eighteenth birthday — but it was stuck in my hair.”

She stared at me. Was it a beat too long? Was she suspicious?

“I think it’s time for you to leave,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “I think I have enough material.”

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