Page 98 of Carbon

“I can’t. Not with millions of people watching me. I’ll have a heart attack.”

He shrugged. “A touch drastic, but it would do the trick.”

Was he serious? I looked for a clue that he was joking but got nothing.

“I can’t. I just can’t. There must be other options.”

“Sure. We can keep tapping our networks and hope we get lucky or wait for Leroux’s next victim to show up in the hospital.”

That wasn’t fair, trying to pile the blame on me, but he was unrepentant. And his gaze hurt. The way it drilled into me, I could still feel the pain even when I looked away.

Emmy left his side and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “It wouldn’t be that bad. It’s not like there’d be loads of people in the studio, just the production crew.”

“But I’d know people were watching it.” My family, people I went to school with, Gregory, the villagers in Sandlebury. “I’d fall apart.”

“And that’s why we need you to do it.”

“What about the motorbike? Can’t you try to trace that again?”

Yes, I knew I was clutching at straws, but I reached out anyway.

“Not if he isn’t riding it.”

The image of Ben’s bloody face on the hospital security camera played across my mind. What would happen next time? Would Leroux get out the knife he seemed so fond of? And if Ben did get badly hurt, I knew I’d look back and wish I’d tried everything to help him, even if it meant laying myself bare in front of a television audience.

And that also meant I had the bargaining chip I needed.

I clasped my hands together to stop them from shaking. “I’ll do it on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“I want to know everything that’s going on. Who the hell is this second client that everyone’s so cagey about?”

“That isn’t my decision to make.”

Sofia slumped into her chair, staring at nothing. She looked rougher today than I’d ever seen her. “Tell her. Just fucking tell her.”

Emmy shrugged, and I steeled myself for her words, unsure whether I’d want to hear them. But I needed to.

“Mack and Luke are experimenting with a program that keeps a watch for people on Blackwood’s wanted list via our DNA database. Not just for exact matches. It also evaluates the samples for close matches—parents, children, siblings—in case they can lead us to our targets.”

“And Ben’s one of your targets?”

“Yes. Our system flagged him up right after Nye entered the DNA results from Angelica’s autopsy.”

“What did Ben do?” I whispered.

This was getting worse and worse.

“Nothing. He was on our list because his sister’s looking for him.”

A little of the load lifted from my shoulders. “There’s been a mistake. Ben doesn’t have a sister. I mean, I’ve known him since we were little, and he doesn’t have any siblings at all.”

“Correction: Ben doesn’t know he has a sister.”

“But—”

This time Sofia interrupted, and when I looked, she had tears streaming down her cheeks. “My mother left with him when I was four. Luke found a photo taken at your school sports day when Ben was nine, and my mother was in it, cheering him on in the egg and fucking spoon race. While my daddy molested me daily in our fucking perfect-from-the-outside house in fucking Ohio, and the neighbours all said what a great father he was for raising me alone, my mother was dealing with eggs and fucking spoons.”

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