Page 55 of Midnight Salvation

Ash

Xavier and Jordan found me staring at the moon, my heart filled with hatred.

“What do you want me to do with the body?” Jordan asked.

“Leave it for Uncle Eli to find. It’s about time they started to clean up their own messes,” I replied.

Lucas joined us. “I’m sorry, Ash. I never knew.” His hand rested on my shoulder. “Marigold must have suffered terribly over the years.”

Yet, she never once burdened me with her loss. I would have tried to move heaven and earth to find my sister.

“Can someone get her out?” I asked.

“Leave it with me,” Jordan said. “Dylan has her under close guard, but we all know that every so often, eyes get taken off the ball.”

I nodded and retrieved the book from my pocket. “Try some of these for what they gave Lucrezia. As soon as I saw it, I remembered Uncle Eli taking us into the woods behind Blackwood Manor and showing us the area that he and Dad had dedicated to their herb growing.”

Lucas took it and started to flick through it. “I’m going to head to the hospital and see Lucrezia.”

“Mum is with her,” I said. She didn’t need to know that I knew about Nicole or whatever she would have called her.

“I won’t say a word,” Lucas promised. “If that piece of shit in there knew about this, then my guess is that his brother did, too.”

I nodded slowly. “We might have time to visit Noah tonight.”

“Why the hell not?” Xavier replied. “I may as well do it all in one night and save Cassandra worrying about me twice.”

Jordan had already researched where both my cousins were earlier, and we decided to go with Josh since he was the more evil of the two. Uncle Bart had one daughter he kept hidden far from the world in his home in Greece with his wife. He lived two lives, one here in England and one in Greece. His wife and daughter rarely stepped onto our shores. It was probably a wise decision.

“Then I’ll stay, too,” Lucas said. “I’ll study this book in the car and see if any of these match Lucrezia’s symptoms. The doctor said she was responding to the steroids when I phoned him before we left.”

Noah’s house was on the outskirts of London and more of a fortress than Josh’s. He took his security seriously and had guards patrolling the perimeter at regular intervals. Too regular. That allowed us to know where the gaps were.

We slipped into the grounds directly after the guard’s latest tour. Four shadows crept across the garden to blend in with the other shadows at the side of the house. Josh had been easy to capture, but Noah was a different creature. He prided himself on being a Blackwood and had embraced every privilege that brought him. He reminded me of Michael more than anyone else in my family. Both the babies and horrible people.

The guilt I first felt when Michael was killed had dulled back down to the normal revulsion I had for my youngest brother. For a while, I had been pissed that I had been there and unable to prevent his death, but after seeing everything my family had been plotting behind my back, I was glad there was one less problem to worry about.

Noah’s security system was more elaborate, and Jordan scratched his head through his balaclava a few times with his screwdriver as he studied it. He burned several wires to make it look like a power flare and an alarm went off somewhere to the back of the house.

“Front it is then,” Jordan muttered, leading the way to the wooden front door. He picked the lock with expert precision, so no one would ever know it had been tampered with.

The front entrance hall was still and dark, voices echoing from the rear of the house where all the security officers were looking for the source of the alarm activation.

Xavier took point, signalling that he and I would sweep the bottom floor, and Jordan and Lucas take the first floor. We moved from room to room in Noah’s house. There was nothing suspicious in it. Xavier used his heat detector and there was nothing under us at the front of the house. He aimed it at walls since our fathers had a tendency to have hidden rooms far from prying eyes.

The darkness was our cloak that allowed us to move between rooms, our footsteps silent on the thick pile of the carpet.

“I don’t care,” Noah said from outside the library door. “Check the entire house. There have been too many coincidences lately for my liking.” He stormed into the room we were in and flung himself into a chair, lifting his phone from the table.

Xavier and I pressed into the wall behind the wooden steps to try and camouflage ourselves. Luckily, he only had a lamp on in the room that left the side we were on in relative darkness.

“Dad? Yeah, I was just checking in as my alarms went off and you said to let you know if anything strange happened. No, I haven’t heard from Ash. He barely looks at me when we are called to a family meeting. Why would he contact me?”

There was silence as Uncle Eli must have been talking in the background.

“Oh. I thought he was engaged to Nicole? Then why would you shoot his business partner with thallium?” Another pause. “I see. Well, Lucas has been a royal pain in the ass for years and deserves his comeuppance. Fine. I’ll check in with Josh. He’s probably playing with one of his toys as we speak. He got a new boy a few weeks ago and seems to be particularly taken with him. I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

Noah hung up and I met Xavier’s eyes. I took a step back and quickly texted our doctor Paul to fill him in about the Thallium before sliding my phone into my back pocket. It never occurred to me that they would use that sort of weapon, but then again, Uncle Eli had had his fingers in the weapons game for years. He probably had bullets laced with every sort of toxin imaginable.

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