Page 83 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
Mr. Wyatt:Oh. That? That wasn’t a threat.
Inspector Patel:Oh really? Then what would you call it?
Mr. Wyatt:A warning.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Maggie
Maggie came awake slowly. Head pounding. Body aching. Mouth tasting like pennies and bad decisions. For a moment, she just lay there, shaking from the cold or the shock or maybe both.
Who was she kidding? It was totally both.
She couldn’t quite remember where she was or why her mattress felt like cold concrete. But then she realized... that’s because she was lying on cold concrete.
She needed to get up, but the room was spinning slightly, a swirl of grays and blues that kept coming in and out of focus. It looked like the galaxy through a high-powered telescope. Like the universe, big and mysterious and all around you—and also incredibly far away. She wanted to tell Ethan about it. She wanted to...
Ethan.
Another picture filled her mind then: Ethan’s face in black and white, making Eleanor laugh before handing her a tray full of poison. Ethan smirking and glaring as he turned and walked away from the scene of the crime. Ethan staring down at the nanny cam in Maggie’s arms like it was a land mine, like it was going to blow his life to smithereens.
Ethan.
That one word was enough to make the world stop spinning, rooting Maggie to the spot as her head cleared and the room came into focus. Concrete floor. Long tables. Dead plants. And the eerie silver shadows of moonlight shining through frosty glass.
Maggie had to get out of here. She had to get warm and stop shaking. She had to... Well, she actually didn’t know everything she had to do, but step one seemed pretty obvious,so she tried to push herself upright and look around the greenhouse—she tried to scoot away—but her hands were bound behind her back. And that was the fact that broke her.
Even Maggie couldn’t convince herself that this was her fault. She hadn’t had an accident or gone sleepwalking or gotten blackout drunk. She hadn’t tied her own hands behind her back because Maggie couldn’t even zip her own dresses. So she couldn’t blame herself for this one. She could only blame—
She saw Ethan’s face on the laptop’s screen and closed her eyes, forcing out a single tear even though crying wouldn’t help. She’d cried in the wine cellar. She’d screamed and clawed and no one had heard her. No one had cared because Maggie had picked the wrong friend and the wrong guy and...
Some things never change. But Maggie had.
She was going to get out of here. She was going to get help. And she was going to start by rolling over because her arms were killing her and something sharp was piercing into her backside and...
Maggie stopped wiggling. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out something hard and plastic. She flicked a switch, then watched as a bright, white beam swept across glass and snow and plants made out of poison.
Well, Maggie had to say this for Ethan Freaking Wyatt: at least he’d given her a flashlight.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Ethan
The fear that Ethan had felt ten minutes before was slowly—rapidly—turning into panic. Because Maggie hadn’t just run away from him.She’d disappeared.She wasn’t just mad. She was missing.
He knew it like he knew his own name, his own hands, his own ghosts. He knew she’d never forgive him and, worse, he’d never forgive himself if he couldn’t find her. It had taken months of surgeries and rehab to regain the use of his right arm, but this... He would never recover from this.
So Ethan ran faster, toward the stairs at the back of the house, praying she’d gone to the tower to try to make a call. But as he passed a window, something made him slow and look outside, praying she wasn’t out there. There was nothing but ice and snow and freezing wind. Nothing but—
Headlights shooting straight up into the sky like they were trying to summon a hero.
The flashlight shook in his hands. His breath fogged on the glass. But Ethan couldn’t move. Because he wasn’t on a staircase in England anymore. He was on a mountain just outside of Aspen.
The snow was blowing too hard and piling on the road. He should turn around, go back. But his mom wasn’t coming back, so why should he?
SoEthan regripped the wheel and kept his gaze on the heavy snowflakes that were slicing through his high beams. They looked like stars and he’d just turned on his hyperdrive—like he was about to make the leap to light speed. His life was getting ready to change. He just didn’t know how.
Not when the road curved. Not when he saw the beams of the headlights sticking straight up into thesky. Not even when he climbed down the icy cliff.
