Page 92 of The Lost Heiress
Florence nodded. “Yes.”
They ate at the Peruvian restaurant, and Charles paid for their dinner. He stayed a week. He found a nice apartment for them on a quiet cobblestone street in the sixteenth arrondissement and rented it under a false name. Before he left, he took Florence aside and said he’d send her a weekly allowance to get them by.
“Take care of her, will you?” Charles said.
Florence nodded and promised him that she would.
Eight weeks later, Astrid was dead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
August 28, 1982—The Night Of Saoirse’s Birthday Party
Ana glanced down at the velvet purse she carried in her left hand. A clutch, it was called, because you had to clutch it to carry it; there was no handle. She’d been fearful the bag would be too small to fit the snub-nosed revolver, that it would bulge and give her away. But the bag was roomier than it looked at first glance, and the gun was so compact and slender that it fit easily into her purse with her compact mirror, powder, and lipstick.
Ana had stolen away from the party early. She could still hear the loud bass of the band playing and the hum of conversation as she crept up the stairs. She had one object in mind—Ransom’s notebook. Ana hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind since she’d first laid eyes on it that night in their hotel room—the daily journal of Ransom’s private thoughts. It was the very thing she’d thought she’d had when she’d taken the black notebook from his locked desk drawer several weeks prior, only to find out it was a sketchbook instead. But this time, she was sure. The only tricky part about obtaining it was that Ransom always had it with him. Which meant it was only at Cliffhaven when Ransom was there. Which meant that Ana’s opportunities to steal it were few and farbetween. But tonight, with the distraction of Saoirse’s party, she finally had the perfect chance. As host, Ransom would be occupied all night, and the staff was busy catering to the guests, leaving the hallway of the family wing empty, free of prying eyes.
When Ana reached the second floor, she took off her shoes—the straps of her heels had rubbed the backs of her ankles raw, and they stung. She padded silently down the hallway and stopped outside Ransom’s room. She glanced left and then right, and when she was sure that she was alone, she reached for the doorknob. But before she could turn it, the door opened on its own.
Ransom stood there in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, the buttons under his collar undone. He had a drink in his hand, and he looked harried.
“Ana?” he said. “I thought I heard someone out here.”
Ana’s heart leaped into her throat, and she took a step back. “Ransom,” she said. Her mind was a fog. “I—I, um, saw you leave the party early. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
It was the first lie she could think of, and she wondered if it landed, because she could give fuck all if he was all right. She hadn’t really seen him leave the party. In truth, she’d seen him leave the dance floor for the bar. She figured he was still carousing with his guests—and if not carousing, then at least, well, present. It seemed rude for him to leave his own party so early.
“Am I all right?” he echoed her, as if it were a question he was wondering himself. “Come in. Have a drink with me.”
Ransom took a step back to make room for her. She hesitated, but what choice did she have? She’d just told him she’d come up to check on him. Ana clutched her purse to her stomach, and she could feel the hard metal barrel of the gun pressing into her, just north of her belly button, and its presence gave her some reassurance. She took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold; Ransom closed the door behind her.
He busied himself at his liquor cabinet, and Ana surveyed the room, her head still spinning from the sudden turn of events. There wasa fire going in the hearth behind him. The doors to his balcony were open, ushering in a cool breeze and the sounds from the party below.
“Please, sit,” Ransom said as he handed her a glass of brandy, neat.
She took a seat on the sofa, next to the fireplace, and kept her purse close on her lap. Ransom sat in the armchair across from her, between her and the door.
“So tell me, Ana,” he said, sitting back. “Who are you, really?”
He looked at her so coldly, without feeling, that it sent a shiver down her spine.
“What?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. The question threw her off guard. What did he mean, who was she? She would have thought it was a joke if it weren’t for the cold look in his eyes and his unforgiving tone.
“I know you’re not who you’ve pretended to be,” Ransom said. “You are not Ana Rojas, twenty-three, nursing student from California State University, San Bernardino.”
He recited the most basic facts about her—her name, her age, her occupation. All those things laid out on the résumé she’d given him. All of them damningly false.
Ana shifted in her seat. She brought her glass to her lips and took a sip just to buy herself some time as she grappled for a response. Here it was, then, the moment she had been dreading, the thing that kept her up at night: that she would be exposed, caught, found out, before she was ready. Before she had accomplished what she had come here to do.
“You should know that the NDA you signed upon your employment is still binding,” Ransom said, his voice so hard and cold it sounded foreign to her. “Signing a false name is fraud, and I plan to prosecute you to the full extent of the law. And if you should ever be so foolish as to put pen to paper, know this: I have vast resources at my disposal and a lethal team of lawyers.”
Ana’s mind was grappling with his words, trying to make sense of them.Put pen to paper?What was he talking about?
Ransom leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, looking at her intently.
“Everything you have, I will take from you,” he said, his voice like ice, subhuman. “Every person you love, I will hunt them down. I will bury them in lawsuits so labyrinthine and costly that I will drain from them every penny they have ever made. I will bring down upon you and everyone you know a hellfire of litigation so intense that you will rue the day you stepped foot inside this house. I will make scorched earth of you.”
The breath left Ana’s body, as if she had been slammed against a wall. Once, she’d been in the front passenger seat while teaching her younger brother Jorge how to drive. They’d been going down a back road at night when a coyote had darted in front of their car. Jorge veered right, slamming on the brakes, and they skidded off the road, over the embankment, and landed upside down on the roof of their car in the dirt, twenty yards from where they’d left the road. Ana would forever remember the strange feeling of being so forcefully and unexpectedly knocked off center. The feeling of going so steadily, so assuredly in one direction, only to be slammed in another one altogether. To lose all sense of which way was up or down. As the car rolled, Ana’s seat belt had hugged her body so tightly that it cut into the skin of her collarbone, and afterward, she’d had a bruise across her chest for weeks, so tender that it hurt to breathe.
