Page 73 of Caged in Desire
Sasha flashes me a grin I’ve seen way too many times growing up. “I can get you out of here, you know. What do you say? Wanna have some fun?”
I stare at him long enough to make him uncomfortable, or at least I hope it does. After nineteen years of being stuck in my family’s compound,nowhe offers to sneak me out? All of the times Ibeggedhim to take me to the movies, or a theme park, or for just a coffee.
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
“Wow,” Sasha says, looking around at the destroyed room. “Whoever’s behind this really hates you, huh?”
“I suppose so.”
Standing here again feels different from before. The adrenaline of sneaking past the Sinclairs has faded, and I’m feeling a mix of yearning to be back home laced with suspense and fear.Sneaking outis hardly the word for what happened. I walked right out the front door while Sasha fed the family false tales of his life in Russia. I honestly don’t even think he’s ever even visited there.
In a more relaxed state, I’m able to take in the condition of the room much better than I did right after the shock of it all. Walking Sasha over to the creepy adjoining room, I show him the window used as the entry point.
“And you really have no idea who it is?” he asks, measuring his stride back to my old room, as if that’s going to help us catch the intruder.
“Our only suspect turned up dead a few days ago,” I say, making my way back into the room and trying my best to notice anything helpful. It’s hard to tell if anything is missing because I moved most of my important items into Henry’s room weeks ago. Anything left behind would be easily forgotten.
“Oh yeah? Who did you have in mind?” he asks, following me.
Turning around, I watch as my cousin inspects every surface I walk by. “There was a man I ran into a few weeks ago who posed as our fill-in groundskeeper—”
Sasha freezes, the color in his face gone. “What was his name?”
“Tommy, or Timothy, I think.”
“Goddammit,” he whispers, running a hand through his hair before bringing it to cover his face. I stand frozen as well, not having the slightest idea what to say. Sighing, he continues. “I hired Tommy, Kat. He was just here to keep an eye on you. Tomake sure you were safe.Fuck!” he yells, kicking a pulled-out drawer that was lying on the ground.
“Oh, I’m…I’m sorry…”
I’m still immobilized as I watch my cousin mourn the life of this man who essentially died watching over me, feeling a bit of remorse for him as well. Not only that his life was taken while his job was to keep an eye on me, but because I judged him so poorly.
Sasha pulls himself together with a renewed ambition in his stance. “We need to find out who this fucker is and stop them,” he says, bracing his hands on my shoulders and looking intently into my eyes. “I need you to thinkreallyhard while we walk through here and see if you can findanythingthat is out of place.”
I shake my head, swallowing at the sudden importance of my role in this outing. With a deep breath, I center myself and look through my room.
Were they just here to hurt me? If so, why would they have made such a mess? And Henry mentioned coming in here earlier to lock the window. So they had been here before and left things tidy.
Were they trying to send a message? If so, why not leave a similar note to the one they delivered to Blanche’s house?
There must besomethingin here they were looking for. Butwhat? All of my valuables are in the room I share with my husband.
“What about this?”
Sasha points at the bookshelf in the corner of the room. Henry had it stocked full of first editions of all my favorite classics before I moved in but left room for me to make additions. I mostly read on my tablet now that Margot and Sloane have me in their spicy romance book club, so I didn’t think to move anything from this shelf.
“What about it?”
As I get closer, he points at a shelf with a book leaning slightly onto the next one, where a gap has formed. “I’ve known you all your life, and Iknowyou don’t leave your books like this.”
He’s not wrong. I look at the shelf in front of me, perfectly neat except for that one gap. “Why destroy mywhole roomfor a book that was so obviously on the shelf? And why didn’t they mess this up too?”And why haven’t I noticed how weird this is?
“To throw you off,” Sasha says with a shrug. “So what kinda sorcery books do you have that are so important, KitKat?”
Rolling my eyes, I look at the shelf again. “These were just some books from the archives in the library. I was reading up on the estate’s history in my free time before Henry and I started fu…when I was bored at home by myself. There’s no telling what it was about.”
Sasha steps back, his attention going from me to the missing book. “Well, whatever is in that book must be fucking important.”
Chapter thirty-five
