Page 242 of Like Grim Death: Part One
Ella swallows, and I turn to look at her as she lifts her chin, nervous, but refusing to back down from Sid.
Lucifer is still staring at his wife though. “Why didn’t you come to me with this?” he asks quietly, realizing she knows something he doesn’t.
Sid glances at him, wetting her bottom lip, suddenly looking apprehensive. “After last night, it didn’t seem like the right time. And because you’re hiding shit from me,” she finally says.
Lucifer doesn’t react at all.
I laugh, the sound biting through the night as everyone turns to glare at me. “This is great, really.” I shrug my shoulders, hands in the pockets of my black bomber jacket as I glance around at all of us. “Each one of us keeping secrets, fucking each other over, putting our goddamn families in danger.” There’s a bite to my words I can’t hide behind twisted humor. “While we’re in the middle of afuckingwar with Mikhail Lazar-Clone Malikov circling around myfuckingnephew, we’re just keeping our mouths shut on shit that mightsave each other’s fucking lives, huh?”
Lucifer smiles, dimples flashing in the night. He takes a step closer, toward the center of the circle, towardme.“Don’t be so self-righteous, Maverick.” His gaze slides to Ella. “Have you beat your plaything’s secrets out ofheryet?”
“Liar’s Island!” Ella hisses the words, coming to stand next to me, all of us taking a step toward each other except Brooklin, who is a foot or so behind me. Ella’s green eyes dart from Lucifer to Sid and back again, her jaw clenched. “What is it? Where is it? Why did Samson take a photo of it and post it was where the children went todie?Is that why he’s dead? Did Atlas have to…kill him? To keep some kind of… Some kind of fucking pedophile island a secret?” Ella continues, her words frantic as she looks around the circle, her eyes lastly landing on Lucifer. “This is important,” she says, the same words she spoke to me when I wanted to fucking kill Atlas. She told me there was more she was keeping from me, and she thought it was urgent and maybe I could help. “This means something, Lucifer. So stop deflecting and answer the question.”
Part of me thought her confession was a diversion from her own indiscretions with taking pills from Atlas, and that confrontation is still forthcoming. But then she told me everything, including the factSidwanted to keep this secret, the same fucking night Sid attacked her. No wonder she went off in search of drugs from Atlas. She’s been fucked over and fucked around by too many of my family.
“Pedophileisland?” Lucifer repeats, his words cold. “What thefuckare you talking about?”
“She showed me in the hallway atyourmansion,” Ella snaps back, her fingers pointed in Lucifer’s direction. I wonder if she’s thinking of her mom. If she assumes Sid got those papers I haven’t seen yet from somewhere inside Liber. If she’s thinking of all the ways Kim used her own daughter to get her next fix. “Why?What is it?”
“There’s a newspaper clipping,” Sid finally speaks up in a less-than-antagonistic tone, her voice matching Lucifer’s chill. “A link to a website. It requires a password to enter, and it’s all of your names.” She darts her eyes to me as chills crawl down my spine. “And… Rain’s birthday.”
Lucifer straightens, rearing back a little like he’s been struck.
My mouth goes dry as I glance behind him, seeing my nephew’s sleeping face in his rear-facing car seat. “And Shadow Villa,” I whisper quietly, thinking I should have paid more attention to that, but now we’re exposing all these creepy places, I need to bring it up. “It’s the only thing I could find on RC anywhere. We went there before.” I remember my father hitting me when he told me not to open a certain door. The way Lucifer was so withdrawn.
Now, he stares at his wife, like he’s seeing someone he doesn’t know.
“The site is how I found Samson’s deleted posts. There’s one in a rowboat, taken of an island, a house… Liar’s Island,” Sid finishes, her eyes searching Lucifer, trying to find something there. Something that tells her this isn’t as bad as it looks, and that he didn’t know about it.
Isure as fuck didn’t know, and I have no idea how Sid found any of this out.
“Where are the papers?” Lucifer asks quietly, coldly.
Sid swallows. “In the hotel. In my… bag.”
Lucifer nods once. All we have is Sid and Ella’s word to go on, but that’s enough. It’s time we started including them in shit. It’s time we startedbelievingthem.
“What happened at these places?” I whisper, still staring at Lucifer, wondering if he remembers more than I can. “Shadow Villa, Liar’s Island, what happened?”
“Is it sex trafficking? Is it some kind of resort for pedophiles? Is it—” Sid starts.
“Liar’s Island isn’t for pedophiles.” At the sound of Brooklin’s low tone, my pulse jumps. I almost forgot she was here.
Turning my head, I watch as she stalks over to join us, her red-bottomed heels clicking on the pavement. She looks up at me, her eyes wide and wet. “It’s a refuge,” she whispers. “Aunt Edith owns the island.”
Aunt Edith.Elijah’s wife.
The kidnapping…Was I wrong about Jeremiah all along? Wrong that it was some way to distract us and let him escape? Was it an inside job, to teach Elijah a lesson? That his wife couldn’t harbor… “A refuge forwho?”I press, turning to stare at my sister with narrowed eyes.
My knees suddenly feel weak though, the longer she gazes at me. She blinks once, twice, her mascara starting to streak at the inner corners of her blue eyes. I think back to her asking me about Malachi. About all the things I can’t remember about him. About the fact, as she said, there were once three of us in that house.
“I went there once,” she says, her voice cracking. “Mom and Dad sent me to Shadow Villa too.” Her entire body shudders as she closes her eyes.
I feel dizzy, like I might faint.
It’s the first time I’ve seen my sister look weak since we got her back from Jeremiah.
“I don’t remember it all. Flashes of things, really.” She swallows, her breaths shallow as her chest heaves beneath her leather jacket. “I was in a church, on a floor. There were… cameras.”
