Burned Hearts (33 page)

Yes, that was bad.

Mysterious and … devious?

“There's a hell of a lot more going on than them wanting a piece of 10,000 Lux. And I'll figure it out if it's the last thing I do.”

The breath rushed from my lungs.

I
so
did not like his words.

 

chapter 17

Dane left me to go run several miles on the treadmill and then beat the shit out of his punching bag. I considered tagging along, because I didn't want to be away from him, especially when he was so volatile. But I needed food—and he would, too, when he was done expending some of his aggression.

So I made my way to one of the kitchens, with some guidance from a housekeeper or two. The staff from last night offered to cook breakfast and I decided that was a good idea, since my mind was much too hyperactive at the moment. I would have burned anything I'd tried to prepare as I mentally waded through everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Like Dane, I was a bit mind blown myself. For a number of reasons.

I ate without him and then headed back down to the vault. I'd search one piece of paper at a time until I found what we needed.

Dane joined me sometime later, after he'd showered. He started on the opposite side of the vault and we worked our way around the room, not even close to meeting in the middle when Dane jerked an entire file folder from the drawer. A thick one. Three more followed.

“Whatcha got there?” I asked.

Dane sat across me from where I sifted through my own files.

“EBHACVHBWM Holdings. The most god-awful corporation name to register, but all the right initials. Evans, Bax, Hilliard, Avril, Casterelli, Vasil, Hakim, Bent, Wellington.”

“That is monstrous.”

“Doesn't really matter. I highly doubt it was ever put on a business card or commercial real estate sign. Though they apparently had numerous investments.”

“What about the
M
at the end? You didn't have a name associated with it.”

He glanced back at the documents. “Right.”

“What state was the company incorporated in?”

Digging around some more, he eventually said, “A Delaware closed corporation.”

I Googled the Delaware trademarks site, pulled up the exact link I needed, and had Dane rattle off the litany of initials once more. I entered the registry. Nothing came up. But there was a section for dead registrations, so I copied and pasted the name into that form.

Bingo!

I scrolled down to the principals listed as investors. Found all of the members Dane had pinpointed. The last name, however, made my stomach plummet and my heart twist.

“Shit,” I mumbled.

Dane took the iPad from me and scanned the page on-screen. His entire disposition hardened as he stared at a very incriminating piece of evidence we'd never pondered. Would never conceive of pondering.

“William Madsen,” he said through clenched teeth.

My mind worked a little too quickly on this one. Mostly because I was getting used to the threads of betrayal, even if every strand shocked me to the core of my being.

“Brought into the investments by your father?” I queried. “Or planted in your lives by Ethan?”

Dane's head snapped up. We stared at each other.

I let the idea sink in.

Then I asked, “Exactly how well does Mikaela know Ethan Evans?”

Tension visibly gripped Dane. So much for working out his aggression.

He said, “I introduced them when I started work on the Lux.”

“Are you sure that's the first time they met?”

“I can't really be sure about anything, now can I, Ari?”

I winced. “No. But it seems they'd have to have a significant connection for her to smack him twice at the baptism—and not have him react.”

Dane's expression turned grave.

I added, “I saw them, in a nook, remember? Intense conversation, smack. More intense conversation, another smack. The TV drama-type slap, like one woman finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband and he's decided to leave her for the friend—and the pre-nup sucks.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry. Just giving you the severity level.”

“No, it's not you.” He shook his head. “I'm just trying to figure out how this could all be.”

“When did the Madsens buy the estate down the road?”

“They moved in when I was five or six. Amano drove Mikaela and me to and from school for Mrs. Madsen. That's how we became such close friends.”

“Close enough that she would know all about your comings and goings, your plans for the future, how well you did in school, what your special talents might be, like financial forecasting?”

“Ari—”

“Just hear me out,” I rushed on. “She could have easily been a spy for the society without even knowing it. All she had to do was answer casual, unassuming queries from her father, all posed under the guise of taking interest in her day. Since you two were friends, it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for her to tell him everything she knew about you.”

He pressed a finger and thumb to his brows, as though fighting off a migraine. I felt wretched for him.

“That still doesn't make a direct connection with Ethan,” Dane said. “Madsen wouldn't exactly have had him over for Sunday dinner—not if they were both society members; the ties are meant to be secretive. And besides, Madsen was rarely ever home, because he's been a U.S. ambassador since I've known him. He's always been overseas.”

Thinking back to the baptism, I said, “I can understand Mikaela being upset that Ethan knew you were alive and didn't tell her. But enough to hit him? If anything, I thought that rage would be directed toward me. It wasn't. In fact, she was shocked, but not volatile in any way. So why erupt with Ethan?”

“I have no idea. But you can be damn sure I'm going to find out.”

I set aside the iPad. Dane went back to plowing through the files, his frown deepening until it turned into more of a menacing glare. A lot of head shaking ensued.

A good hour or so passed and I said, “Dane, you can't leave me in suspense here.”

“Sorry.” He groaned his disgruntlement. “So, they all went in together on several joint ventures from '78 to '83. But there are all of these receipts”—he held one up for me to see—“that show reimbursement to Bradley Bax for his percentage of the initial investments. One per venture.”

“So he was involved initially, then they cashed him out?”

“Because he backed out?” Dane wondered.

“Possibly. If he started to suspect something fishy.”

Dane got to his feet and prowled the vault. “I was born in 1983. My parents died in 1983.”

“And the last reimbursement came in 1983. Just two weeks before you were born.” I waved the slip from the very back of the last folder in the air.

“Six weeks before they died.”

We stared at each other. Sure, my conspiracy theorist mind went in all different directions, but inevitably it landed on one particular thought. “Is it conceivable that your father realized things weren't going the way they were supposed to with the society, he pulled out, and they let him, for appearance's sake? Even went so far as to give him the money due. And then six weeks later…?”

“They killed him. And my mother was a casualty of war?”

“Victim of circumstance. There's no justifying it. But let's extrapolate.”

He gave me a teasing look, despite the gravity of the situation. “Do you have any idea how sexy it is to hear you use the term
extrapolate
?”

I laughed. “Only a brainiac such as yourself would find that sexy.”

“Okay, maybe it's just you in general.”

“Stay focused.”

“Right.”

“So you said that Ethan had wooed you from the beginning, when you arrived at Harvard. Is it really too far-fetched to assume that he and the other members of the society kept tabs on you from birth? Using Mikaela as a source of information.”

He considered this.

I continued. “Were there indications that you'd end up at Harvard instead of Yale or Princeton or wherever? Did Ethan follow your progress and align himself accordingly, so that the two of you were ‘destined' to meet? And then he recruited you without ever having to mention that you technically
did
fall within the generational rule of the Illuminati?”

“At this point, nothing is too far-fetched. And all of it is fucking bullshit.” Angst rolled off him in waves as we got closer and closer to an absolute revelation he might have to accept. The emotion was mixed with something even stronger—a rage I suspected was related directly to the implication that his parents might have died by society hands.

That would be more excruciating for him to face than Ethan's betrayal.

I kept sifting through the files Dane had extracted from drawers.

“Unfortunately”—I loathed admitting the reality of the situation—“the plot thickens.”

“Ari!” he ground out, tormented.

“Dane.” I'd located the last needle in the haystack. Extracting the gold coin from an accordion sealed folder, I flattened it on my thumb and then flicked my thumb with my index finger, sending the coin Dane's way.

He caught it with one hand. Kept his gaze on me as he opened his fist.

“Final proof,” I simply said.

He tore his emerald eyes from mine and stared at the NOS insignia in his hand.

“Fuck!”

I nodded. I could see how this gutted him, and that pained me, too. But there was no way to hide from this, no way to shove the files and the evidence into the drawers, seal the vault shut, and pretend we never pieced together an insidious puzzle that went well beyond my web on our office wall.

We'd just thrown onto the table the very real possibility that Dane's entire life, his entire existence, was based on a lie.

Worse …

It'd been orchestrated from birth until this very second.

*   *   *

I drifted in and out of sleep while Dane scoured more paperwork, agonized, analyzed, internalized. I couldn't even begin to fathom what churned through his system at this point, while he spent hours grinding over every little tidbit unearthed.

I had known from the age of five what my mother was all about and what my home life would be, how the interactions would play out, and what to expect. As hostile as the environment had been because of her, at least it was predictable.

Even as shitty as my childhood had been when all of my father's money had gone to Maleficent and he hadn't been able to continue to compete professionally because of his shoulder injuries and everything in our life had turned dark and dismal, there had been a huge amount of certainty.

That certainty had all been centered around the fact that my mother was a selfish, money-hungry bitch. There'd not once been any proof otherwise, and she hadn't put any effort into correcting the image or our opinion of her over the years, the decades. If anything, she'd found creative ways to exemplify and perpetuate the role she apparently loved playing.

Unfortunately for Dane, he'd never had a demon staring him so squarely in the face—that demon being the society he'd believed in. Vale Hilliard and Wayne Horton had come damn close to tearing him apart with their Machiavellian plots against me and the Lux, but this was Dane's parents we were talking about.

Chances were very good his father hadn't crossed to the dark side along with Ethan or anyone else. For the most part, all evidence pointed to Bradley doing exactly as Dane had done when he'd discovered things had gone horrifically wrong—finding a way out.

Yet Dane had no one to confront, no one to question. If there'd been a generation of Bax men who'd occupied a seat at the table, they were long since dead and buried. Dane couldn't consult them. And it wasn't as though he could ring up Ethan and ask
him,
right?

Not blatantly at any rate. Not without repercussions we were not at all prepared to deal with at the moment, as we acclimated to this new scenario. This new peril.

To that point, I grew infinitely agitated as we showered and got around the next morning, after packing up all of the documentation Dane had collected and we put the vault back together.

I didn't like being away from Amsel for so long. It made me even more nervous since Dane and I had encountered additional sinister doings. Dane spoke with Amano and assured me all was well back home, but I'd never fully accept that until we were in Sedona and my son was in my arms. So, with no other reason to hang around Philly, we flew home.

Dane was abnormally quiet. Not that he talked much on a regular basis. He was a brooder by nature. I could easily amend that and consider him a ruminator by nature, because he was deep in thought, as usual. I didn't interrupt. I couldn't offer anything to tip the scales for him, so I flipped absently through magazines while he mentally debated everything we'd discovered, his jaw and his fists clenching from time to time.

Dismay set up permanent residency low in my belly, keeping me unsettled.

The matter of what had really gone on between 1978 and 1983, what the Bax family's involvement was with the society, and what had truly happened to his parents were confounding enough. But one other issue reared its ugly head in my mind.

If Ethan discovered we'd pieced the puzzle together, what then?

If he was in cahoots with the corrupt members who'd conspired to destroy the Lux, who'd executed attacks on me, who'd do anything to get what they wanted or thought they deserved or were owed, then all of this
wasn't
over. We'd just added another layer to the danger that darkened our doorstep.

“Don't look so worried,” Dane finally whispered as he leaned toward me and kissed my cheek.

“I can't help it. There are roots buried deep that neither of us ever considered, because you trusted Ethan and didn't know your father's connection with him or the society.”