2
Haley
Dad’s not home for dinner.
I put off cooking, hoping he’ll walk in the door with a bag of takeout.
“You have to stop going in there,” Cash calls from the living room to where I’m standing in the kitchen, staring into the sink like it’ll give me a plan for putting food on the table when anything could be happening to our father. “He’s not going to magically appear.”
I pace back out to the living room and check the driveway for signs of an approaching car. Nothing. “We have to do something.”
“There’s nothing to do.” Cash rubs both hands over his hair and sags back against the couch, neck cushioned by tensed arms. “Not until he comes home. Unless you want to attack the Morelli family. If we start a war, maybe no one will wonder what Dad was doing.”
“I’m not saying we attack them.” We don’t have a lot of options for doing that, anyway. A bunch of kitchen knives and some half-finished inventions. I have a wild, ridiculous vision of charging at them with the color-changing wind chime. “I’m saying we do something other than sitting here.”
“You haven’t been sitting,” Cash points out. “You’ve been walking back and forth from here to the kitchen for two hours.” He’s not even pretending to look at his laptop. I’ve been pacing, but Cash has been holding his empty coffee cup for the better part of forty-five minutes. “He’ll come back.”
“I don’t think he will.” I’m headed for the stairs to his workshop before I realize what I’m doing. Footsteps come along behind me.
“What are you looking for?”
“He had to write down the address. He wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise.” The workshop is a long, wide space, with workbenches along the back wall. Lights attached to moving bits of metal and plastic give the space a dim glow. I find the light switch without looking. Dad replaced the fluorescent bulbs with special ones that are meant to mimic sunlight. He claims this means he can work longer hours without missing the benefits of being outside.
I push away the morbid thought that he might never be inside our home again and concentrate on the notepads.
Yellow legal pads. White scratch pads. One from the grocery store that they gave out last Valentine’s Day. Most of these are piled up near Dad’s computer, wedged into a corner of the workbench. Pages on pages of notes.
And on top of all the notepads—his phone. My shoulders drop.
“What is it?” Cash asks.
“Dad’s phone.” I pick it up and hold it high so he can see it. “He left it here. We can’t even call him. What if he stalled somewhere? What if he’s stranded on the side of the road?”
I take a deep breath and swipe across the screen. No passcode, because he’d forget what it was and lock himself out. My dad has had this old iPhone for close to four years now. That is the equivalent of a cell-phone century and I’m seized with a panic that it will die in my hands and I’ll never find out what happened to him. It’s slow, this phone, slow to respond to my touch.
The calendar app takes forever to load. When it does, I can see that it’s blank. I curse under my breath.
Cash comes to look over my shoulder. “Notes app?”
“Maybe.”
It’s right there in the first note. An address in New York City. Under that is the name of the person he’s meeting.
Leo Morelli.
Oh, god.
Cash’s face has gone pale. “He didn’t say that’s who it was.” His defensive tone gives me another pang of guilt. I shouldn’t have blamed him for this earlier. Shouldn’t have even suggested that. “He never gave me the name.”
My heart knocks against my sternum, pulse pounding in my temples. “Okay. I’m going after him.”
I take the stairs two at a time, Cash chasing after me. “Hales, you can’t go. It’s the Morellis. It’s Leo.”
Everyone in Bishop’s Landing and probably all of New York City knows who Leo Morelli is. He’s the Beast of Bishop’s Landing. That’s what everyone calls him. His older brother, Lucian, is evil in the way of all Morellis, but Leo is more unpredictable. More dangerous.
He likes to make life hard for people in our family.
He’s good at it.
There isn’t really a good Morelli in this situation, but Leo’s the worst of the entire family. “I don’t care which one of them it is. He shouldn’t be there alone.”
“We shouldn’t be there, either.”
“You’re not coming.”
“I’m not letting you go by yourself.”
I round on him while I pull my coat over my shoulders. “I’m going, Cash, and you’re staying here in case Dad’s already on his way home.”
Cash steps around me and blocks the door. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but what if we called Caroline? He might be in trouble. She could help.”
“We’re not calling any of them.” Involving the larger Constantine family would be a mistake. A fatal error. Caroline doesn’t allow mistakes. And my father talking to a Morelli would be a mistake. A big one. She could probably figure out where he’s gone. Hell, she probably has contacts that can track cell phones, but if she got involved, she wouldn’t help. More likely she would leave him to the wolves for the sin of failing the Constantine name.
My brother’s face is red and gets redder. “You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
Hat. Mittens. Keys. I shove my wallet into the pocket of my coat. “Stay here, and wait for Dad to get home. Call me if he does. Otherwise I’ll bring him home with me.”
I reach for the doorknob and Cash catches me by the elbow. He turns me back around and crushes me in a hug. Cash has been taller than me for years, and stronger. He’s still my little brother. I squeeze him back and pull my hat back into place.
“I’ll come back.” Unlike my father, I don’t give him a timeline.
“If anything happens...” Cash’s eyes burn into mine. “If anything happens—”
“I’ll call you.”
“I’ll kill them.”
“I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder. He’s trembling. So am I. This is bad. Our family has weathered catastrophes, but something like this can spiral out of control. “Have something to eat. We’ll both be home soon.”
My Toyota hums to life in the driveway and releases a breath of glittering snowflakes into my face. I crank the heat anyway. Maybe it will find its courage again. If it doesn’t, then I’ll freeze my ass off to save my dad.
I hope that’s the worst of it.
The route to the highway takes me through the heart of Bishop’s Landing, a town filled with mansions. The Constantines live here. The other Constantines. I feel like I have this last name by accident. There are people out in the world with blonde hair and blue eyes who never have their aunt Caroline show up at the front door with a disapproving expression and barbed comments. I’m as far removed from them as I am the real Constantines—the ones who live in the gorgeous estates I’m driving past now.