As the message started with nothing but static, he flipped the envelope open—and what was inside confused him.

What the . . . hell? Photographs?

“. . . Hello, Lodge,” came a muffled male voice. “I just want to say fuck you. I’m going to kill her first and then I’m coming after you. You fucking . . .”

The message continued on as Samuel T. flipped through what turned out to be close-ups of Gin and him from the cemetery and then later as they left his building together after they’d had sex on his sofa at the penthouse.

Meanwhile, on the message, Richard Pford’s cadence grew stronger in volume and urgency, the man working himself up into a lather that was going to hurt someone. Badly.

The final thing in the envelope was a single sheet of paper with a reporter’s name and number on it, and a statement that a quote would be appreciated before everything ran the following morning.

Samuel T. cut off the message and didn’t delete it. Calling up Gin’s phone number, he waited through the rings until voicemail kicked in. Then he called her again. And a third time.

He lasted a split second after that.

With curses leaving his lips, he raced through the house to get one of his handguns out of the study.

As the storm raged across the land, he ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the keys to his Range Rover, and punched open the door to the garage, triggering the opener—

Only to stop.

Heart pounding, body flooded with adrenaline, he became trapped on a precipice he wasn’t sure he wanted to be on anymore: Gin’s drama was a sinkhole for him. It always had been. She was the siren who called him into tumultuous seas, the beacon that he followed toward chaos, the fire off in the distance that he couldn’t resist, even as it threatened to burn down his house.

He thought of Amelia.

The lie.

The losses he had suffered with his daughter.

As the garage door finished its ascent, the hot, wet breath of the storm barged into the bays.

He imagined himself crouched over the steering wheel, the Range Rover’s engine powering forward, visibility poor, his destination unclear. She had been headed back to Easterly—or at least he assumed she had been. He wasn’t sure where she was.

Maybe Richard was waiting for her there.

And Easterly always had people around. So she wouldn’t be alone.

Samuel T. watched the storm from this different vantage point a little longer. Then he turned away from the torrential rain and damaging winds . . . and went back in his house.

The door shut on its own behind him.

TWENTY-FOUR

Gin could barely see River Road in front of her as she shot down the Ohio’s shoreline, the fury of the storm muscling the car around so that she constantly had to realign left and right to stay on the pavement. As she breaknecked along, she passed a number of cars that had pulled over to the side, their blinkers flashing as they waited the worst of it out.

Richard was right behind her.

No matter how fast she went into the curves or how much she tried to pull away on the straight sections, he was sticking with her. Closing in.

As she kept going through the gallons of water falling from the sky and the flashing lightning and pounding thunder, part of her was in the car, hands locked on the wheel, body braced, foot pressed hard on the accelerator. Yet even more of her was floating above the speeding Mercedes, watching everything from a position somewhere above her right shoulder.

It was, she supposed, as it would be if she died in a crash, her spirit lingering over the chaos of the corporeal world as the car fireballed into oblivion.

Funny, she was familiar with this splitting experience. She had it whenever Richard was on her sexually, and there had been times before he had come along that she had done this: Whenever she got too wild, too drunk, too out of control, the disassociation could take over.

It could also happen if she were scared.

The first incidence had been when she was a child. Her father had come after her and her brother Lane, for some reason. She could remember the man marching down the hallway outside of the bedrooms, his face in a rage, a strap in his hand, his voice like the thunder in this storm.

She had run as fast as her feet could take her. Run, run, run, and then she’d hid—she had known that was the only thing to do to save herself.

She had known because Lane had told her so: Run, Gin, run, and hide.

Hide, Gin, so he can’t find you—go into a closet or under the bed. . . .

She had been three and a half? Maybe four?

She had chosen the bed in her room to take cover under, and she could still recall exactly what it smelled like under there, the dusty rug and the sweet floor polish. She had been shaking and breathing hard, and tears had come out of her eyes, but she had not cried out loud.

Lane had gotten beaten but good. She had heard everything from his room next door.

She hadn’t even been sure what he had done. And she didn’t think Lane had known, either—no, wait, he had refused to tell their father where Maxwell was. And she had gotten caught up in it all when she had seen Lane run by and had chased after him, thinking at first it was a chance to play.

Yes, that was how it had gone down.

And she could still recall that sound of the strap on her brother. He had cried out over and over again . . . and the beating hadn’t stopped until he had told William that Max was in the basement, in the wine cellar.

Those heavy footfalls had then come down the hall and paused in front of the open door to Gin’s room. How her heart had pounded. She could have sworn he’d hear it. And yet her father had continued on—and she had stayed put.

Eventually, she had had to go to the bathroom.

She had remained there, however, until she had peed herself. Some five hours later.

She had told no one about that part; she had been too ashamed to admit that she had soiled the carpet under the bed.

When they had done her suite of rooms over when she had turned thirteen, she could still remember the decorator frowning at the stain when the old bed had been taken away.

That was why she liked her rooms to be white: In a convoluted way, it proved to everyone and everybody that she hadn’t been weak and lost control of her bladder.

Craziness.

And so was this, she thought as she tried to draw herself back down into herself.

Checking the rearview again, Richard was so close to the Mercedes’s bumper that she could clearly visualize him over his own steering wheel, his face full of rage, his mouth open like he was screaming at her.

As fear spiked and she decided he was truly mad, she had a strange realization. Richard, and his particular brand of unpleasant ness, with its threat of violence never far from the surface, was what she had grown up around. In this way, he was like her father, a simmering explosion about to find a target.

Yes, she thought. She had chosen him for a number of reasons.

Not all of them money.

Had her father known this? Had William been aware of Richard’s proclivities? Probably not. And even if he had been, it was doubtful that her father would have cared whether or not the torture continued. After all, when William had tried to force her into marrying Richard right before he had died, it had been all about the business imperative: William had assumed that with Richard “in” the family, Pford Distributors would offer better terms to the BBC.

So she hadn’t been taken into account except as a lever to be pulled.

In fact, William had known what was coming with all those bad deals and bad loans, and he’d clearly planned to cut some of the financial shortfalls off at the pass by selling her to Richard. And of course, she had refused. Only to then volunteer for exactly what he’d demanded of her when it had become clear she was going to lose her lifestyle.

Her father’s daughter, indeed—

Richard rammed the rear end of the Mercedes, the bump hard enough to kick Gin’s head back against the rest. As she screamed, she fought to keep control and stay on the road—

He did it again. Just before a tight turn that would take them over a thin bridge which spanned one of the Ohio’s larger feeding streams.

“Stop!” she yelled at him. “Leave me alone!”

But he was a nightmare of her own making, a Grim Reaper she had let into her life because she had been too scared, too lazy, and too spoiled to go forward without the money and the prominence she had grown up with.