Chapter 23
Byrdie
One month later…
“How was that?” I turn to Nash, sitting beside me at the grand piano.
He smiles at me. “Perfect.”
I raise my eyebrow at him. “Are you telling me that because you love me, or because I nailed that piece of music with no help to read the music?”
He leans in close and kisses me. “Can it be a little of both?”
“You need to see this,” Makhi says from behind us, startling me.
There’s a note in his voice that instantly sets off alarm bells.
Breaking the kiss, Nash takes my hand and helps me up from the piano. After glancing at each other, confused about what’s happening, we follow Makhi out of the music room, across a white marble foyer, and into the den.
The villa in the south of France was Nash’s idea.
I thought he wanted to escape the reporters and the insanity of his uncle’s looming trial. Even if we’d wanted to leave the Gabriel Mansion, the reporters clogging the front gate for days made it impossible.
“I’m putting the house on the market,” Nash said over breakfast one day.
None of us had believed him at first.
By the end of the day, he’d found a couple of realtors to manage the sale, and Nance was busy coordinating the packing.
A week later, we were in a villa in Provence that Nash had rented for three months with no idea of what comes next. Getting away from a stifling town had been liberating for all of us and made us sure of one thing: our future isnotin Massey, Arizona.
That town is in our past, and none of us have looked back since we arrived in the south of France.
Makhi is standing in front of the big screen TV, and what it shows stops me in my tracks.
“That’s the compound.” I lift a trembling hand to my mouth.
Men in black jackets with yellow FBI stamped on the back gather in small huddles with local police officers within the compound’s wire fence.
The headline running across the bottom of the screen is like someone plucked out a wish from my head that I’ve had since I watched Jeremiah’s acolytes lower my mom’s body into the ground.
“Jeremiah is dead,” I whisper.
“Someone took him out with a bullet right through his eye,” Makhi says.
I whip my head toward him. “How did you know? Did they announce how he died?”
“Witnesses,” Makhi explains, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Apparently, he was in his cabin getting ready to spew whatever cult leaders spew when someone took him out. Everyone scattered. Then they realized all the guards were dead too. Someone made it into town, then the cops got the FBI involved.”
I sit down heavily on the couch before I fall. “When?”
Nash joins me on the couch and squeezes my hand.
“A week ago,” Makhi says. “It was on national news before it hit international.”
“Aweek?” Nash repeats, then snaps his head to the left.
We all turn to the left to look at Vonn, sitting quietly on an armchair, reading a new thriller he picked up at the airport.
