She stared down at me there on the carpet, the fear on her face changing into something even more terrible: dread. She looked at our father. “Shit,” she said. “Daddy, you said no one would be here—”
“Anaïs,” he said brusquely, “shut up.”
I stayed there on my knees as Annie, my not-so-dead sister, hugged herself in the doorway. “You’re alive,” I said calmly.
I should have been more shocked than I was. But part of me had known it already. That tattoo on the body? Ihadn’timagined it. It wasn’t Annie who had died there on that trail. It was Harper Connelly.
But I’d known earlier than tonight. When I’d seen the video of that mysterious figure trying to get into my rooms, running down the driveway, I’d told Jack it was Annie.I know my sister, I’d said.
I’d sounded crazy to him. To me, too, because rationally I knew she had to be dead. She’d been identified by Craig Wyatt, and it had been confirmed by both fingerprints and my DNA.
I pushed myself to my feet and turned toward my father. “I don’t understand…the fingerprints…and they said the DNA matched…”
My father was busy on his phone, tapping away at something. The sticky notes on his computer screen were revealed in the glow of his phone, and he pulled them off with one irritated eyebrow raised as he looked at me, crumpled them, and threw them in the wastepaper basket under his desk. “Getting them to look the other way on the fingerprints was easy enough. The DNA? Well, if you’d just, foroncein your life, done what you were told to do, Miller, the DNA would never have been an issue. That was a very expensive mistake to correct. Itoldyou to stay away from the police. But the first thing you did, of course, was to run to them, trying to get some attention from them.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped as Annie squeezed it. “Daddy, Miller didn’tknow,” she said. “He didn’t understand.”
“I still don’t understand.” My shock was dying away and I was getting angry instead. An oddly calm anger, a clear, blue-blazing fury that, if I released it, would incinerate anything it touched. I grabbed Annie by the wrist and forced her to look at me, straight on. Her lips were chapped and her nose was red and sore-looking in the light of my phone.
“Where have you been?” I asked. My calm demeanor in combination with the hard hold on her wrist disconcerted her, judging by the way she chewed on her already-ragged lip.
“Hiding out.”
“Harper Connelly,” I said, “is dead.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she snapped, yanking her wrist out of my grasp.
“Oh, Annie,” I breathed. “What have you done?”
My father was busy typing something into his phone again. “The passport is ready,” he said in satisfaction, as though Annie and I had said nothing at all. “I’ll send Wyatt around to collect it, and in the meantime, I’ll book your flight.”
Wyatt. Craig Wyatt was in on this?
Of course he was. He’d “identified” the body. He’d immediately attempted to gain access to all of Annie’s social media accounts. He was an old friend of my father’s. I wondered how big a kickback he was getting for his part.
Annie flew around the desk. “ButDaddy,” she said, pouting, “I want to take the jet with you. I hate commercial.”
“We follow the plan,” he said, as coldly as he’d ever spoken to me, and Annie deflated.
“Guess I’d better call the cops and let them know they’ve made a terrible mistake,” I said loudly. Clearly.
My father flew across the room at me, but I stood my ground and stabbed a warning finger at him, holding my phone away with a thumb poised over the call button. “Don’t.” He stopped dead. “Don’t you fucking touch me. Explain what’s going on.”
I’d seen that look on his face before, when he was calculating which pilot TV shows would be the best to back, which would be most likely to take off, where to place his money and his influence. “My only aim tonight is to ensure your sister’s safety. She is in grave danger. I need to get her out of the countrytonight. I don’t have time to explain everything. Once she’s safe—”
“Nope,” I said. “Not good enough.” I turned to Annie. “You. You can tell me.”
Her eyes flicked between me and our father before she crumpled. “It’s all Roxy’s fault,” she sobbed. “It was just supposed to be a bit offun.”
It came rushing out of her in a big mass of weeping and self-pity: how Annie’s work offers had been dropping off, and Roxy had told her that her boyfriend, Gino, could help out with a side hustle, in return for a little Hollywood gossip about jewelry—something that Annie knew a lot about.
“I didn’t realize howseriousit was until I was in too deep,” she finished, with wide, wet eyes. Her lashes starfished very convincingly, but I’d seen my sister fake-cry too many times in my life to be fooled by it now.
“We don’t have time for this,” my father hissed, flashing his phone light into my face as though he could get me to stop that way.
I ignored him. “What about the Castellani necklace?” I asked Annie.
