“Look,” he sighs. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he closes his eyes for a moment to regroup. “I’m not going to give you the highlight reel of why I did what I did. But I am sorry for some of the things,” he admits. “I never should have involved Ava and for that I am sorry, brother.”
Brother.
I have brothers. Vasily, Roman, Maksim, Leon, and Nikolai are my brothers. Even that shithead Dima. They have been for years. But there is something in the way Ivan utters that word,with reverence and respect, that stirs the shattered parts of my soul.
“Why did you?”
“Because she meant something to you,” he sighs with regret. “Even before you realized it yourself.”
forty-seven
I stare down at the numbers written in Libby’s journal.
1-3-6
14-3-1
19-1-7-2 (3)
Each number represents a specific part of the book. The page number followed by the paragraph on that page followed by the word in that paragraph. Flipping through the pages at the beginning, I turn to the page labeled as the first. My finger slides gently down the page to the third paragraph and over till it finds the sixth word.
Well.
Easy enough. I repeat the process with the second cipher.
Far.
I can already see where this is going, but wanting to be absolutely sure, I follow the cipher one last time. This one is different. It contains four numbers instead of three and has one in parentheses. So, the seventh letter in and two of those threeletters make the word, which is ‘ago’. Since ‘ag’ makes little sense, I go with ‘go’.
Well far go.
It doesn’t take a genius to know she’s talking about the bank. It’s simple, and she doesn’t attempt to obscure the name or make a riddle out of it. No one other than Kenzi would have known what those numbers referred to. You have to have the book to decipher it, and not just any version ofThe Hobbitwould get the job done. It needed to be this specific edition.
If it’s a bank she’s leading me to, that means the numbers she listed below are a bank account. 1974762095230091. Are the remaining numbers 091322 the passcode or something else? And what does the hastily scrawled name of Demeter mean?
A passphrase?
Ugh. I close the laptop screen and lean back in my chair, closing my eyes as I rub my temples. Libby could have left clearer instruction. Like what Wells Fargo she’s talking about, for example. Since there are approximately fifteen in Seattle. If it’s just a bank account, then it wouldn’t matter which I choose, but if it’s a safe deposit box, it would. Luckily, only a handful of Wells Fargo’s have safety deposit boxes.
“Everything okay in here?”
Cracking an eye open, I look at Vas and shake my head, letting out a rough breath.
“That bad, huh?” he asks, taking a seat in front of me. We’re in Matthias’s office. His old office, since it’s now mine, but everything in it is still exactly as he left it.
I can’t bring myself to change anything. It still smells like him. The light scent of tobacco hangs in the air, mixing deliciously with the warm spiced aftershave he always wears.
“Libby’s secret code leads to a Wells Fargo bank,” I inform him. “But she doesn’t say which one or whether it’s an account or a lock box. Nothing. I’ve got the account number, but that’s it.”
“What about the name and the other set of numbers she listed?” Vas questions. “Any clue what those mean?” I shake my head.
“The six digits could be a passcode,” I sigh. “It can’t be a historical date because it’s dated for September of 2022 and it’s February.”
“What if it’s not a date,” he suggests.
“Then it has to be a passcode.”
Vas’s mouth turns up and his shoulders shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
