“Two are photos.” Lacy sniffed. “The third one is a one-minute video of us in the act. I had no idea he had… something like that.”
Brett had done it again, recording an intimate moment for future use. Bile rose in the back of my throat.
I didn’t need to look at the attachments to know how harmful they were. Lacy’s emotions blanketed her face.
“You know I’m not angry with you,” Anton said, moving to the other side of Lacy and pulling her into his arms. “I’m furious with him, with his sick, twisted…” He clenched his hands like he’d gotten Brett’s neck in his grip and was ready to squeeze. He looked at me as if I had some kind of answer. “Brett dated Lacy a decade ago and he was still obsessed with her?”
“I don’t think he was obsessed with me,” Lacy said, staring at the ground. “He just wanted views for his show, and he thought I was an easy target.”
“Why couldn’t he have hired an actress if he was so intent on having the content for his show?” Anton asked. “Or found some other girl who wanted fifteen minutes of fame?”
My stomach turned over. I thought I might know. Brett was a man with power, a man who wanted to see if he could actually get away with threatening a vulnerable person. He likely got some sort of jolt of machismo out of wielding his control, but ultimately, he’d arranged all of this—as well as the blackmailing of Mr. Finch and perhaps at one time even his own girlfriend—because he could.
“It’s after eight,” Lacy said, checking her phone. “I have less than four hours until these photos go to my clients, toTMZ. Until they’re everywhere.”
Anton locked eyes with Lacy, and in that moment I could see how much he loved, even adored, her.
“Okay,” I said. “We have how many more tries with the password?”
“Two, maybe one?” Lacy answered. “I tried it twice last night, and I’m not sure if the count resets after a certain amount of time.”
I read the message to Anton one more time, pointing to the middle phrase:though not the one that got away.
“This is just like in the password hint,” I suggested. “We still need to find the name of this person.”
“Does it matter at this point?” Anton asked. “This email seems less like a clue with some hidden message and more like it was intended to threaten Lacy and make me want to kill him.”
Before I could respond, my phone dinged with messages from Savilla.
Talked to financial guy. He had these images from when Daddy got the diamond appraised a few years ago when he was going to sell it.
My phone dinged again, and an image came through, this one a close-up of the edge of the Rose Diamond, a series of tiny numbers, reading 1434.7.
“What are those?” I mumbled. “A serial number?”
Anton began to pace again, still fuming, while Lacy peered over my shoulder. “No. It’s a code,’ she clarified. ‘It means,I love you more. Forever.”
“How do you know that?”
“The numbers correspond to the number of letters in the words,” Lacy answered. “It’s something Brett used to do. Write me little notes with codes.”
“Is this a thing?” I asked.
Anton, who was listening, seemed as baffled as me.
“Yeah, Katy Perry released an album called143last year.” Lacy looked at the two of us as if we were aliens from another planet. “And it’s a line in Brett’s song, in the bridge at the end.” She started humming and then sang the words, “I love you more. Forever.”
I wasn’t convinced, but Lacy certainly was. “It has to be a code from him,” she insisted.
One last message from Savilla confirmed Lacy’s theory.
I asked finance guy to see records. The numbers were added to the stone in 2022 when it was appraised—and before it disappeared.
Which meant Brett must’ve requested the numbers be added around the time he blackmailed Mr. Finch with the video of Savilla, a kind of extra guarantee that Mr. Finch was serious about leaving him the stone.
I considered Brett’s message as well as this new intel, that maybe wasn’t so new. “In the Music Room, what did you say the password hint on Brett’s email was?”
Lacy had memorized it by now. “It said, ‘Diamond numbers, hashtag, lowercase, name of the one that got away.’”
