“For a change, it wasn’t a bad thing. It was evidence that the woman whose death you were right then being blamed for was not, in fact, dead. Even better, before the cops got there, that corrupt detective and a nurse showed up with a gurney to move her, but they left swiftly when the pap began shooting them—with a camera, I mean. They tried to leave in an ambulance, but then the detective went into labor. We got them, Griffin. We got the bastards—all of them.” Outside, the sirens crescendoed. “Speaking of cops, they’re finally here. You two okay while I go and talk to them?”
“Yes, go,” Griffin said. “Tell them I didn’t kill anyone.”
“I think they figured that out.”
As Estelle left, Lana adjusted her position, wincing. “So you set all that up—Estelle, the cops, all these people?”
“I had the idea, but Estelle did the work. I gambled that Maggie would take me to the same place you’d been taken, only I set my phone up to share its location with Where-Is-Griffin-Hart-dot-com. Plus, Maggie had told me earlier that she’d parked in the basement, so Estelle sent her goon squad to sneak in and secretly film them taking me. I didn’t count on Sweetie pulling a gun, but hey, it made for better footage.”
“The goons just stood by andwatched?”
“We needed Maggie to lead us to you. The Chevy turned out to be the perfect?—”
“Trojan horse!”
He grinned. “Only, instead of an army of warriors, it brought Estelle and her goons and … whoever these people are.”
“Librarians,” Lana said in wonder, looking around, “some of them. My boss! My colleagues!”
“Kickass librarians. Naturally.”
Griffin was aware of dozens of phones aimed their way—and he no longer gave a shit. Let them look, let them take photos, let them livestream, let them write any bullshit headlines they wanted. He drew Lana into his arms and took her in a kiss that would leave even theGods and Mortalsintimacy coordinator swooning.
Chapter 26
Lana
“If I’ve been asleep for a month, why am I so freaking tired?”
Lana topped up Vivien’s water cup. “The doctors say it’ll take a while.” It had been hours before Vivien could even speak, and after a full day, she’d only just been moved into a sitting position, propped up with pillows.
Lana had filled her in on nearly everything that had happened since she’d been sedated. Everything except Griffin and Lana’s … relationship. If you could call it that. Because now that the crisis was over, Lana didn’t know where they stood. Not to mention: how did she explain that while her sister was missing, she was sleeping with a movie star?
She hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, though her phone was still at the Beverly Grove hospital. After police arrived at the soundstage, they were interviewed separately by the LAPD Threat Management Unit—the stalker branch. Afterward, the Fitch cop, who’d come down “to join in the fun,” in his words, had driven Lana to Vivien’s new hospital and taken her bloody clothing as evidence, leaving a kind nurse scrambling to find hersome clean clothes in lost and found. For all she knew, Griffin was now back on set, back in his version of normalcy.
“I always felt like there was something unexplained about me,” Vivien said, touching her necklace, which Lana had returned to her. “Something in my brain, in my memory, that I could never quite access. I did hypnosis once, a couple of years ago, and I got a really strong memory of my mom hugging me—but it wasn’t our mom. The therapist said I might have ‘unresolved childhood trauma,’ but I didn’t want to think that something was wrong with me, so I pushed it to the back of my mind. But then, a couple of months ago, I needed my birth certificate to renew my passport, but couldn’t find it, so I went in to apply for one, but the woman got confused and thought I wanted access to the original, which she said was sealed.” Vivien closed her eyes. “Which, as I found out, could only mean one thing. Long story, but I did the DNA test, and one thing led to another. I was about to talk to you and Mom and Dad, but then this other shit happened, and here I am.”
Lana had managed to piece together the rest. Vivien had been approached by a woman who claimed to work for a nonprofit that helped reunite adopted kids with their birth parents. “I wasn’t sure about it, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt—ha!” Vivien had explained. “From then on, all the communications were by mail—actual snail mail. Weird, right? She said it was a legal thing. But then it got real strange—they told me they’d found my father and offered me a ton of money to go and confront him.”
Vivien had declined, and told a friend in the industry about it, who had joined the dots on the family tree in the same way Evangeline had, and led her to Walter. “I went to see him, but I wasn’t in a great frame of mind—I mean, I’d just found out I wasn’t who I thought I was, right? And he offered me money, and I stupidly took it, thinking he was just helping me out, butnext thing, he hits me with a restraining order. And then my friend said she figured these people were some blackmail gang and she offered to set me up with someone she knew who was looking into it, but I thought that sounded shifty, so I went to the cops instead. And then they sent down that detective to talk to me.”
“To gaslight you, basically,” Lana said.
“She really pissed me off—you know how it bugs me when people write me off as a flake. So, I’m sitting in my car, straight afterward, stewing about it, and I see her go to her car, and she’s carrying the binder I gave her, with all the letters from the blackmailers—the originals. And she was looking kind of shifty. I didn’t mean to follow her at first—we were just driving the same way, but then she parked up and jumped in a car with this other woman, and gave her my binder! And I recognized her as this Griffin Hart stalker who’d been ejected from the set—he’s the big star of the show. Hot like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Uh-huh?” Lana said, noncommittal.
“So that was odd, right? I followed them to this old soundstage and watched them punch in a code at the door to get in, so I waited until they left, and I broke in to get my binder back. But I found an office with all sorts of shit—photos of celebrities doing stuff they shouldn’t be, sneaky photos of Walter and me at the hospital… I used their photocopier to take copies of everything I could find.”
Lana nodded. The LAPD had searched the office yesterday and taken everything as evidence.
“But then I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t go to the cops, obviously. I sat on it for a while, freaking out. And then Walter calls me while I’m on set and accuses me of recording our conversation! And I realize he’s already getting blackmailed. I told him I’d found all this stuff, but he didn’t want to hear it—hethought I’d betrayed him. After he hung up, I checked my phone and found this recording app on it.”
“So you ditched the phone.”
“Yeah. I mean, if they were listening in, they would’ve heard me tell Walter about the photocopies, so I knew they’d be coming for me. I left it on, hoping it would lead them on a wild goose chase, to buy me time. I decided to hand everything to Walter—the guy must have contacts, right? But then, well, you know the rest.” She sighed, exhausted by the effort of speaking.
“Save your voice, Vivi. You should rest.”
