“Thanks for inviting me to dinner.”

“Ugh, you roped her into a social visit? Poor thing.” Everything Juliet said was dipped in acid, but she gave me her sly smile. “If you ever want to compare notes, I’m game. Call me.”

“You could stay, if you want,” her father told her.

“No, thanks,” Juliet said. “We never had family dinners when I was growing up. I may be allergic to them. But we do need to finish talking business before I go, Father. We have a cockroach problem. Again.”

“Juliet! I can’t believe you said that.” Theodore shot me a worried glance.

I had a cockroach problem in my dungeon room, but mentioning it didn’t feel helpful.

“We had this exact headache two months ago,” Juliet added.

“I apologize, Deirdre,” Theodore said. “I didn’t realize we’d be delving into such unsavory territory. Why don’t you wait with Ursula and Teddy?”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

I ducked out of the room and walked down the hall. I couldn’t slip out of my boots to tiptoe back, so I crept as quietly as I could on the carpet.

“How much did it cost us last time?” Theodore asked.

“A quarter of a million. Caroline said to go ahead and pay it, because we didn’t need any bad publicity in this market.”

Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t think they were talking about bugs.

“What’s your instinct this time?” he asked her.

Before I could catch Juliet’s answer, Teddy popped into the hallway. “You have to help with the trains,” he told me.

He had terrible timing, but I couldn’t disappoint him.

Ten minutes later, Teddy’s grandfather strolled in as the engine was whipping around the track.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Fine, fine. Juliet will handle it. She’s very capable.” He sighed. “I feel guilty, leaning on her as I do. She works very hard. I always expected Theo would join her in the business. But he dumped us all to go adventuring and do what he wanted.”

Maybe he wasn’t that into money laundering, I thought, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t know how I felt about Caro’s involvement. It was baffling to me. “That’s too bad.”

“I don’t mean to sound bitter.” He sighed. “When you have children, you have no way of knowing how they’ll turn out. You believe they’ll be like you. Your blood is running through their veins. But they can reject everything you taught them and become something you barely recognize.”

I wasn’t the best audience for this. I had no relationship with my father, and I didn’t regret it. “People talk about nature versus nurture,” I said. “But I don’t think genes predict who you’ll be. They give you some characteristics, but they don’t define you.”

“That’s an excellent point. It’s been on my mind since Theo ran off. It doesn’t seem like he even wants to be a father.”

I glanced at Teddy. He didn’t look like he was listening, but he was a smart kid. He got every word. “It’s a really tough time for everyone right now.”

“Of course. But I worry that Theo is going to do something dangerous. What if he took Teddy away to Europe? Can you even imagine that?”

“That would be awful.” Teddy was my living link to my sister. I’d never let him go.

“I’m so glad you feel that way,” he said. “Juliet is filing some paperwork to keep Theo from taking Teddy anywhere unsafe. It would be helpful to have a sworn statement from Teddy’s favorite aunt.”

His words sounded sweet, but something sinister twisted beneath them. Hugo Laraya’s caution echoed in my head. You’ll get caught up in his web—that was what Theo had warned his friend. I was starting to sense delicate threads of spider silk attaching themselves to me. Theodore Thraxton had told me terrible things about his son. He had taken my suspicions about Theo and amped them up a thousandfold with the information he’d given me. What if he had done exactly the same thing to Caro?

“Whatever you need,” I said blandly, turning to watch Teddy play. Caro had wanted to escape from all the Thraxtons, Adinah Gerstein had said. That included her father-in-law. I was starting to understand why.

CHAPTER 37

THEO

My mistake had been in thinking I’d need two days to accomplish what I needed to in Berlin. In reality, I’d only needed one. But the airline wouldn’t allow me to change my ticket, which meant I had another day to kill before I could go home.

“I have a particularly strange question for you,” I said to Klaus as we left the hidden restaurant he’d lured me to. We were strolling companionably down the zigzagging alleyways.

“Go ahead.”

“You know I have scars all over my body,” I said. “Some were self-inflicted, but some have been there as long as I can remember. My father always said I was attacked by an animal in a zoo. Did he tell you this story?”

“A version of it,” Klaus said. “That you were attacked. No mention of any zoo.”

“Then what attacked me?”

“He never said.”

“You didn’t ask him?” I was startled. “Why not?”

“The reason your father and I have worked together—successfully—for so long is that neither of us asks too many questions. This was one of those cases. He was terrified that you might die. He didn’t need me saying, ‘Why did you let this happen?’”

We were at the street by that point. “Can I give you a lift?” Klaus asked.

“I’ll make my own way back.”

“Bon voyage tomorrow,” Klaus said. “Will you do me a favor?”

“How did you know I was flying . . . never mind. What is it?”

“Tell Ursula I’m sorry for being a bastard,” Klaus said. “I have done many unfortunate things, but that is the one I regret.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“She won’t listen.” Klaus sounded sorry for himself. “Years ago, she asked me for help, and I refused. I told her she’d made her bed and she had to lie in it. It was wrong of me.”

“What help did she need?”

“She wanted to leave your father,” Klaus said. “But I cared more about my friend’s feelings than I did about hers. I never thought about Ursula’s troubles. I told her she had to stay, and she did.”

It was after eleven when I got back to my hotel, but that meant it was only five o’clock in New York. I called Gloria to check up on Teddy, and then I called Dr. Haven.

“I need to tell you everything I’ve found out,” I said. The words tumbled out of me, with parts of the story in the wrong order, but Dr. Haven listened patiently. At one point, I heard an awful sob and realized belatedly that it had bubbled out of my chest. I was enraged, but I also felt empty and betrayed. I was used to a lack of trust with everyone in my family. I was familiar with the eternal chess games, and I knew that I was just a pawn to my father. But the fact that he would commit a crime and make me believe I was responsible for it was a nightmare I could never wake up from.

Eventually I ran out of words. My face was wet. My breath escaped in tiny gasps.

“Theo . . . this is like something out of a horror movie,” Dr. Haven said finally. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve seen family members do terrible things to each other, but this is beyond that.”

“I want to make sure that my father never gets anywhere near Teddy.”

“There’s a lot of talk about grandparents’ rights, but they don’t exist,” Dr. Haven said. “Unless the custodial parent can be proven unfit.”

I had no doubt that’s what my father was doing. The question pricking at my brain was whether he’d considered Caroline an unfit parent too. He was doing his damnedest to claim my son, and I could only wonder how far he’d go.

“I know you don’t feel like you can trust anyone right now, but I want you to listen to me,” she added. “You need to trust yourself. Your father—your whole family—plays mind games, but that’s not who you are, Theo. Trust yourself.”

That was easy for her to say, I thought ruefully after we hung up. She didn’t have a chorus in the back of her head whispering, I am full of hidden horrors. She didn’t live with the torment of not knowing what part of your own brain you could rely on.

On instinct, I went into the bathroom. My razor was in my toiletry kit. I retrieved it and cracked the plastic against the marble vanity. The four blades that dropped out were tiny fragments; I held them in the palm of one hand. Each one reflected a small part of my face: an eye, a lip. I appeared as fractured as I felt inside. I’d grown up managing mental pain by balancing it with physical torment, but in that moment, I knew it was futile. I was a bundle of scar tissue, but the agony inside me never abated.

The memory of the last time I’d seen Caroline came into focus. Do you want to come up now, Ben? I can’t wait. We’re really doing this, aren’t we?

She was livid that I’d overheard her on the phone. What are you doing here?

I live here, in case you’ve forgotten, I said.