Chapter 5
Blackthorn stood four hours north.
Stone house.
Forty acres.
No regular staff.
My mother had closed it fifteen years earlier.
One year after Isolde disappeared.
Coincidence suddenly looked lazy.
I turned toward Warren.
“You know Blackthorn.”
He shook his head.
Too late.
“You reacted.”
“I know the name.”
“How?”
Silence.
Domenic looked between us.
Then remembered.
“Warren asked about it.”
“When?”
“Last winter.”
My engagement had been announced last winter.
Of course.
Warren had approached two Marconi capos casually.
Asked which old properties still belonged to the family.
Which were occupied.
Which had permanent guards.
Blackthorn came up.
At the time nobody cared.
Now I did.
I looked at Warren.
“Was Preston marrying me because of Blackthorn?”
He stood.
“Don’t be absurd.”
I smiled faintly.
He hated that.
“Then why ask?”
No answer.
The deeper truth came from Preston.
He returned twenty minutes later carrying his jacket.
He had heard the last question from the doorway.
“My father asked me too.”
Warren turned.
Preston ignored him.
“About what?”
“Whether you ever talked about Blackthorn.”
“When?”
“Two months after we started dating.”
Not engaged.
Dating.
Early.
I stared at him.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you hated the place.”
True.
I had never even been inside as an adult.
Mother’s rule.
Then:
“Why didn’t that strike you as strange?”
Preston looked ashamed.
“He said there were old Hale belongings there.”
Warren snapped:
“There are.”
Interesting.
“What belongings?”
No answer.
Then Preston said something worse.
“He told me my mother stole them.”
Warren closed his eyes.
There.
A new story.
Isolde the unstable wife.
Isolde the abandoning mother.
Isolde the thief.
All pointing toward the same locked property.
I looked at Preston.
“What did you expect after marrying me?”
He understood where I was going.
His face drained.
“Access.”
One word.
He had planned to ask me to reopen Blackthorn.
Not for Warren, he told himself.
For history.
For his mother’s supposed theft.
But Warren had prepared that request years in advance.
May you like
Preston had not brought a golf club into my bridal suite only carrying his father’s lesson.
He had brought his father’s mission into my marriage.
