Platinum Prey (Blind Barriers Trilogy #2)

It honestly wouldn’t have been a big deal at all that they had business dealings to discuss that might not be appropriate for me just yet. But when I met his eyes, instead of the reassurance that I expected to see, or even the weariness of a man who worked too much, something there told me that this was anything but everyday stuff.

  Fear.

  For the first time in my entire life, my father looked scared.

  “DO YOU THINK maybe you should slow down?” Asher suggested as I threw back a shot of Grey Goose.

  It was my third in ten minutes.

  The liquid burned going down. I loathed the unpleasantness; it served as a searing reminder that this was no dream. This, whatever this was, was really happening. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and reached for the bottle again. Asher was faster. He whisked the vodka away, holding it just beyond my reach.

  I glowered, eyes focused on the liquor bottle.

  “Raven. Look at me,” Asher said sternly, his voice taking on the tone of a big brother speaking patiently to his childish little sister.

  It irked me.

  My hands were numb and I rubbed them against the fabric of my shorts to build friction and create warmth. When I looked up, it appeared that two Ashers were now sitting next to me on the couch in Lark’s living room, not one. I narrowed my gaze, focusing intently until four concerned brown eyes melded into two.

  “Getting drunk won’t change anything,” Asher said, placing the liquor bottle on the floor by his feet.

  “No? Then why’d you get the vodka?” I slurred.

  Ignoring him, I picked up the mug I’d been using as a shot glass. It appeared to be empty, but I held it to my lips anyway, allowed my head to fall backward, and let the several remaining drops of liquor dribble into my mouth and down my throat.

  “I thought you wanted to help her,” Asher said quietly, pointedly ignoring my jab about him being the one to procure the alcohol. “That,” he gestured to the glass in my hand, “is not helping.”

  With a shrug, I slumped back against the soft cushions. The glass tumbled from my numb fingers and landed with a dull thud on the carpet.

  “It’s helping me,” I said sullenly.

  My eyelids were heavy and becoming hard to hold open, so I let them fall shut. Images I never wanted to see again exploded in my mind like flashbulbs.

  The safe in Lark’s bedroom.

  The passport. My name. My picture. My birthday.

  The debit card. To some bank account. In my name.

  The credit card. My name on it. Platinum credit card. It screamed, Sky’s the limit!

  It was all so surreal. Leaving the family nest in Pennsylvania and coming to D.C. was a monumental step—the largest I’d taken in my eighteen years—and I’d expected to encounter some difficulties. On the drive to our nation’s capital, I’d worried about a million things: renting an apartment, finding a job, making friends, acclimating to life in a major city after a lifetime in small town America.

  But instead of merely changing zip codes, I felt as though I’d changed solar systems. After less than forty-eight hours in the District, I’d somehow managed to become entangled in one of the most highly publicized and baffling missing person cases of the decade. That night, I’d gone to bed boring old Raven Ferragamo. The next day, I awoke in the center of a nationwide manhunt for a missing diamond heiress. One fantastical news outlet had even likened Lark’s disappearance to the Lindberg baby kidnapping. Not because of any actual similarities between the two cases, but because of the massive amount of media attention and resources being devoted to finding the teenaged girl.

  Admittedly, at first—back when finding Lark’s journal had seemed random and my involvement voluntary—investigating her disappearance had been fun in a way. The puzzles, the bizarre clues, the rare look into the life of a girl whose family was mentioned in the same breath as other American royalty, like the Kennedys—it was all so alluring. I’d quickly found myself wanting to know more.

  Then, as I’d delved deeper into Lark’s life—her real life, not the crap that the world read about her in the paper or heard on the nightly news—I felt a connection to the missing girl. A part of me felt like I knew Lark. And I wanted to figure out what happened to her, wanted to help.

  Now, though, it was a different story. Knowing that somehow, some way, Lark Kingsley had meant for me—me—to find her journal and follow the cryptic clues she’d left behind, to uncover her dark secrets and expose the skeletons hidden in her walk-in closet…I wished that I’d never heard the name Lark Kingsley. This was way too much responsibility.

  Why me?

  Those two words played on repeat in my mind like a broken record.

  Why would Lark Kingsley—a girl I’d never seen in real life, a girl who came from a world so different from my own that it seemed impossible our paths would ever cross—choose me?

  The other question that arose was equally vexing: How had she chosen me?

  Suddenly my head began to spin and I started to worry that I was going to be sick. Churning in my gut, followed by hot bile creeping up my throat, changed that worry to certainty. In an instant, I was off the couch and sprinting down the hallway, Asher on my heels. He was the one to open the toilet lid as I fell to my knees beside the porcelain throne. I wanted to tell him to leave, but when I opened my mouth, liquefied pizza shot out like water from a fire hose.

  Asher rubbed my back and made soothing sounds as I continued to heave until nothing more than choked sobs were left inside of me. Mortified, I rested my feverish forehead against the toilet seat and reached blindly for the lever on the tank. Again, Asher was faster. For a moment, I was able to forget about what I’d found in the safe and concentrate on the sound of water swirling and disappearing down the pipes, taking my shame with it.

  You’re stronger than this, I admonished myself. You knew that investigating Lark’s disappearance might mean finding all sorts of crazy stuff. That was part of the draw.

  Except I’d never, not for a single moment, imagined that any of that crazy stuff would be tied to me.

  Before, Asher had suggested that it might all be a game—the convoluted clues, the journal entries, the scavenger hunts that led to nowhere. That maybe it was simply hoax perpetrated by a bored, rich, socialite with too much time on her hands. When he first brought up that idea I’d scoffed at the notion, dismissing it immediately.

  But now, a part of me prayed that he was right. I didn’t want the documents in the safe to be real. I didn’t want to be involved. I didn’t want to be connected to Lark in some way that I had yet to understand. And never wanted to understand.

  Should have gone to the police, I thought.

  Now, it was no longer an option. Considering the fact that official documents with my name on them had been hidden in Lark’s secret safe, there was no way the cops would believe I wasn’t involved in her disappearance,

  “Up you go.”

  Asher’s strong hands were suddenly around my waist, gently lifting me to my feet as if I weighed nothing. Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he tucked me snuggly against his side and supported much of my weight. I rested my cheek against his chest, noticing, even in my condition, that he smelled really good.

  At some point during my mental wanderings, Asher must have left the bathroom without me noticing, because a glass of ice water and two aspirin were now sitting on the sink ledge. He grabbed them both as he led me from the bathroom. Instead of turning left towards the common area, he turned right towards the bedrooms.

  “Not hers,” I urged, voice raspy but firm. “Guest room.”

  Right now, I needed space, physical distance, from Lark and her life. Had I not just yacked up my dinner, I would have insisted we return to our building on Gibson Street. But it seemed like a million miles away, and I was so tired.

  “Here. Take these.” Asher wrapped my fingers around the water glass, and then pressed the pills into my other palm.

  Wobbling only a little, I watched as Asher turned
down the covers on the daybed in the guestroom.

  “Take those, Raven. You’ll thank me in the morning,” he called over his shoulder, struggling to figure out where to put all of the superfluous pillows.

  Glad that someone else was calling the shots, I obeyed. Decisions seemed too difficult to make just then. The glass was slippery and I squeezed until my knuckles turned white to ensure it didn’t go sliding through my fingers. Even after the pills were swallowed, I continued to drink, letting the water soothe my raw throat.

  “Good. Now, get in.” Asher nodded towards the bed.

  Once again, I complied without a word. Laying on my side, I faced towards the wall, so I wouldn’t have to see the worry in Asher’s soft brown eyes. He sat down on the edge of the bed, settling the covers up over my shoulders and tucking them beneath my chin. My mom used to do the same thing when I was little.

  “I’ll be on the couch,” he said gently when he’d finished fussing with the blankets. “Just yell if you need me.”

  “You don’t need to stay here with me. You should go home,” I mumbled, my feeble protests falling on deaf ears.

  The mattress lifted a fraction of an inch when Asher stood. Part of me wanted to ask him to stay right here with me, wrap me in a warm embrace and never let go. Another part of me desperately wanted to be alone.

  “We’ll find the truth, Raven,” Asher said after a minute, his voice soft and distant. “You were right all along. You’re the one meant to help her, to find her. And you will. We will. I really believe that.”

  I felt his presence as he lingered a heartbeat longer.

  “Stay,” was on the tip of my tongue, but something or maybe someone—Kim?—held the plea back. And then it was too late. Soft footsteps marked Asher’s retreat to the living room. I breathed a sigh, relieved that he was gone but also that he wasn’t too far away.

  Alone, my thoughts flew back to the reasons I’d been driven to alcohol in the first place. The things I’d found in the safe. The inexplicable things I’d found. Taking a deep breath, I tried to consider them rationally, to decipher what the hell was happening.

  The credit card and debit card weren’t as unsettling as I’d initially thought. Curious and odd, yes. But not disturbing in and of themselves. Having grown up in the digital age, I’d seen enough of those special reports about identity fraud to know it happened all the time. That it wasn’t exactly difficult. With someone’s name alone, you could set up accounts online, essentially faking the other information. So that—how she’d done it—wasn’t the big mystery. Procuring cards in a fake name was doable. But, naturally, I was plagued by the word that seemed to be the most prevalent in my life these days: Why?

  Why on earth would someone like Lark Kingsley, who had unlimited resources at her disposal, steal my identity?

  And, having done so, why would she then essentially lead me down a trail of clues to find out about it?

  What was the point? Was she giving it back to me? That had to be a first when it came to stealing someone’s identity.

  And then, of course, there was the other item. It was more troubling than the cards, because it wasn’t as easy to get.

  The passport.

  How did Lark Kingsley have a passport with my picture and my name on it? Since I’d never traveled outside of the US, I’d never acquired one of my own. So it wasn’t like she’d stolen it from me or somehow ordered a duplicate. And all of the information on it—how did she get that? Where did she get it? I mean, I didn’t even know my own social security number. Yet, somehow she did?

  Beyond the physical items and the bizarre behavior, the predominant question lurked. Disconcerting didn’t begin to describe the way it made me feel. Baffling wasn’t sufficient to describe the depths of the mystery.

  Why me?

  Where did Lark get my name and picture in the first place?

  Was it random? Had she blindly thrown darts at a map of the country and hit my hometown of Nowhere, Pennsylvania? Scoured public high schools for a girl her same age? Even if that was what she did, what about me had attracted her attention? I was no one special, had no remarkable qualities that made me stand out from my classmates. My grades were average. As were my looks. I’d been a member of my school’s debate team, but hadn’t been a star or anything. Joining clubs was never my thing, nor had I played in the band or sang in the choir. Basically, my list of extracurricular activities sucked.

  So…why me?

  I ran through every possibility that I could imagine. Each theory was more outrageous than the one before it.

  Why me?

  There were pictures of me online, I reasoned in an attempt to introduce logic to the outlandish thoughts swirling in my head. But not many. For the most part, they would be within the online archives of my hometown’s newspaper. Given the lack of excitement and breaking news in our area, our debate team matches were often written up. Those articles were always accompanied by photos from the event as well as our team picture. There would also be a picture or two from the annual Pie Bake-Off at the county fair last year, when Mom won first place. They’d included pictures of our happy family to display alongside her recipe.

  But surely, surely, the New Freedom Gazette wasn’t on a socialite’s radar. And if Lark had, for some incomprehensible reason, kept up with our tiny paper online, those mundane articles weren’t anything that she’d notice. And even if she’d somehow seen those articles—even while intoxicated, carrying the line of reasoning this far was laughable—there was absolutely nothing remarkable about the girl within the dark, grainy pictures.

  As for social media, I’d never really gotten into the craze. Truthfully, I only had a handful of friends from school, and none of us had been particularly caught up in creating and cultivating online counterparts for ourselves. Which eliminated blogging as well. At our age, having grown up in our town, we didn’t really have anything to say to the world that people would care about. No hobbies to share, either. Our sole interest, what united us as a group, had been planning for and talking about leaving New Freedom. About getting out into the world and really living for the first time. Basically, when it came down to it, Googling Raven Ferragamo would result in abysmal findings.

  So that was it. I had no idea. After wracking my brain, I couldn’t find a single reason that a total stranger—and not just any stranger, but Lark Kingsley, the real-life Blair Waldorf—would fixate on me. Would choose me. Not a single reason why she would believe that I could help her.

  Why me?

  With a body-shaking yawn, I accepted the fact that nothing would be solved tonight. The alcohol still coursed through my system, making me sleepy. Just before finally falling into a dreamless sleep, it occurred to me where the passport photo was from. There had been too many wild questions flying through my mind when I’d first seen the document for me to think about the picture itself, even though there was an obvious answer. Now that I’d digested the whole startling new development, I recognized the picture for what it was.

  Mom had insisted I put in a little extra effort, because, years from now, that photograph would serve as a visual reminder of how I’d looked in high school. And, after all, didn’t I want my classmates to remember me at my best? So I’d painstakingly straightened my brown locks, until the choppy layers fell nicely around my shoulders. In addition to the normal swipe of mascara and layer of lip gloss that constituted my everyday makeup, I’d added shimmery shadow to my eyelids to bring out the flecks of gold in my dark irises. While I’d wanted my senior portrait to be as true to life as possible, going the extra mile had paid off—my mom liked the picture so much, she’d framed it and set it on the mantle the day after the prints arrived.

  New Freedom High published their yearbooks digitally, for those of us who didn’t need a tangible reminder of the best years of our lives. That must’ve been where she’d stolen the picture from

  Relief flooded through me, but it was short-lived. One piece of the mystery was solved. But where Lark foun
d the picture was not nearly as troublesome as why she’d done it. Why she’d picked me.

  Why me?

  More than ever, I was determined to find Lark Kingsley. Alive. Even if only so I could ask her that very question.

  I DIDN’T DARE to watch the pilfered videos when anyone else was in the house. Since I had no idea what I’d find, no idea what would cause fear in my father, I couldn’t risk someone catching me. Even though I had to know what was going on, I had a deep-seeded fear of uncovering and exposing something that would hurt my father. I loved him too much to cause him pain.

  Two weeks after I found and copied the files, almost a month after I’d first heard the word Jyranji, an opportunity presented itself. It was a Saturday, and our penthouse was eerily still and quiet. My father was in Washington, DC, meeting with politicians, and my mother had an appointment with the tailor for a wardrobe fitting. If her past fittings were any indication, she wouldn’t be home until late in the evening. Jeanine had left after supervising my breakfast to run a list of errands a mile long. The rest of the staff had been asked not to disturb me, as I was supposed to be doing schoolwork for my summer classes.

  Instead, I was sitting at my desk with a piping hot cappuccino, staring at the offensive jump drive and wishing that my fervent need for answers wasn’t so steadfast. If only I’d never heard McAvoy utter the word. If only I’d gone to the fundraiser that night, instead of staying home to play Nancy Drew. If only my father hadn’t looked so scared. Any of those things would’ve changed this moment for me.

  Stop being such a wuss, I admonished myself.

  With a trembling hand, I woke my computer from sleep mode and slid the drive into the USB port. When a window popped up to ask me what I wanted to do with the new drive, I clicked the icon to open the folder.

  There it was. The list of files I’d copied. The secret that McAvoy and my father wanted to keep hidden, even from me, was somewhere here among the list of dates and numbers. Clicking to sort the list chronologically, I debated between starting with the oldest or newest file. Oddly, the words of Maria Von Trapp flitted through my mind.