Dark Favors

I didn’t think so, but I also didn’t want to keep guessing and screw with everything.

Finally, knowing that there was no chance in hell it was possible, I tried my own birthdate.

And everything opened.

“What the fuck?” I whispered out loud.

Why the hell had my birthday been the password?

“What are you hiding?” I asked, and then I started clicking. Almost instantly, I felt sick. It was all here. My entire life was here. Locke knew just about everything about me, and not only about me, but my mother.

I clicked on a PDF. It was a copy of a newspaper article from the night the woman went missing at the mansion I’d just had sex in. There was a picture of the missing girl, and right away, I recognized my mother.

Only, she had a different name.

Instead of Elizabeth Key, as I thought her name was, the woman in the picture was called Theresa Smith. She was barely out of high school when she’d vanished, and nobody ever knew what happened to her. For weeks, people had looked for her, but eventually, everyone realized it was useless, and the world moved on.

Only, Locke hadn’t moved on.

He’d found out who she was.

And he’d found out who my father was.

I started crying as I looked through all of the pictures, newspaper clippings, and recorded interviews. My dad wasn’t just some schmuck who’d run off because he didn’t want a kid. My dad was actually Locke’s arch nemesis. Josiah Reagan was my father, which meant that not only did I have a dad, but I had an older half-sister, too.

Did Annabelle know about me?

Did she know what her dad had done?

I kept clicking, reading through all of the material, and soon I figured out exactly what had happened all of those years ago. Josiah had slept with my mom, and when she’d gotten pregnant, he’d threatened her. The event at the mansion was the last time she was ever seen in public under her real name. She’d worked for him briefly as an assistant of some kind, and no one had really thought too much about their relationship at all. He’d been questioned when she vanished, but he’d been cleared, and the world moved on.

So why had she vanished?

And why hadn’t he killed us both?

Finding out that the biggest asshole, and also the biggest real estate tycoon, in Ruby City had an illegitimate daughter?

That was news.

People in Ruby City loved a good gossip story, and they loved seeing their beloved heroes fall on their faces. This was the kind of story that would destroy Extrance for good. The shareholders wouldn’t want to be associated with the kind of guy who would get someone pregnant and then try to kill her. They definitely wouldn’t want to be associated with the kind of guy who would abandon his unborn child.

“Mom, what did you do?”

My mother had never told me where I’d come from.

She’d never told me that she used a fake name. Fuck, even after she’d died, I hadn’t found anything that would have told me the truth. This was a secret that she wanted to die with her, apparently, but something had happened.

Rebecca Locke had happened.

I found her research paper on the flash drive, along with all of the information she’d gathered about my dad. And despite being a college student, she was wildly clever. She’d found out exactly who he was, what had happened, and then she’d found something else.

Hush money.

My mom had run away, disappearing into Ruby City with me. There was a reason we’d lived off the books in the trailer park. There was a reason we’d rented a trailer without signing any sort of contract. My mom did everything she needed to in order to protect me and keep me safe.

And she’d blackmailed Josiah Reagan into sending her money every single month.

Rebecca had found a post office box where the checks had been sent, and I realized that it was something I hadn’t checked since my mom passed away. It had only been six months since she died. Would the box still be open?