“Why were you looking at pictures of Jake?” Kori asked.

I exhaled heavily and folded my hands on the table. “Research. I wasn’t about to walk into the Tower estate and ask for a favor without already knowing everything I could possibly find out. No matter what you might think about me, I’m not an idiot.” But I’d evidently said something wrong. Kris had been staring at me for the past ten minutes, which was unnerving enough on its own. But now his gaze looked feverish. Eager, like a cat who’d just caught a mouse.

“Favor? You went to ask them a favor? Not to hire them? Why would the Towers owe you a favor?”

Shit. But it was too late to backtrack. “They don’t owe me a favor. I just thought it was worth a shot.”

No one bought that. Hell, I didn’t even buy it.

A second earlier, Vanessa and Gran had looked ready to curtail his line of questioning, and maybe even let me go. But that all changed in a single heartbeat. And too late, I realized I’d forgotten to be careful around the Reader.

“She’s lying.” Anne sat up straight in her chair. “They do owe her a favor. She believes they do, anyway.” And suddenly everyone was looking at me as if I’d grown a second head.

Damn, I hate Readers.

“Why would the Towers owe you?” Kris demanded, and I could feel their interest like a living thing, ready to burrow deep inside me and feast on my secrets.

“They don’t.” My mind raced as I tried to decide what I could say to make them let me go. “I was totally over the line, asking them for a favor. I never met any of them before this afternoon. I swear on my full name.” Which—with any luck—they would never know.

“Anne?” Kori said.

The Reader frowned without taking her gaze from me. “I don’t taste anything false, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would you ask the Towers for a favor, if you don’t have any connection to them? That takes one hell of a set of balls.” Yet she looked less impressed than incredulous.

“How did you even get in to see Julia?” Kori asked. “Kris said you were in her office, with just her and Lynn?” She glanced at her brother for confirmation and he nodded. “Jake didn’t meet with strangers in his home. Not even prospective clients. That’s too much of a security risk. I can’t see Julia veering from that policy, especially considering that we’re not the only ones who want her dead, thanks to rumors that she was involved in her brother’s murder.”

“Rumors?” I couldn’t help but ask. The Towers were my business now, at least until I figured out what I’d actually inherited from my biological father. “Does that mean they’re not true?”

“Oh, those rumors are one hundred percent true,” Ian said, and I glanced at him in surprise. “She asked me—in a circumspect, but very obvious kind of way—to kill Jake. I was happy to oblige. For my own reasons.” His smile was for Kori, and Kori alone, and for one short moment I envied the intimacy the smile demonstrated, even in a room full of people.

But then his point sank in.

“That’s right. You killed Jake Tower.” Kori had told me that, but I hadn’t yet mentally connected the gun that had fired the bullet with the trigger finger of the man sitting in front of me. The man who’d killed my biological father, who—by all accounts—had received a much better death than he’d deserved.

How could I have known so little about the man who contributed half my DNA? How was it possible that I knew more about him now, three months after his death, than I’d ever known in life?

But I felt guilty about that thought as soon as I’d had it. I hadn’t known much about Jake Tower because he hadn’t mattered. My real father was my mother’s husband. My sister’s father. They were all the family I’d wanted, and if I’d never lost them, I wouldn’t need to know the family that didn’t want me. I wouldn’t care about what the Towers owed me, because I wouldn’t need that favor.

Anne was right about that. The Towers did owe me. They owed my mother for the years she’d spent hiding me. For the nights she’d spent worrying that I would turn out to be like my biological father, in spite of the happy, healthy life she’d made damn sure I had. And they were going to pay what they owed, even if that meant pressing whatever advantage my inheritance—Money? Property? Companies?—gave me.

“Yes,” Ian said, answering a question I’d almost forgotten I’d asked. “I shot Jake Tower with his own gun. He died quickly, but in a great deal of pain.”

“Well, the general consensus seems to be that he deserved that.” I stood and wiped my hands on the front of my jeans. “So...who’s taking me out of here? You can drop me off anywhere. Seriously. The front lawn is fine.” Just as long as I was on the other side of those countersunk screws.

Kris looked at Kori, whose gaze flitted from Ian to Anne to Vanessa, without once straying to Gran, who seemed to have forgotten we were there at all, while she rinsed dishes and lined them up in the dishwasher.

“I have one more question.” Vanessa met my gaze boldly. “Is there anything you can do to help us get Kenley back? Anything at all?”

I exhaled slowly, pretending I was actually considering the question, when I was really trying to figure out how best to get away with a lie. The safest approach seemed to be avoiding lies altogether, in favor of a marginally relevant truth. “I told you, I never met any of the Towers until today. And they shot at me,” I said. “Ask Kris if you don’t believe me.”