Daybreak (Sorrowsong University, #2) — Chapter no 4

Chapter 4

ALEX

[DRAFT]

Subject: Sudoku (noun) Please teach me To: Ophelia Winters

I don’t understand how you could possibly enjoy Sudoku. They’re making me angry.

I KNEW MY day was off to a rocky start when Josie, unsupervised, ate six bowls of marshmallow cereal for breakfast and then proceeded to vomit it all up on the way out the door. Crisis managed—I owe Emily, the nanny, a day off for that one—I made it into the office by nine, despite the traffic that a Monday morning in the city brings.

Jacqueline has my weekly schedule in my inbox by the time I slide into the chair behind my desk. A double espresso steams on the coaster beside my laptop. I text her a quick thank you and open the shitstorm that is my emails after a busy weekend at home.

Two notifications ping through at exactly nine. My daily reminder, Don’t call Ophelia, sits beneath a text from Harwood, punctual as ever.

Robert Harwood Morning. I’m back in the city today. Lunchtime?

Alex Lunch sounds good.

I stare at the reminder, glaring at it like that might make it go away.

Don’t call Ophelia. It sits on my lock screen all day, obscuring her warm

brown eyes in the photo I took in the back of the Land Rover on Christmas Eve.

It was the first text I got from my lawyer and investigator the day it all went south. Don’t call Ophelia. Cease all contact. Don’t incriminate your family further. Don’t give Green a reason to sue you for defamation, to suspect that it was you who helped her put that article together. Don’t be seen together, not until all threads of Bancroft’s life have been buried.

Fifteen infuriating letters that have made all of this so fucking lonely.

My first call of the day is with Mack and Brendan: the two private detectives I hired to assist the FBI in their search for my father. My dad has a lot of connections there, so I need two people who are definitely on my side. They’ve worked with me before to find the leak of various medical records belonging to my mother over the years.

Brendan appears on my laptop screen, a hoodie covering his messy hair.

Through his half-an-inch-thick glasses, he’s frowning at his screen, telling me I only have half his attention. With a background in cybersecurity and an IQ the rest of us mortals can only dream of, he handles anything that can be done behind a desk.

I don’t think Mack could sit behind a desk even with a gun to his head.

“Morning, Brendan.”

He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Morning. We have an update for you. I’ll wait for Mack to get online.”

No problem, I’ll just have an internal meltdown until then. “Great.”

Mack takes forever to arrive, finally joining on his phone with his AirPods in. “Guess where I am.”

“Do you actually want me to guess? Because I have another call at nine thirty.”

He rolls his eyes at my mood, panning the camera round an empty airport.

My breath hitches, fingers freezing as they type an email on the other half of my screen. The last time I was at Inverness Airport, the walls of my universe were crumbling around me.

The last time I was there, I told Harwood I genuinely couldn’t survive the day, that I couldn’t do it anymore.

The last time I was there, Ophelia was there, and I turned away.

I thought distance from her would make it easier. Easier on me if I chose to live, easier on her if I chose to die. Easier managing my time between my sisters and work. It hasn’t made anything easier.

Mack’s voice drags me back to the here and now. “You’re not our chattiest of clients.”

“What are you doing there?” I sit up straighter in my chair, realization suddenly dawning on me. The idea that my father might be in Scotland, anywhere near Ophelia, makes my hands curl into tight fists atop my desk.

“Is he there?”

“Well,” begins Mack, like he has all the time in the world, and not twenty minutes, to deliver this story. “I just left Sorrowsong this morning.”

My stomach drops, landing with a splat on the ground floor sixty-two stories down. “Is she okay?”

“She got a text in the airport the day you left.”

I flinch at the last two words. I don’t need a reminder. “You asked me to stay away from her,” I spit out, teeth gritted.

“And I stand by that, given you don’t want a murder on your record. Or hers, for that matter.”

“No one will give a shit that Bancroft’s gone.”

“Please don’t text Ophelia, Alex. Don’t risk incriminating yourself.”

“Rocco’s men have scrubbed the site clean. All pieces of Bancroft— digital or physical—have been wiped.”

“Ah. About that.” My phone pings. It’s an email from Brendan. Delete it once you’ve opened it. I’ll erase all trace from my end.

I unlock my phone and open the photo attached. It’s blurry, taken with some kind of cheap night vision camera. When I realize what it is, the rest of my internal organs join my stomach seven hundred feet below me.

“Fuck.” I rake my hands through my hair, imagining what this could mean for the eight women that own every cell of my heart.

For Ophelia, it’s jail time. It’s the end of all the dreams she deserves so much to achieve, the dreams I crave for her. This would be the end of my mother, the final straw. “Fuck,” I repeat, zooming in on Bancroft’s dying form in front of Ophelia and me.

I drop the phone back on the desk. “Fuck.”

Mack purses his lips like he’s actively enjoying himself. “Triple fuck.

Haven’t had one of those before.”

“This isn’t funny, Mack. I have the girls to look after. And Ophelia … this can’t come out.”

“I can’t match the text to either of your father’s phones,” says Brendan,

more serious than his colleague.

“A burner phone?”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure. I don’t know how he’d have a burner phone ready so soon after that article went live.”

“He could’ve.” He had a hundred phones for a hundred crimes. “But he couldn’t have taken the photo. He was in New York that week.”

My mind whirs like a flip-book, a hundred different faces flashing up in quick succession. Shawn feels like an obvious possibility. Carmichael, maybe. I can name more than a handful of business and finance students who think of my father like some sort of hero, who’d do anything for him.

My question from earlier lingers, unanswered. The knowledge of what this truly means seeps beneath the fragile barrier of my skin, joining the grief and the exhaustion and the anxiety that already sit there. Ophelia is dealing with another anonymous threat. “Is she okay?”

“She’s in one piece, if that’s what you’re asking. She looked exhausted.”

Fuck. I look at the email again, trying to imagine the mental toll that sitting with this photo has taken on her. My presence—my family’s presence—in her life is an abscess, infecting all the healthy tissue around it.

“I need to call her.”

“Not a good idea, not with this picture in the equation.”

My frustration is dangerously close to bubbling over. “Like me calling Ophelia is going to incriminate us any more than a photograph of us next to a body?”

“It’s not a great photo of you. Obviously, we’re aiming to track this photo down and bury it, but if it did get leaked, we have a solution. If we can claim you and Ophelia split before that night, you’d probably pass for someone else. That photo isn’t clear enough to identify you in a criminal case, in my opinion.”

Something clicks into place, and with it, a hot wave of fury boils my blood. I’ve been too busy to fully understand Mack and my lawyers’ decision to distance me so far from Ophelia.

They want her far enough from me that she can be thrown under the bus if required.

Mack mistakes my silence for confusion, or a lack of confidence in his plan. “It’s not like you had a motive for what happened to Bancroft.”

But Ophelia had the perfect reason. He doesn’t say it, but it echoes around my office, deafeningly loud. Ophelia was looking for revenge for her parents’ death, and that makes her a perfect scapegoat for all our problems. “That is not our angle. I am not taking that angle if it comes to it.”

“Alex, you have an airline, six minors, and your mother’s healthcare depending on you. Ophelia … to put it respectfully, if she went to jail—”

My knuckles turn white. I would care. It would matter to me. “I wouldn’t finish that sentence, if I were you.”

The ice in my tone must make them realize their jobs are on the line, because they both drop the idea completely and don’t mention it for the rest of the call. The rest of their updates are just filler, delicately placed to keep me sweet. We almost found this, we’re nearly there with this, we’re hoping to do this.

Why is it that the best of the best can’t even catch my father’s scent?

“He will have to surface, Alex. Visit an ATM, rent a car, get gas, eat food. He will surface, and we’ll get him the second he does. Talk to your lawyers about whether calling Ophelia is a bad idea.”

I hang up and scrub my face in my hands. I swivel in the chair to face the bustling city below, trying to get a hold on my quickening breaths.

Everything is piling up. Everything is too much and not enough. I can’t shake the feeling that Ophelia is in danger, that someone else is after her.

The chime of my laptop tells me my next meeting has begun, but my chest feels like it’s wrapped in chains.

I stare down at my shaking hands, trying to count my fingers through the panic that sinks its claws deep into my throat. I can’t catch my breath, can’t get a full inhale. I almost drop my phone, fingers trembling as I dial Harwood. He picks up on the third ring.

“I can’t breathe. I’m not going to make it to lunchtime.”

“You will. You can and you will.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“It’s a panic attack, Alex.”

A cold wave of dread washes over me. “Not this time. It’s worse. I can’t breathe. I can’t do it.”

“What’s happened?”

I can’t do it. Can’t survive the next thirty seconds. My heart is hot and sticky in my throat, clogging my airway. “He’s nowhere. He’s fucking nowhere. But he’s going to surface and he’s going to hurt one of them when he does. And Mack … Mack saw Ophelia and …”

And I’m not there to hold her, to walk her to her lectures. I can’t keep her safe.

“Alex, stop. Good, okay. Now breathe. Breathe.”

I manage a sorry excuse for a deep breath. “Mack visited Ophelia, and she got an anonymous text, and it … it’s a photo of us. A bad photo. And this could be the end of her.”

“Ophelia is stronger than you’re giving her credit for. She can hold her own. Tell me about the photo at lunchtime. I have another appointment in two minutes.”

The small crack in my voice fills me with disgust. “I can’t make it to lunchtime.”

There’s a smile in his voice when he next speaks. “Tell me about that at lunchtime.”

A small, disbelieving snort slips between two ragged breaths. “I struggle to like you sometimes.”

His laugh is genuine. “Survive until lunch, Alex. Then we’ll talk more.

And ask Jacqueline for decaf for the rest of the day.”

I hang up, puffing a slow exhale from my cheeks, drawing random lines in my notebook. My heart rate slows gradually. This whole situation is laughable—me, twenty-three, sitting behind a CEO desk with no idea what I’m doing and a crushing sense of existential dread.

I breathe for another moment, sketching a robin in the corner of my page until I’m calm enough to join my call. I switch my camera on and attempt to tame my unruly hair. “Sorry I’m late.”

I’M ON THE treadmill at 11 p.m. with Mia crunching through a bag of chips beside me when she mumbles something. I slow the treadmill to a jog.

“Huh?”

“Who’s Brendan?”

I hit the Stop button. “Why?”

“You’ve got two missed calls from Brendan. You got a boyfriend?”

An uneasy sense of alarm prickles my nape. I already know from the late hour and the fact that it’s Brendan calling and not Mack that it’s probably something serious. I pray to a god I’ve never believed in that Ophelia is unharmed. I grab my water and my phone from where they sit beside my sister. “I need to call him back.”

“Is it work stuff?” she asks, holding the bag of chips toward me.

I shake my head at the bag, trying to catch my breath. “Get yourself to bed, M.”

I head out the kitchen doors and into the garden outside, pacing the length of the small space while the phone rings and rings. It’s unbearable. I call him for a fifth time, raking a hand through my hair. I fire Belladonna a text asking her if she knows if Ophelia is okay.

Belladonna Let her go, Alex. She’s the human equivalent of wet cardboard.

Great.

When Brendan picks up, I half expect him to have been shot, or for someone to be holding him hostage, or something. He never fails to pick up immediately. His voice is muffled when it comes. “Sorry, was refilling my cereal bowl. Do you think they’re putting less marshmallows in Lucky Charms?”

We’ve put people on the moon, yet we can’t punch people through the phone line yet. Science is letting us down. “You’re thirty-five, Brendan.

This better be fucking good,” I grit out. “Is she okay?”

“Ophelia? I think so, yeah. Can you see my screen?”

I look down at my phone, where Brendan has started sharing a photo.

It’s blurry, like the camera it was taken on was greasy, but I’d recognize Sorrowsong’s distinct glasshouse swimming pool anywhere. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Ophelia got sent this. Only just told Mack about it.”

I zoom in on the small screen, realizing why he’s showing me it.

Ophelia is in front of the door to the pool, glancing over her shoulder like she knows she’s being watched. Even with the low quality, I can make out the worry on her expression. “When was this taken?”

“Yesterday.”

My eyes flick to the soft glow emanating from Fleur’s bedroom window to the silhouette of Mia brushing her hair in hers. I feel like I’m stretched too thin to protect everyone who’s important to me, despite my best efforts.

I chose the girls over Ophelia, I chose my family over her. It’s the decision I always knew I’d have to make; it’s the right decision. But I can’t help but imagine how it feels for Ophelia. Left behind, like she always has

been.

Fuck.

I drag a cigarette out of the box and light it. “And you of all people can’t trace it?”

“I can trace it, but it’s no help. It was taken at Sorrowsong, obviously,”

he says, like I’m three years old.

“But sent from New York?”

“Sent from Sorrowsong, too.”

“So either Ophelia has herself a new enemy, or …?”

“Or your father has made his way to Scotland to punish Ophelia for the article. Would he do that?”

I open my mouth to ask how my father would cross continents with an international arrest warrant but don’t bother. He has endless connections in the aviation industry and bottomless wealth, both in cash and in private banks.

Would he do that? It’s a good question. I try to put myself in my father’s shoes, imagine I’m on the run with nothing left to lose. “I’m not sure that he would. She’s a nobody in his eyes.”

Ophelia lost a lot when that article went live, but from an outsider’s perspective, I won. Inherited a company I had no right to inherit, gained the favor of the media, got rid of the father I never liked. I imagine my father hates me more than anyone else right now. “I think if Cain were to want to punish anyone, it’d be me.”

“That’s what Mack thinks, too. He thinks your father is waiting for a good time to corner you. He might still believe he can get his life back.”

Dread trickles down my spine, too hot, too sticky. I’m not afraid of whatever he has planned for me, but if one of the girls were to get caught in the cross fire … I shudder, my next drag on the cigarette a burning fire beneath my freezing skin. “I have to go to her.”

“I think your team is really against that idea.”

The unspoken reasoning behind his statement drums up a visceral rage, boiling and volatile in my chest. “We are not throwing Ophelia under the bus for what happened to Bancroft.”

“If Rocco has done a good enough job of burying him, we won’t need to, as long as we silence whoever’s texting her before they leak the photo.”

“Leak or not, it’s not happening,” I bite out. “If she’s getting a manslaughter charge, I am, too.”

“Do you hear how you sound? You have a family.”

Maybe I sound ridiculous to him, but for me, there is no debate. I will not be one more person using Ophelia like that. My father used her parents’ death to mop up the evidence of an affair. I won’t use her life to mop up the

evidence of a murder. “Drop it.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, defensively.

“I’m going to visit her,” I declare into the cloudless night, more to myself than Brendan. Like I’m giving myself a little pep talk. This’ll all work out marvelously, Alex. Ophelia will be delighted that you came and definitely won’t tear you a new one as soon as she sees you.

A sigh is all I get in return.

“There’s an aviation conference in London this weekend anyway.”

“Oh, is there?” he says, and I think he’s convinced I’ve lost it.

“Amazing. I, too, love to take eleven-hour detours when I’m on business trips. Do me a favor and keep your trip to Scotland off any electronic records. Don’t fly to Inverness. I’ll book you a rental car from London under an alias.”

“Will do,” I say. “And my seven-year-old sister thinks they’re putting less marshmallows in.”

“Fucking knew it,” he mumbles before hanging up, like he’s just solved the biggest case of his career.

With the New York February chill biting its way through the thin fabric of my gym top, I open up my texts and ask Jacqueline to book my flights.

I’m going to see Ophelia again.

I should text her first. Give her some kind of warning.

My fingers hover over the keyboard, cigarette dangling from my lips.

Hi. Absolutely not. Hey. Even worse. We should talk. Jesus, no. I sound like I’m about to suggest a divorce. I’m coming over. I spam the backspace

button, reminding myself that I’m actively trying not to get a restraining order from her.

Above the dread that sinks itself right into the marrow of my bones, an unfamiliar buzz of excitement skates along my skin, and as I let sleep drag me under later that night, for the first time in a while, I actually want to wake up.