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It wasn’t difficult to fake looking ill as we left the party My stomach isted in knots from the adrenaline and the emotional rollercoaster I’d been on, and I leaned on Vance for support as aited for the car to pull up

We didn’t talk on the short drive back to his house We were both too deep in our thoughts He was probably wondering as on the flash drive, but all I could see was the gold face of led to put it back in Lambert’s safe

There was an uneasy feeling in the air as we got out of the car and went up the front steps of his family’s mansion The wind seemed cold and vicious as it rippled across my strapless dress and bare skin, like it knee’d taken so we shouldn’t

Our feet carried us through the house, up the grand staircase, and into his bedrooether on the couch with his MacBook perched on the coffee table in front of us, and the copy of Lambert’s flash drive clenched in Vance’s fist

“Ready?” he asked

I’d been ready for ten long years to see what my father had been after, and now the moment was finally here “Yes”

He plugged it into the port, gave it a nize the device, and then double-clicked Theopened to display a few folders One was titled Barlowe, and another Stockwell, but it was the Hale folder in the ated the cursor to and clicked open

It held a single mov file, and the name on it was a rando from the dark thu by his confused look

He didn’t ask for privacy before clicking on it Perhaps he felt I’d earned the right to see everything on the drive since I’d been the one to find it, or o, and he didn’t wantsecrets

The video application launched, the screen filled with the black dialogue box, and then the footage began to roll

The Hales’ for room was naturally dark because it was paneled in wood, but in this video, it was lit only by the candles in the five-arant table

A woown sat in a chair with her back to the camera, and she was surrounded by tuxedoed men on either side No one seereen leaf at the edge of the fraement

“What is this?” I asked