back then. What didn’t make sense to me was that if my dad did set Deon up four years ago, why would he have done it? I thought he was waiting for Deon to come back, judging by the preserved room and the spot at the company. Now it seemed more like he was trying to take him out.
“Nathan,” Cherri said weakly.
I looked up at her. “Cherri, I’m so sorry for everything that I’ve put you through and that my family has put you through. I can’t beg your forgiveness forever, but—”
“You’re forgiven. I know what happened back then wasn’t you, and now I see the pressure you were under. I don’t know how you didn’t break sooner.”
“I’ve made peace with the stain I’ll always have, so I can’t just be a stool forever while I try to make it up to you, but is there anything I can do? Anything?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “You can tell me if Deon is alive.”
I looked back at her, trying my best to maintain my poker face. I could see Kyle eyeing me and could feel Nikita’s gaze on the back of my head. My mind drifted to the bedroom upstairs, Deon’s old room, the one I’d prepared for Deon and Cherri to stay in together one day if it became possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why Deon wanted Cherri out of the loop, but if my relationship with Nikita had taught me anything, it was that the love that two people share is strong enough to overcome any obstacle. The way Cherri loved Deon and the way he loved her was the kind of force that was going to get us through whatever challenges and traps my father had set up for us in the days ahead, but only if they were together.
“Yes,” I said finally, and Cherri doubled over. She let out a sigh of relief, and I could see tears dripping from her eyes.
She looked up at me, and grief and desperation were written all over her face. “Where?”
“Wait,” Avery said, looking over at me. “Deon’s alive?”
“Yeah,” I said to her and then looked to Cherri again. “I don’t know where he is, though. I swear. He and I have been communicating on and off, but…” My stomach churned as I prepared to tell her the next part. “About, I don’t know, four weeks ago—maybe more, I can’t remember—Deon called me to check in. We were talking, and the line went dead all of a sudden. He hasn’t called back since. Kyle can verify.”
“You knew?” Alistair barked at Kyle.
Kyle pointed at me, and I held up a hand. “Deon and I both swore Kyle to secrecy, and he only knew because of unavoidable circumstances. He said very clearly that he thought it was a bad idea and wanted to tell Cherri right away.”
Cherri looked over at Kyle. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why don’t you call him?” Cherri asked.
“I don’t have a number for him,” I replied. “He calls me on an unknown number every single time, and it just rings and rings until I pick up. It never goes to voicemail.”
Cherri’s eyes widened. “What?”
“What?” I asked.
Cherri jumped up and bolted for the stairs. “Sicily!”
The rest of us exchanged looks and then stood up and ran after her. We rushed down the hallway, past the room with some suggestive sounds coming out of it, and down to Sicily’s room. Cherri opened the door, bursting through it. Sicily was sitting in front of his wall of monitors, clicking away at the keys, playing some game where he was a little green astronaut running around. A lot of other multi-colored astronauts were running around too. Right as we walked in, he appeared to get killed by one of the other astronauts.
“No! Lime!” he screeched. “Dammit.”
“Sicily,” Cherri barked. “Quit playing that dumbass game.”
“I knew he was sus,” Sicily replied and then turned and saw that we were all standing in the room. “Oh. Hey, guys.”
“Sis, remember that time that I got a phone call. It just rang and rang and rang, and for like fifteen minutes, it rang, but we never answered it. Finally, you just made me turn my phone off.”
“Yeah,” Sicily replied.
“You said that you kind of wished we’d answered it because then you could have tracked it?” Cherri said. “Nathan has gotten calls like that too. They were from Deon.”
“What!” Sicily snapped, then jumped up and ran over to me, slamming his hands on my arms. “Do you still have the