Page 61 of The Billionaire's Angel

“I'm fine,” I said, mostly telling the truth. I was somewhere in between Amelia and Annalise. Now that Amelia could see for herself that her family was safe and well, I could tell by the gleam in her eyes that she was more curious than alarmed by whatever had happened. Annalise, on the other hand, looked ready tobolt.

Gage sat between Amelia and me. I suspected Aiden would have taken the head of the table, but he sat opposite us, next to Annalise, and took one of her trembling hands in his. She curled her fingers around Aiden's and held on,tight.

“Cooper is sending more security,” Aiden began. “They should be here any minute, so don't be alarmed if you see more of the Sinclair team in the house. We're going to search the lower level. Whoever got in didn't know about the motion alarms and set them off when he or she tried to enter the hall. They broke the glass in the library window to get out, but they didn't have time to cover theirtracks.”

“What does that mean?” Amelia demanded. “Cover whattracks?”

“Did you catch him?” Annalise asked in a thinvoice.

Shaking his head, Aiden said, “No. We saw someone running across the back lawn when we got to the window. One of the security team went after whoever it was, but they had too much of a head start. And we don't know that it's a man. We don't want to make any assumptions. We made that mistake with Marissa Archer when she was leaving the pictures. We might've caught her sooner if we hadn't assumed the person on the security tapes was aman.”

“Cover what tracks?” Ameliarepeated.

“The hidden door in the library leading to the hall outside the theater room downstairs was open. However the intruder has been entering the house, we think they're getting in down there. We’re going to start lookingtomorrow.”

“This is an old house,” Gage said. “The rooms on the lower level have been repurposed more than once, but there used to be a furnace, a coal chute, who knows what else. We'll figure out how they're getting in and seal itoff.”

A quick double knock sounded at the door to the dining room, and we all turned to see a man in a Sinclair Security uniform standing at the door, holding a woodenbox.

Aiden gave him a questioning look, and he said, “We found this outside the broken window. It had fallen open, and the contents were scattered in the dirt. We think this is what the intruder was after, but when he dropped it, it opened, and he had to abandon it if he wanted to get away. We put everything back in the box and thought you might want to take alook.”

Crossing the room, he handed the box to Aiden and turned togo.

“It's possible this is what the intruder has been after from the beginning,” Gage said, studying the box on the table in front of Aiden. A little taller than a shoe box but about the same dimensions, it was made of dark wood, with brass hinges and a brass clasp. There was a lock on the front. It looked as if it had been smashed in, I was guessing by theintruder.

Aiden lifted the heavy lid of the box, folding it back carefully and drew out a creamy sheet of paper with smears of dirt on the front. His eyes scanned the scrawling, handwritten note. When he was done, he set it on the dining room table and pulled out a second, seemingly identical folded sheet ofpaper.

When he reached for the third, Annalise ran out of patience and snapped, “Aiden!”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sophie

Aiden’sdark brows pulled together in concentration. He looked up at her and gave a tiny shake to his head. She shifted in her chair, I thought repressing the urge to get up and snatch the box away from her older cousin. Aiden dug to the bottom of the box and drew out one more letter, this one on gray paper larger than the first few notes. He scanned it and returned it to the bottom of thebox.

“So far, they're all addressed to your mother,” he said, looking from Annalise to Gage. “Nosignature.”

“From our father?” Annalise asked, reaching for one of the letters Aiden had left on the dining room table. Aiden moved it out of her reach before heanswered.

“It's not his handwriting. Not my father's either. The date on the letter from the bottom was July 1980. Before Anna started dating Uncle James. The letter on the top was from a year after they gottogether.”

“What did they say?” Gageasked.

“They appear to be love letters,” Aiden said quietly as shock settled over theroom.

Beside me, I felt Gage go utterly still. This was his mother they were talking about. I knew from Amelia that shortly before I'd been hired, they'd discovered that Anna Winters had borne a child and given him up for adoption before she'd married James Winters. They'd been looking for the missing child eversince.

Finding the box should have answered questions instead of creating more. Had Anna been the one to carefully pack up all those letters? What were they doing in the library? And how had the intruder known where tolook?

Gage studied the box sitting so innocuously on the table and said, “I don't remember seeing that box anywhere in thelibrary.”

“Neither do I,” Aiden said. “But there's more hidden in there than just the door to the lower level. My dad told me there were secretcompartments.”

“Where?” Annalise asked. “Why didn't I know about this? Did you know?” She askedGage.

Gage gave a guilty shrug. “Uncle Hugh said there were three, but Aiden and I only ever managed to find one. Could the box have been in another? Who would've known where tolook?”

“Where is it? Where's the secret compartment that you found?” Ameliaasked.