I glance over. Preston had blue eyes, but Adam’s are a weird greenish gray. So that’s why I never knew “Preston” wore contacts—because they were part of a disguise. And the frequent haircuts I used to mock him for were probably to mask his curly hair. And now the picture in front of the Rosewood Center for Boys makes sense. Because Preston really was there, only he wasn’t Preston.
“I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course,” Adam continues. “The truth leaked out over the past few years. Claudia tends to get chatty when she’s drunk.” He glances over at me. “At the time, DeWitt’s men just told me if I wanted to get out of the boys’ home and go live in a big pretty house in the city I would have to change my name and pretend to be someone else. They made it sound fun, like acting. They said they’d buy me whatever I wanted. I’d get my own room, my own maid.”
“So DeWitt . . . hired you? To become Preston?”
“Basically.” Adam’s mouth twists into something harsh and ugly. “His men helped me run away from the center and brought me to the DeWitts to start my ‘great new life.’ Only it wasn’t great.” He bears down on the accelerator, and the pickup’s engine grinds in protest. He looks confused for a second.
“You need to slow down or shift up,” I say. “The gears are sensitive on this thing.” I watch as he wrestles with the gearshift. How completely bizarre would it be if Adam and I were at Rosewood together? I was only there for about three weeks, but it’s still entirely possible. I try to recall the faces of some of the other kids, but they’re all blurs. Nameless blank figures who sometimes stared at me but never talked to me. All I remember is Henry.
“For the first two years, they kept me in the house,” Adam says. “They told everyone I’d been in an accident and needed plastic surgery. Then they said I went straight from recuperating to boarding school. Only instead of classes I got drilled and redrilled by Claudia about what it meant to be Preston DeWitt. When I screwed up, she locked me in my room for hours until I promised to try harder. Do you know how hard it is to learn to be someone else?” he asks. “I ran away once, but they caught me and I ended up in a psych ward. Some shrink decided I had paranoid schizophrenia. He jacked me full of meds and zapped my brain. After that, I didn’t run away again, but my memory began to get choppy. I started filming everything I didn’t want to forget, just in case.”
“That is seriously messed up.”
“Tell me about it. And then I started talking to my real mom again—I found her online—and she gave me the great idea to start recording the DeWitts,” Adam says.
“Violet?”
He nods. “She raised me by herself because my dad split early. But then the state took me away from her when I was seven because she sometimes left me home alone while she was working. After I found her again, I didn’t want to be Preston anymore. Mom said we could get a lot of money from my fake parents. I rigged the house with cameras; getting them to incriminate themselves was child’s play. I wanted to save up so me and my mom could disappear and start over somewhere else.” He whips the steering wheel to the right to avoid what looks like a dead raccoon. “But those bastards set her house on fire. They tried to kill us both.”
“But there was a second body. Who—”
“Some loser frat guy Mom brought home from her job.” Adam stares straight through the windshield. “You were right about her being a stripper, by the way.”
“But DeWitt—”
“Identified the remains as Preston?” Adam’s mouth twists into a scowl.
“Why the hell would he do that?”
We almost fly right past the turnoff to the Colonel’s cabin. My eyes flick to the dashboard. 11:51. Adam hits the brakes at the last second, turning off onto a dirt road. Even with the brights on, I can only see a few feet ahead of us.
“I’m surprised he even reported me missing in the first place. Maybe Claudia did—she seemed to take everything a little harder than dear old Dad. But my guess is that once Langston and his guys got close, they probably wanted to hunt me without any interference from the FBI. DeWitt IDs me as dead, and suddenly everyone stops looking for me. No one would ever expect a distraught father to lie about something like that. And if they did, DeWitt would just pay them off, I’m sure.”
“It just all seems so . . . insane.”
“Yeah, it does. And now even if I turn up claiming to be Preston, they’ve probably got real Preston’s fingerprints and DNA locked away somewhere. If need be, DeWitt can just pull them out and call me a fraud, perpetrated by political opponents or some shit.” Adam squints into the dark. “It’s not like he’d let me go back to being Preston after finding out Mom and I were blackmailing him.” He glances at the dashboard clock. 11:54. “We need to grab Parvati and then find a safe place to hide out until I can mail my videos to the cops.”
“Why not just turn them in yourself?”
Adam shakes his head. “I’ve got enough money to start over. I don’t want to hang out here to testify. I’d rather just let the world think both Preston and Adam are dead.”
The road narrows. Tree branches slap against the outside of the pickup like clawing fingers. We’re getting close to the cabin. “We should park here and hike in on foot,” I say. “If we get much closer they’ll know we’re coming.”
Adam nods. “DeWitt’s got a whole group of ex-military thugs doing his dirty work. They’ll be ready for you. Hopefully some of them are combing the woods trying to find me. They won’t expect me to come back. I can be your secret weapon.”
He pulls the truck off the side of the road until it’s halfway buried in the trees. We both jump out of the truck and head into the woods. My heart races in my chest. What chance do I have against guys like Langston and Marcus? Almost none. “Wait.” I touch Adam’s arm as he plunges into the trees in front of us. “Why the hell would they take Parvati from the cemetery? Why would they bring you guys here?”
Adam looks back at me. His eyes glow gray in the moonlight. “She knows too much. Not sure why they brought us here. Probably to throw suspicion onto someone else.”
“Someone like me.” I tell him about the fake eyewitness, the bloody cell phone, my shark’s tooth pendant showing up in the fire.
Adam snorts with disgust. “I’m not surprised. DeWitt doesn’t care who suffers as long as it’s not him.”
The Colonel’s cabin comes into view, and I pull my hood even lower and drop down into a crouch. My blood roars in my veins, drowning out the symphony of bugs and rustling leaves.