Hey, look at me. Look at me, Emily. She looked at him wrecked, hollowed out. This is not your fault, Marcus said fiercely. You hear me?
A professional con man targeted you, studied. You moved into your life on purpose. You didn't fail to see it because you're stupid. You didn't see it because you're a decent person and decent people don't walk around expecting to be hunted. That's not a flaw.
That's the best thing about you. And he used it. That's on him. Every bit of it is on him. But your house is on that list, she whispered.
Marcus, don't you understand what that means? He didn't just target me. If I'm across the street from you and your house is what he really wanted all along. Her eyes searched his face terrified. He didn't come to my house that night by accident.
And he didn't sit outside your house by accident either. Marcus, this whole time, all of it, you and me, me ending up here in your house. What if that's exactly where he wanted me? What if he pushed me right to your door on purpose? And Marcus kneeling on his kitchen floor with a woman's hands shaking in his felt a cold understanding settle over him because it fit.
Every ugly piece of it fit. The money hadn't been the endgame. The wedding hadn't been the endgame. Emily herself had never been the endgame. She'd been the way in.
And the endgame was the one thing Ryan had wanted from the very beginning. The one property on that whole list that wouldn't sell the one man who'd told the friendly people to get off his porch. The endgame was Marcus' house. And Marcus' house came with Marcus's daughter. And a man who'd spend four years running a con to get a piece of land was not a man who'd let one stubborn father stand in his way.
He wanted me to take you in. Marcus said the truth of it, turning his stomach. That's why he let you see him at the window that night. That's why he made you scared enough to run but not scared enough to leave town. He knew what kind of man I am.
He knew if a woman screamed across the street, I'd run. He counted on it. His voice dropped to almost nothing. He used the best thing in me to put you in my house so that when the time came, he'd have a way in. Through you, Emily stared at him, and the horror in her eyes was complete.
Now then I have to leave. She said standing up so fast the chair fell. Right now tonight I have to get away from you and Ava as far as I can because as long as I'm here I'm the door he's been trying to open and I will not I will not be the thing that lets him near your daughter. Emily, no. Don't you understand?
I'm the weapon Marcus. He built me into a weapon and pointed me at your family and I walked right into your house carrying it. Marcus stood and took her by both shoulders gently and made her look at him. If you walk out that door tonight, he said quietly alone, scared into the dark where he's waiting, then he wins twice. He gets you back where he wants you and he gets me sitting here alone thinking I let it happen.
So no, you're not leaving. We are not doing the thing he wants. We are going to do the exact opposite of every single thing that man expects. His hands tightened on her shoulders. He built you into a weapon, Emily.
Fine. Then he's about to find out what happens when the weapon knows the truth and turns around. Emily was crying and shaking and looking at him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had just dissolved. How? She whispered.
How do we fight a man who planned all of this for 4 years? He's smarter than us. He's ahead of us. He's been ahead of us the whole time. He's not smarter than us.
Marcus said he's just been the only one who knew the game was being played. That's over. As of right now tonight, we know. And a con only works as long as the mark doesn't know she's the mark. He looked her dead in the eye.
You're not the mark anymore, Emily. Neither am I. And that changes everything. He let go of her shoulders and picked up the fallen chair and set it upright. And he sat her back down in it.
And he sat down across from her with the folder between them, the folder with his own address near the bottom of a con man's list. And he opened it back up to the first page. Now, Marcus said, we're going to go through every single piece of paper in here tonight. And we're going to find out exactly what this man wants and exactly what he's done and exactly where he's weak because he's been building this for 4 years. And that means somewhere in all this paper there's four years of him getting sloppy thinking nobody would ever look.
He tapped the folder. You handed me his whole plan the night you ran and you didn't even know it. So let's read it. And across the street in a dark car parked where he thought no one could see him, a man sat watching the lights burn late in a small house that was almost his. Smiling to himself, certain that everything was going exactly according to a plan he'd spent 4 years building.
Having no idea at all that inside that house at that very kitchen table, the two people he'd been moving around like pieces on a board, had just for the first time turned over and looked directly back at him. They read until 3:00 in the morning. Marcus made a fresh pot of coffee at midnight and another at two. And the two of them sat at that kitchen table going through Ryan's papers one sheet at a time. And the picture that built itself in front of them was worse than either of them had guessed.
It wasn't just Marcus' street. There were three neighborhoods in the folder, three separate lists of addresses, all of them workingass. All of them the kind of place where people had lived for 30 years and raised their kids and buried their parents. And a company was quietly buying them up house by house through a web of LLC's so tangled that even Marcus, who'd dealt with developers his whole working life, had to read some pages four times to follow the money. "He's not flipping houses," Marcus said finally somewhere around 1:00 in the morning.
"This is bigger than flipping. Look at this." He turned a page toward her. "These aren't purchase agreements for individual homes. This is an assembly. He's putting together parcels.
You buy up a whole block. You knock it all down. And you sell the assembled land to a big developer for 10 times what you paid for the houses. There's a name here on this one. Some regional development corporation.