The Masterminds (Masterful #2) Read online

  THE MASTERMINDS

  Book 2 of the MASTERFUL series

  Olivia Wildenstein

  Contents

  the MASTERFUL series - book 2

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part 3

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Also by Olivia Wildenstein

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  the MASTERFUL series - book 2

  “A villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told.”

  -Chris Colfer

  Part I

  1

  A girl who stitches quilts.

  This is the first thing I learn about Ivy Redd. After skimming through her Masterpiecers application, I toss it aside because quilt making is not really art. I admire people who stitch stuff. My grandmother was one of them. Up until the day she died, she met with her quilting club each week. They’d cut and sew squares of gaudy-patterned fabric with fervor, as though their lives would fall apart if they paused.

  Dominic, the president and founder of the Masterpiecers School, picks up the application and thumbs through it.

  “Don’t bother. It’s quilts,” I say, grabbing the next file.

  He studies the picture stapled to the last page. “You are too rash in judging this girl. She has something. What do you think, Josephine?”

  He hands it over to the vice-president of the school.

  “Pas mal. But we only have one more slot. And I found the perfect candidat.”

  “Really?” Dominic leans back against the silk upholstery of his wooden chair. One of the school’s graduates, Christos Natter, carved it. One side is curved and smooth, while the other looks windblown, stretching irregularly toward Dominic’s bulky chestnut bookcase. “Who struck your fancy?”

  Josephine flings a file onto the eighteenth-century French desk. It lands next to the industrial steel lamp.

  Dominic glances at it. “No.”

  “Pourquoi pas?”

  He flaps his hand in the air. “He’s a former soldier, not an artist.”

  She folds one leg over the other and rests her hands on her bony white knee. “That is not a reason, Dom. He is skilled. Look at that rope he wove while he was on tour.”

  “Come on, Jo. It’s a rope,” Dom says.

  “And this”—she nods toward Ivy Redd’s file—“is a quilt. Why does quilt trump rope?”

  “Because!” The way he looks away from Josephine says there’s more to his staunch refusal than the medium of the pieces.

  “You both have a special person, who you did not pick on merit,” she says. “I am certain Chase is a talented boy, Brook, and Maria—actually, I am not certain Maria has anything to offer besides her body, Dom—but I accepted. Now consent to my choice.”

  Dominic reddens at the mention of his ex-girlfriend, a former beauty queen and ham-fisted artist whose claim to fame are crude renditions of overly made-up pageant contestants. I heard he impregnated her, and the only way to get rid of the baby was accepting her onto the show.

  Josephine rises, and her tailored pearl-gray dress slips right into place over her skeletal body. “I will alert Mr. Kevin Martin that he has been selected. Oh, wait. That is why we have Brook now, n’est-ce pas? To do all the menial jobs.”

  I glare at her, although she’s right. That is why I’m here. “I’ll notify the contestants this afternoon.”

  She gives me a crooked smile before stepping out of Dominic’s office.

  “She hates me,” I tell Dom some time after she shuts the door.

  “She hates everyone.”

  “Except her fiancé.”

  “I doubt she even likes him.”

  As I straighten out the files of applicants who didn’t make the cut, Dominic tut-tuts.

  “What?”

  “The girl who sews quilts; keep her application aside. We’ll be needing it.”

  I slip it out of the pile and put it on top. “Why?”

  “Because.” He shifts his eyes toward his cell phone. Dominic is certain we are being listened to. “She’s a sound runner-up.” As he talks, he grabs a piece of paper embossed with his name and scribbles something.

  I scratch the stubble on my cheek as I read it. When my jaw unhinges, Dominic picks up his message and shreds it into a dozen tiny pieces that he drops into his leather bin. They flutter down like confetti, settling in the dusky emptiness. I doubt anyone will collect them and glue them back together, but just in case, I crouch down, swipe some into my palm, and stick them inside my blazer pocket.

  I have as much to lose as Dominic. No, that’s a lie. I have more to lose because it’s my name that’s being used, not his. Mine.

  “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” he says, all cheery again. “I love spring. Don’t you?”

  I’m tongue-tied.

  “I’m heading out for lunch. I’ll see you tonight,” he says.

  “Tonight?”

  “Didn’t your father tell you? We’re having dinner all together at his house. To celebrate the sale. It went well, didn’t it?”

  I make a jerky head movement that’s supposed to be a nod.

  “Did it pay the bills?”

  “Not all of them.”

  He pats my shoulder. “I’m sure they’ll get paid soon. I have an idea.” His fingers clamp down around my shoulder like a metal claw. I’m starting not to like his ideas. “I’ll tell you later.” He squeezes once, then lets go and walks out, whistling a tune that sounds like something from Les Misérables.

  Clutching the pile of applications against me, I stop by my office, which is more of a glass cubicle than an office. I don’t even have screens or blinds. As I heave the folders onto my desk, I notice one of the secretaries fanning a leaflet out in front of a young boy. It throws me back in time. Four years to be exact. I stood at his exact spot, overwhelmingly excited at the prospect of starting at the Masterpiecers. Four years ago, when everything was still so peachy. When my family was still rich. When my little brother didn’t despise me for having usurped “his life.” The school has strict laws forbidding siblings from attending. Supposedly, it’s to discourage family feuds. Didn’t discourage Chase from hating my guts.

  Movement behind the secretary catches my attention. Josephine stands next to her triangular-shaped desk, where a lone potted orchid holds court over an ultra-flat computer screen and a pencil cup made of cerulean blue clay. It looks as though a kindergartener crafted it, when in fact, it was an alumni from this school.

  Josephine sees me staring. There’s something
unsettling about the way she gazes back, eyes sort of slanted. My shirt collar suddenly feels tight, so I pop the top button open. She smiles that glacial smile of hers, then gazes down at my jacket pocket. I stick my hand inside protectively before reassuring myself that Josephine Raynoir does not have X-ray vision. I rub the pieces between the pads of my fingers, feeling the raised edges in the vellum where Dominic inked his command: Find out who Kevin Martin really is.

  Josephine flicks a switch and her glass walls blur. I am left with the shadow of her body moving about like the giant stick insect I won at a fair when I was twelve. I kept it in a terrarium, which I couldn’t be bothered to clean. Our housekeeper, Carmelina, was too frightened of the bug to touch the thing, so the sides became filthier and filthier until my mother got so sick of it, she seized the glass case and dumped it on the curb for some other little boy, or some garbage collector, to find.

  I eye my trashcan, but decide against putting anything inside. It’s lunchtime, and even though I’m not hungry, I walk out of Delancey Hall, a two-story building with glossy green ivy scuttling over the brick walls. It was named after Dominic’s favorite adviser, Robert Delancey. A few years back, when I was starting on college applications, The New York Times dedicated its entire art section to the man. It was titled The Monocled Star-Maker. My father read it out loud to us over breakfast.

  “Art is Chase’s dream, Dad. Not mine,” I remember telling him, mostly to get him off my case.

  Chase looked up from his big bowl of cornflakes, milk dribbling down his chin. He was fourteen then. His upper lip had finally grown some fuzz.

  “I wasn’t given a choice,” Dad said.

  “Well I’d like a choice,” my seventeen-year-old self demanded.

  “And you’ll get one,” Mom chimed in, clicking into the dining room for breakfast. She dropped a kiss on my forehead, and then tried to peck Chase’s, but he ducked away from her. “Right, Henry? We always said we would let the kids choose.”

  In the end, after two years spent at Duke University, I asked to transfer into the art school to my father’s delight. It was the same year Chase sent in his college applications. His top choice was the Masterpiecers, but I beat him to it, something he never forgave me for. Just like he never forgave me for consoling his ex after their messy breakup.

  As I walk toward Riverside Drive, I grab the slivers of paper from my pocket and dump them inside the nearest trashcan. Then I slip my phone out and open a search window in which I type Kevin Martin’s name. There are several pages of results. I add the words ‘retired sergeant.’

  There is only one result: Kevin Martin, Private Investigator.

  Dominic was right. Josephine is investigating him.

  2

  1 month before the show

  It’s strange keeping a secret from your best friend. In my case, from my two best friends. The girls who, in spite of being two years younger than me, and somewhat cool—especially Ivy—ate their lunches with the fat kid every day.

  Yes, once upon a time, I was that kid whose belly plopped out of elastic-waisted pants and whose cheeks earned him the nickname of Hamster. Ivy would smack anyone who dared call me by my furry moniker, while Aster reassured me I was the handsomest boy she’d ever laid eyes on. Said she’d had a crush on me since the age of five when we met in the McDonald’s jungle gym, where I rescued her from the ball pool.

  I drop on the couch, draping one arm around the back cushion. “What time are they broadcasting the selection?” I ask Ivy, who’s sewing something red. Her fingers move so fast, tucking the needle in, gliding it out, in, out, it’s hypnotic.

  “At nine. Hopefully, Aster will be home by then.”

  “They work her too hard at that pizzeria.”

  “It’s good for her.”

  “Is it?”

  “It gives her purpose.”

  “The ad agency gives her purpose,” I say.

  “Yes, but it’s an internship. She doesn’t make any money.”

  “She would’ve been better off working at Mom’s bakery.”

  “Possibly. But she would have seen it as charity, and you know as well as I do, that she hates charity.” Ivy sets the red thing down next to her. “Joshy, if I get picked—”

  “When you get picked.”

  Ivy wrinkles her nose. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s made that face when she’s nervous. “If I get picked, will you stay with her while I’m gone? I know it’s a lot to ask, what with you guys being broken up and everything, but I don’t like the idea of leaving her on her own.”

  “Why are you even asking, Ives?”

  “Because you have a new girlfriend now.”

  Heat crawls up the sides of my face. It prickles, like when I slap on aftershave after nicking my skin. “How do you know about Heidi?” I half-whisper, gaze darting toward the door.

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t told Aster,” she says, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. It’s flat and shiny, unlike her sister’s springy corkscrews. “Is it serious?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Promise me you won’t tell Asty until it is?”

  I nod, ogling the threadbare carpet because Ivy has a way of looking at you that’s really unsettling. Maybe it’s because her eyes are so light. Nah. Aster has light blue eyes too. That’s not it. “How did you find out?”

  “I saw a picture of you two on her Facebook feed, and guessed.”

  I lift my gaze back up to hers. “Crap. What if Aster saw the same picture?”

  “She’s not friends with Heidi.” Ivy leans forward and pokes my chest. “You can’t keep secrets from me for long, Joshy.”

  Actually, I can.

  And I have. The FBI put my chief on a huge case, and I’m part of the task force.

  I so wish I could tell someone. Anyone. But especially Aster and Ivy. They’re like my sisters. Well, Ivy is; not Aster. Aster is something else to me, something pure and painful and complicated.

  Our relationship, although brief, was bittersweet and intense. We loved deeply, but not well…because she wasn’t well. Her mental health pierced the fragile bubble that had formed around us. I still remember the exact moment it happened. It was the morning the gynecologist phoned Ivy to tell her that her twin left her office upset, convinced she had just endured a miscarriage although she hadn’t. It took us hours to locate Aster.

  She was covered in snow on a bench, in the middle of Highland Park, clutching her empty abdomen. Cradling her in my arms, I carried her home. She believed her jeans were soaked in blood when in fact it was a mixture of snow and urine. I ran her a warm bath, sponged away the imaginary blood, and let her fall asleep in my arms one last time.

  “Joshy?” Ivy says, flapping her hand in front of my face. “I lost you there.”

  I fire up a smile to raze my brain of that chilling, snowy morning. “What are you making?”

  Ivy bites her lip. “A bag.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “It’s Mom’s last quilt. Maybe I shouldn’t turn it into a bag.”

  “At least it’s practical now.”

  She smirks. “I can’t believe how dense you still are about art.”

  “Dense? Really?” I chuckle. “It must be so hard to be an artist around all of us dense Kokomoans.”

  “You’re not all dense,” she says, still smiling that brazen, brilliant smile of hers.

  “Just me?”

  She winks.

  I fling the remote control at her, making sure it arches up in the air and falls a foot away.

  “Using force to retaliate, Joshy? How very masculine of you.”

  I laugh. She laughs. It’s always been like that between us. Easy.

  “Turn the damn TV on so I don’t have to listen to you assault me verbally anymore,” I tell her.

  “Assault you verbally? Learn those big words in cop school, Officer Cooper?”

  “I know you underestimate me because I have all this awesome muscle”—I flex my arm and
my bicep bulges—“and you’re into nerdy, little artists.”

  She snorts. “I’m not into anyone.”

  “Luke’s still pining for you.”

  Ivy went out with him briefly when she was thirteen. Five years later, they attended prom together. But that was it.

  “Luke’s a bit boring,” she says.

  “Because he doesn’t know who Monette is?”

  “Monet, not Monette. And no. There was just no chemistry between us. I tried twice.”

  “You want a medal?”

  “No.” She purses her lips as she says the word, which makes me grin.

  I stretch my arm out to grab the remote control and surf the channels, while Ivy resumes transforming the quilt. We sit in comfortable silence until Aster arrives, right in time for the announcement.

  Ivy tenses, fingers curling like claws, and her skin, which is usually this gold-copper shade, even in the winter, has turned as pasty as the balls of fondant my mother kneads at the bakery. Heidi’s dying to work there instead of at the Dairy Queen where she picks up a few hours here and there, but I don’t know how I feel about introducing her to Mom. I mean, Mom knows her, but not as my girlfriend.

  Aster surprises me with a hug, which makes me forget all about Heidi and my mother.

  “Did I miss it?” she asks, plopping a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table and taking a seat between us on the lumpy, L-shaped couch.

  “No,” Ivy says. She sounds croaky, like someone who’s coughed a lot. She grabs a fistful of popcorn and tosses it inside her mouth.

  I shoot my gaze to her face, and sure enough, she’s wrinkling her nose. “Relax. They cannot not pick you.”

  Aster squeezes Ivy’s hand. “You’re the best.”

  “I’m not the best, and yes, they could not pick me. They probably didn’t pick me. I make quilts.”

  “Works of art,” Aster chimes in.

  Ivy yanks her hand out of her twin’s and reaches for more popcorn.

  “The most beautiful works of art,” Aster continues.

  Ivy sighs. “Please stop.”