Page 38 of Edge of Ruin (The Edge Trilogy #3)

Vivi accepted it and laid it on the table, gently loosening the roll. The pieces of paper were not large, but they were very brittle, threatening to crack.

Vivi unrolled it ever so slightly, pressing it just far enough to peek inside. She stared for a long moment, and when she lifted her face, her eyes were huge.

“Oh, guys,” she said. “This is ... I think that this might actually be ... oh, my God, this is scary. I’m getting dizzy.”

“What?” I snapped. “Out with it, goddammit!”

“I think this might be the big L,” Vivi said, staring first at Nell and then at Nancy. “Just look at it. At this bit of sketching, of the angel. Look at that face. And look at the writing below it. That script. It’s backward.”

Nell and Nancy gasped. “No way,” Nancy whispered.

“I can’t believe it.” Nell’s voice ended in a squeak.

“Who the fuck is the big L?” I said, frustrated.

Nell turned to him. “Leonardo,” she explained. “As in, da Vinci.”

“Oh.” I closed my mouth abruptly. “Oh. Holy fucking shit.”

There was a moment of dead silence. “I need a drink,” Liam said, turning toward the door.

“Bring the bottle back with you,” Duncan called after him.

A few restorative swallows of fine single-malt Scotch took the edge off our collective freak-out, and a half hour later we were all sprawled on the couches grouped around the coffee table in Liam’s living room, staring at the roll of parchment that sat in the middle of the table as if it were an unexploded bomb.

Which, in a sense, it was. After all, it had almost gotten all six of us killed, at one time or another.

“We have to tell the press,” Nancy said. “Get it on AP. All over the Internet. If the sketches are no longer secret, and that bastard knows that it’s now in the hands of experts getting authenticated, there’ll be no more reason for him to attack us. There will be no profit in it.”

“Wrong,” Vivi said, regretfully. “I’m so sorry, Nance, but that would only be true if you were dealing with a normal, reasonable criminal asshole.

But John is special. He’s over-the-edge bat-shit, blood-hungry insane.

I don’t think John even cares about the money.

He’s just pissed. He wants payback. He wants to chop us into chunks. ”

“Which means that we’ll be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives?” Nancy said, dismayed. “God, I am so sick of it!”

“One thing’s for sure,” Liam said. “I will not have that thing in my house overnight. I’ve lost enough sleep lately.”

“It’s been in your house for weeks of nights,” Nell reminded him.

Liam gave her an eloquent look and tossed off another swallow of whiskey.

“I’ll take it,” Vivi offered. “My friend Jill has a big rare-book and antiquarian gallery in the city. She’ll be able to tell us how to take care of it, and store it, and get it authenticated. Somebody lend me a phone, and I’ll call her right now.”

Vivi wandered into the kitchen to make her call, and I listened to the animated rise and fall of her voice as she told her librarian friend the crazy tale.

I felt beaten down, exhausted. Scared. Impressed about the famous art and the big L, for sure.

Very cool, zowie, but only a tiny part of me really gave a shit.

It was only parchment and charcoal and ink, after all.

No matter how famous and charged with history and talent and genius it might be.

I was far more focused on the danger that bastard John posed to my living, breathing, beloved Vivi. And her sisters, of course.

Vivi came bouncing out and tossed Nell’s phone back to her. “It’s all set up. Jill just about had a stroke when I told her. She’ll make the arrangements for authentication, and she can store the sketches in humidity controlled her rare-book vault.”

“The sooner you get rid of them, the happier I’ll be,” Liam said.

Nancy gave him a soothing kiss, but the guy looked unsoothed.

Vivi was holding up the necklace to her sisters. “Should we detach these again? Do you want your necklaces back now?”

Nell and Nancy looked at each other. Nell took it from Vivi’s hand, flipping the lever to retract the three planes with the miniscule writing.

“Not yet,” she said. “Let’s stay united. When this is sorted out, we’ll get the chains fixed and wear them again. For now, you keep it, okay? Like a talisman.”

There were tears, at that point, and group hugs. I averted my eyes until Vivi’s voice caught my attention.

“Nancy, can I borrow your Jetta to drive into the city?” she asked.

My whole body seized up. “What? You’re going to just stick that thing in your purse? You mean to carry it around on the street?”

“I’ll put them carefully into the table leg where they’ve resided for at least eighty years, and I’ll put the table leg into a big shopping bag. No one will know they’re there,” she soothed. “We’ll all breathe easier when those sketches are safe in a vault somewhere.”

“I’ll breathe easier when that son of a bitch is dead,” I said.

Vivi kissed the top of my head. “Well, yes. That goes without saying. Afterward, we’ll drive out of the city. Find ourselves a hotel, okay? If Nancy can spare the car.”

“Sure, but the Jetta is kind of unpredictable these days,” Nancy warned. “The window in the back’s come loose, so don’t even try to roll it all the way up. It got smashed in by crackheads and methheads one too many times.”

“It couldn’t be more rickety than my van was,” Vivi said, wistfully. “My poor, beloved, drowned van. I owe that van. It gave its life for me.”

My urge to fight drained away. I was whipped. I was following that chick around like a panting hound, doing exactly as I was told. But the thought of a night in absolute privacy with her alone in a hotel room was too tempting to resist.

I wanted to have that talk that she had promised me. To thrash things out between us, so I could just go buy her a goddamn engagement ring already.

I wanted to close this deal and move forward, with her. Into our shared future.

But my patience came dangerously close to its end when I realized that she intended to stop at Lucia’s house in Hempton on the way.

“There’s something I need to pick up there,” she insisted.

“At a time like this? What in holy hell could be so important?”

“It’s a secret!” She frowned at me. “You’ll understand later! Now just take this exit, turn to the right at the bridge, and stop arguing with me!”

I snarled obscenities as I flicked on the turn signal, and guided Nancy’s battered, coughing little car off the highway, following Vivi’s directions to the quiet street where Lucia’s house was located.

I jerked to an angry stop in front of it. “So? Now what?”

“Thank you,” she said primly. “You’re very obliging. So polite, too. Do you want to wait here while I run up and get it?”

“You think I’d let you go into a dark, abandoned house all alone?” I pulled out my gun. “Bring those sketches in with you.”

“As if I’d leave them in a car,” she scoffed. “Let alone a car that has its back window held together with duct tape.”

I kept hold of her arm. The street was quiet at this hour, just a few of the houses lit, the bluish flicker of televisions here and there.

But my senses were buzzing, my hairs on end.

There was no way anyone could know we were here—unless Lucia’s house itself was watched.

But who would watch an empty house? For weeks?

Get real, I told myself, as Vivi pushed the door open.

She didn’t waste time in the sad, quiet house, just flipping on the light over the stairway, and then the light for a steeper stairway leading up to the attic.

I followed her up, fuming. My discomfort grew as she pried open box after box.

“What the fuck are you looking for, Viv? Christmas decorations?”

“Shut up and let me concentrate,” she replied calmly.

She finally found what she sought, although she would not let me see it. She hid it with her body, wrapping it in a big plastic sack.

“Okay,” she announced. “We can go now.”

I led the way down the stairs, muttering imprecations as we went back to the car.

Vivi frowned as I opened the trunk for her. “I wish you’d relax a little,” she complained. “You’re making me tense.”

“I’m making you tense? Jesus.” I opened the car door for her, circled around, slid in, and started up the engine in one movement. “Let me tell you about my tension level, Viv.”

That instant, I registered the smell. Sour halitosis, heinous body odor. But it was already too late. There was a rustling sound, like a flock of bats. Panic exploded inside me—and Vivi’s gasp choked off into a squeak.

A heavy arm was clamped across her throat. A gleaming blade was pressed beneath her eye.

John grinned from behind Vivi’s car seat, a panting, stinking death’s head, his face swollen, bruised and shiny. The point of the blade traced its slow, cruel way down over her cheek, leaving a thin red line in its wake. It ended up jammed against her throat. Point digging in.

“One move, and she’ll bleed out in forty seconds,” John rasped.