Page 21

CHAPTER 21

Forty minutes later Maarja had turned on all the lights in the house. Yet when someone rang her front doorbell, she froze in place, then deliberately relaxed and checked her phone app. The porch camera showed Dante Arundel on her front porch, dressed in a dark business suit, starched white shirt, and a charcoal tie, loosened at the neck.

She opened to him at once. “How did you get here so fast? Transporter beam?”

“Helicopter.” In a shrewd sweep of dark-eyed intelligence, he assessed her physical health and her mental distress. “You have to invite me in.”

Like he was a vampire. “Come in,” she said, not because he compelled her, but because she actually knew why he wanted the words spoken aloud. Her front porch camera recorded conversation, and for a wealthy man like Dante, permission must save on lawsuits.

He walked in and back toward her bedroom.

A black sedan was parked at the curb, and the unmistakable form of Nate lurked beside it.

She shut the door. “If you came by helicopter, how did you get here by car?”

Dante looked back at Maarja. “We set down at Angelica Lindholm’s helipad.”

Angelica Lindholm essentially owned Gothic.

“She graciously allowed me to keep a car for my use in her garage.” He walked into Maarja’s bedroom.

Angelica Lindholm also didn’t graciously allow anyone to exploit her, her influence, or her facilities without good reason, which meant Dante had…paid her? Threatened her? Commanded her? Maarja took a breath to ask, then exhaled and hurried after him. She had other more important questions, like “Why would you do that? Keep a car in Gothic?”

“I thought this day might come.” He stood by her chest. “Which drawer?”

“Second one. What day?”

“The day you called me.” He opened the drawer.

“Left side.” He was talking about her, and him, and pregnancy. “I had a period. A little late, I think, but there’s been a lot of trauma so it’s not surprising.”

He lifted her socks and looked, nodded, then put them back. “You could have told me.”

“I did tell you. I told you when we had… When you brought it up…” Shit. She was fumbling this big-time. “Afterward, after we…were in the shower, I told you I wasn’t pregnant.”

“Hm.” He gave his opinion clearly in one syllable, like he had no faith in her previous assurances and still didn’t quite believe her.

But she had had a period. It was as simple as that. Bleeding, cramping, moodiness…more moodiness…more moodiness. Her hormones had been hell-bent on reminding her of Dante and his prediction of fate and babies to unite the families and, oh, my God, the dreams for those nights. Talk about a horror show, complete with the entire cast of hostile characters from the funeral, her sword-wielding mother, and some assassin who kept showing himself, but without a face.

Oh, and a baby she had to feed and change, and she had no experience and no way to support it…

Fine. Her conscious mind refused to consider the chance of a child. Her subconscious mind was not so easily coerced.

“You have a security system,” he said. “Nothing and no one shows on the video, so whoever placed this commandeered your system. I’ve got my people looking into it.”

“How do you know what’s on my security system?”

“It’s basic home security, nothing fancy, good enough for most situations, but also easy to hack as needed. I needed.”

She wasn’t speechless, exactly. She just didn’t know what to say. “I’ll…upgrade.”

“Not tonight.” He stood with his head down, clearly thinking. “You got home. You came in and walked right here to find the bottle.”

She didn’t know what to do first. Combat outrage that he’d hacked into her camera and watched her recent movements? Or be glad he cared enough to come so quickly and investigate so conclusively? And keep a car here to come to her when she needed him… She remembered his expression when he heard the shipment had been stolen, the ruthless cast of his face, the chilling manner in which he’d weighed her involvement and found her guilty. Worse was that moment when she’d admitted she killed his father…

She had blood on her hands. His father’s, and she did not care about that.

But her mother’s.

Dear God, Mama.

All his preparation had been in case she were pregnant, yet she was not and he was here, now, anyway. What did it mean…other than the fact she didn’t understand Dante Arundel? She didn’t understand him at all.

“You knew la Bouteille de Flamme was here. Maarja, how did you know that the bottle was here?” The way he spoke, she thought he’d asked more than once.

“I told you. In your mother’s library. Remember that day? I told you I have a sense about these things.” Yet his first thought might not have been that he knew that, but that she’d somehow set it up herself.

He said, “The Chinese scroll you said was a fake? You were right.”

Ah. She’d proved herself. “I know. Usually I have to touch something to sense its past.” She half smiled. “The Chinese scroll didn’t have much of a past.”

“But tonight, you don’t have to touch the bottle.”

Yeah. Proving herself wasn’t so easy to this doubtful asshole. “Inside the glass is the blood of my blood. I know when it’s near.” Believe me or not.

As swiftly as a snake striking, his hand reached out and gripped her wrist. “Do you know where the stopper is?”

“Nobody ever told me.”

“Do you know ?”

He’d spotted her prevarication, damn it. “I know. I didn’t until I held the bottle the first time, in your mother’s library, then I understood what I’d only sensed.” She shook herself free, went to the jewelry box that sat on her dresser, and in an act of great courage, lifted out a necklace. Courage, because she was alone with an Arundel, the son of the man who’d been willing to kill a woman and a four-year-old child for this, and Dante could casually take her life, dispose of her body, and no one would ever know what had happened to her.

Dante’s gaze narrowed on the shiny stone that hung on the sturdy gold chain. “Of course. You were wearing that the day your mother—”

“Yes. That morning, she put the chain around my neck. She told me it was my heritage, the only thing she had to leave me. She told me to remember her when I wore it. None of it made any sense to me at the time, but I have treasured it.” Maarja cupped the stone in her hand and stepped close to show him. She lowered her voice when she spoke of it, using the reverent tone one used in church. “Viewed close, it really didn’t look like much, a black stone with a hole in it. But it’s not black, it’s a blue so dense it seemed to be impenetrable. A hole was carved, not by human hands, but by water.” Her eyes fluttered closed as she sensed the tumult of a cascading waterfall, relentlessly grinding the stones at its base until this one broke free. “Years and years it traveled down, down toward the sea. The waves found it, played with it, smoothed the stone—feel it—” Blindly she reached for his hand and guided his finger to the rock’s silky surface. “A girl discovered it. Many years ago she found it, glinting in the bright white sand. She took it to the glassmakers on the island, and they created the blood-red vessel to give it purpose, and the girl carried it to her tribe, to her father.”

“What happened?” Dante’s voice coaxed Maarja, lulling the portent of anguish.

“She was the daughter of J?nos, our founder, our visionary. He foretold that we would come to a place where we could live at peace with man and nature, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. When he spoke, we could almost hear the waves crashing, imagine a life of fishing and farming. The tribe traveled north and west, walking, pulling their wagons, caring for their horses, seeking the home that J?nos foretold. When they came to the land of the Normans, the man who called himself Lord of the lands, èrthu Arundel, saw the girl and wanted her…for a moment only, for he had a wife great with child. Instead J?nos offered the glass bottle and stone stopper. èrthu took the gift, raped the girl, slit J?nos’s throat.” Dante’s fingers flexed in hers, offering his strength. “As her father died, the girl captured his blood in the bottle, and thus it became a holy object to us.”

“What happened to èrthu Arundel?” Dante’s voice barely pinged into Maarja’s consciousness.

“J?nos’s sons castrated him as they would have an unruly horse or a wayward ox. He lived, but it was too late. His wife gave birth to a boy child, èrthu raised him in cruelty and vengeance, the years of battle and blood had begun, and for a thousand years the bottle and the stopper changed hands, were separated, sought each other, until…today…”

Taking a deep breath, Maarja opened her eyes. She looked right into Dante’s face…into the face of a fiend.

His complexion had bleached to a waxy tint, with furious red on his cheeks and lips. His nostrils flared, his cruel white teeth were bared. His eyes…heavy-lidded, dark-lashed, with a gold flame lit deep within.

She was a fool. This man was dangerous to her, more dangerous than even she had known.

Still holding the stone, she tried to step back.

He caught her arms. “Do you always see so much?”

“Never. Only now, when you’re touching…me.” Maybe it wasn’t him who was dangerous to her, but the now of knowing.

He looked toward her bureau, then he scanned the tops of her windows. Or maybe the edges of her coved ceiling where her camera lens watched and recorded. “We’ll do this thing.” He seemed to be talking to himself.

What thing? She didn’t speak out loud. She still felt as if she had one foot in the past, and somehow he had taken a step away from her and into the future.

He took her by the shoulders and positioned her so she stood at right angles to the light from her bed lamps. Going to her bureau, he opened the drawer, and while she whispered, “You said not to touch it,” he took it out from under her socks and brought it to her. Holding it cupped in his palms, he gazed at her from those fierce, dark, fiendish eyes. “Free your stone from the chain. Unite the stopper with the bottle. It is, after all, what both have been seeking all these centuries.”