Gali tore her eyes away from what looked like an original Basquiat in an elaborate gilt frame hanging on the wall. “Uh, what exactly is this artifact again?”
“Oh, I did find that out, actually! So apparently, it’s rumored to be from one of the Vatican’s secret collections—”
“The Vatican has secret collections?” Bonbon looked surprised.
Oriak? grimaced. “Absolutely,” she answered. “They stole tens of thousands of artifacts from Indigenous people during colonialism and—surprise, surprise—they never returned them.”
“That’s fucked up,” Gali said. “I know museums be doing that, but man, theVatican?” She shook her head. “Hits different when it’s an institution pretending to have some kinda religious moral authority, you know?”
“Exactly,” Oriak? agreed. “Dad goes on and on about this all the time. Anyway, this one’s a ritual mask that’s a few thousand years old. It’s, like, cast in bronze and inlaid with ivory and gold and a bunch of shit. Very extra.”
“Ancient drip. I like it.” Bonbon smoothed down her dress. “How much is it worth?”
Oriak? shrugged. “Like nine?”
“Million?”
“No, figures.” Oriak? turned a corner, not noticing that both her friends had stopped dead in their tracks.
Gali mouthed a silentWhat the fuck?as her brain did the math, and Bonbon stared at her with wide eyes. “Is she serious?”
“I think so.” Gali grabbed her hand, and they hurried around the corner to catch up. “Oriak?... should you be showing us this?”
Oriak? snorted. “Absolutely the fuck not. Dad would kill me if he knew.”
“See,” Bonbon muttered, “it’s a problem when I can’t tell if she’s exaggerating.”
They arrived at an ornate set of carved wooden doors with four men stationed in front of them and cameras mounted above the lintel. Each of the men was heavily and blatantly armed, wearing black tactical gear. They watched the girls approach with cold, flat eyes.
Oriak? tipped her chin up and spoke in her most imperious voice. “Get me Helel,” she ordered.
Only one of the men acknowledged her order. His eyes were gray and unfriendly as he touched his earpiece and murmured something, his voice pitched low; then he gave Oriak? a curt nod. “One moment, Ms. Onyearugbulem.”
Bonbon stepped a little closer to Gali. Her body had gone tense at the sight of all the guns, and Gali slid her arm through her friend’s.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. Her aunt Shirley had taught her how to shoot out in the fields, and Gali was excellent at it, but she didn’t like the guns either. The foreboding was loud and oppressive this far into the house, and a migraine was stabbing through her right temple. Celestial would kill her for ignoring how bad this was starting to feel, but Gali was stubborn. They were just going to view the artifact, and everything was going to be fine. She didn’t need to do any work because nothing was wrong. She was normal. This wasfine.
Oriak? was about to snap out another order when someone melted out of the shadows on their right, startling them all. Bonbon squeaked, and Gali did a double take because she could have sworn there was nothing there—no door, no hallway—just pools of darkness splashed on the walls and floor. She looked up at the stranger, and her brain nearly short-circuited. Her migraine squeezed at her skull.
God, he wasbeautiful.
His skin was a pristine dark walnut that seemed to almost glow, and when he turned his head to glance at the guards, Gali saw the hooked jut of his nose in profile. The stranger lifted a hand to brush a shadow off hisblack shirt, and he had those damn piano hands that were always Gali’s weakness, with the long, articulated fingers and singing tendons right under the skin. Coarse dark curls fell into his face and around his ears, kissing the collar of his black shirt, and his mouth was unforgivably wide and lush. He wasn’t visibly armed, but there was something about him that seemed intrinsicallywrong, like he wasn’t really supposed to be here, like he was one step sideways out of this reality. Gali knew that feeling quite well. Her entire family had that strangeness to them, but it was much louder in this man and much, much more dangerous. He was displaced and he wasn’t happy about it.
Gali knew she was staring, soaking him up with her eyes, but she didn’t care. Bonbon leaned in. “Who the hell is that?” she whispered. “He’s fucking delectable.”
Oriak? glanced over at her friends. “This is Helel,” she said. “He’s the head of the artifact security team.”
The stranger’s eyes flicked in Gali’s direction, and her knees almost gave out. He had the longest lashes she’d ever seen, and his eyes were so dark they seemed black. Shards of gold splintered in his irises, shifting in the light, and she thought she saw a glimpse of violent power before it was shuttered away. Her skin skittered over her body. He really did seem illuminated from within, radiating a light that animated the dim hallway they stood in. It wasn’t something Gali could ask the others to confirm, because she would sound crazy and she was trying very hard not to be that, not in Salvation, not this far from the Kincaid house.
“Can I help you with anything, Ms. Onyearugbulem?” the stranger asked Oriak?. “Have your companions been cleared for this wing?”
Gali exhaled as the rolling heat of his voice curled around them. He sounded like a herald—the kind who sang down falling civilizations, who stood mad on a mountain as children burned. That voice... it scorched like both magma and a cold that could sear flesh off the bone, iron bleached soft at an unfathomable temperature. It licked against her like a spell.
“They don’t need clearances,” Oriak? snapped. “They’re with me.”
The stranger’s face didn’t change in the slightest, but a haze of contempt oozed out from him.
A faint smile curved Gali’s lips, and she couldn’t help herself. “You’d like us to get on out of here, wouldn’t you?” she said, amused.
