I laughed to myself. I wasn’t a one-night stand kinda girl normally. The heroines in my books were sometimes, but not me. However, I had stolen a few condoms I’d found in Jean’s bathroom, just in case. It had seemed ridiculous at the time, but a girl had to be prepared.
Life’s too short not to steal the condoms, right, Grace?
Henri opened a heavy wooden door, bringing me back to the present moment. “This is my study.”
The room was lined with bookshelves, and a large table dominated the center, covered with documents, photographs, and papers in protective sleeves.
Tomáš moved to the window. “I retrieved everything you requested before I picked you up at the station, Mr. Dubois.”
“Excellent. Thank you.” Henri gestured for me to sit in one of the huge carved chairs. “Please, Grace. This is everything my mother kept—my father’s letters, photographs from before and during the war, documents from her grandfather about the egg and the other Russian artifacts he brought with him.”
I moved toward the table, my heart beating somewhere in my throat. There was so much, but my eyes gravitated toward a photograph near the middle of the table—a young woman in a worn velvet jacket, standing in rubble. The same photograph Dmitry had dropped at my café, but larger and clearer.
Didi. Delphine.
Henri came to stand beside me. “My mother kept these documents hidden in our wine cellar, under heavy stone blocks. She was always afraid someone would come looking.”
I sank into a chair at the end of the table, while Henri took the one closest to me. “Someone like Werner Kessler?”
Garrett and I had discussed him at length this morning. He didn’t have any additional information on what Richter’shard waymight be. Still, with four Pendragon operatives assigned to us, plus Arthur and Merlin arriving later today, Garrett felt confident. And so long as he was confident, I felt safe.
“Someone like anyone.” Henri picked up a letter, handling it carefully. “This is from my father to my mother, written a few weeks after she returned to Prague. He wrote about how quiet the house felt without her. How he missed her voice, even when she was scolding him.”
Dmitry settled into a chair at the edge of the table, leaning forward. “The movement of artifacts during wartime has alwaysbeen complicated. Families hide things, sell things, and wind up with their possessions confiscated. Documentation like this is rare.”
Henri set the letter down and picked up another document, older, the paper yellowed, with sketches alongside columns of text. “This is my great-grandfather’s inventory. Everything he brought out of Russia.”
I leaned closer. The drawings included jewelry, small sculptures, and decorative boxes. And there, near the bottom, a sketch of an egg with its shell open, revealing the yolk, and beside it, a tiny hen with its breast open.
The egg Garrett was still carrying.
“One of the items listed here is now in a museum in New York,” Dmitry said, pointing to an entry near the top. “Another is in London. I believe a few others made their way back to Russia over the years. The egg and two smaller pieces are all that remain unaccounted for.”
I traced the sketch with my finger. The detail was so remarkable, it was clear this egg had been in the artist’s possession.
“Can I ask you a question?” I looked at Henri. “The letter inside the egg—the one addressed to Delphine. It was written in Cyrillic. Why would Marcel write to her in Russian instead of French?”
“I thought about this after Dmitry sent me the details.” Henri smiled. “My mother taught him the language so he’d understand where her family was from. He wasn’t fully fluent, but he could read and write well enough. Using Cyrillic served two purposes: it acted as a cipher, since most people who might intercept it couldn’t read it, and it served as proof. When someone came to retrieve the egg, they would need to be able to read the messages. Anyone could forge a letter in French or English. Russian was… safer.”
That made a strange kind of sense. A code only the right people could crack.
Garrett was suddenly beside me, his hand on my shoulder. He leaned close, his lips next to my ear. “I want to check the rest of the house. Radek can stay with you, or I can have him and Aleš do the sweep if you’d rather I stay.”
I turned my head slightly toward him. “Doyouneed to see everything yourself?”
“Yes.”
I put my hand over his. “Then go. I’m fine with Radek.”
Before he pulled away, he brushed his thumb over my knuckles, and I almost melted into a pile of goo as I watched him march his sexy self out of the room.
Henri walked me through more of what his mother had preserved. Coded letters from Marcel describing the work they’d done, which were full of admiration for the English girl who argued with him constantly. Photographs of the resistance cell—young faces, some smiling, standing in front of damaged buildings or crowded into dark rooms.
“Do you know what happened to them?” I asked, touching the edge of one photograph. “The others?”
Henri shook his head. “I was born here in Prague. By the time I was old enough to ask questions, my mother only had the letters and photographs. She never went back to France.”
Dmitry added what context he could. He explained how the resistance networks operated, how messages were passed, and how easily everything collapsed when one person was captured or killed, if the cell wasn’t built for continuity.
