Arthur leaned in as soon as we found our table at the back of the restaurant. “He knows where we’re staying. That’s a problem.”
“He’s been a problem since this whole thing started. Someone’s feeding Kessler information, or he’s got resources we haven’t accounted for.” Or Dr. Caulfield found out where we were staying from Henri, and told Kessler about it.
Arthur said, “Let’s have Morganna pull the hotel reservation chain to see if there was a leak on that end.”
Merlin nodded. “I’ll send her a text.”
My attention remained on Grace.
“What Richter said.” She stared blankly at her menu. “About Henri’s great-grandfather taking the artifacts without authorization?”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Does he have a point?” She looked at Merlin, who’d explained about ownership of ancient artifacts over dinner last night. “We know Henri’s great-grandfather smuggled things out of Russia during the Revolution. If Kessler’s family really is connected to the Romanovs, and the egg was theirs, doesn’t it belong to him? Wasn’t Henri’s great-grandfather a thief, in the end?”
“There are too many unknowns to make that call right now,” Merlin said. “Morganna hasn’t been able to find any evidencesupporting Kessler’s claims. His grandmother may have been in the Imperial orbit, but an actual connection to the Romanovs is tenuous at best. There’s no documentation of direct lineage, and the claim has never been validated by any Romanov heritage organization.”
Grace put her menu down, fiddled with it, and picked it up again.
If it were up to me, I would have told Conrad Richter to go fuck himself. Maybe his boss had some claim to the egg, maybe he didn’t. What Ididknow was that Richter lost any opportunity to claim the moral high ground the minute he began harassing Grace.
“Marcel Dubois gave the egg to my grandmother and asked her to hold it for his family. The letter inside the egg agrees with what Henri’s documents show.” She straightened. “I need to finish what my grandmother started and return it. If Kessler wants it, he can buy it from Henri.”
Chapter 32
Grace
Brandon Caulfield was thorough,if nothing else. He’d been testing this, that, and the other thing about the egg for two hours.
I fluttered my T-shirt, unable to cool myself in the heat. Henri had apologized for not having air conditioning in his home. He’d set Dr. Caulfield up in the large dining room and propped open the garden doors, so whatever breeze Prague could offer us brought the temperature down a degree or two.
The dining table had been cleared of everything except Dr. Caulfield’s tools. The hen sat disassembled in front of him, resting on the black velvet jeweler’s mat he’d brought. Photos and a tablet with additional documentation were stacked next to his padded case, which had held multiple testers and the lamp he’d clamped to the table’s edge.
“Gold testing confirms eighteen-karat throughout.” He placed the gold tester back into his case and made some notes in the leather-bound journal he’d brought. “We’ve confirmed the diamonds, the sapphires, and the gold. We’ve verified the enamel is consistent with the Saint Petersburg workshop,compared the maker’s mark on the hen’s interior hinge to those from several other eggs.”
Since I’d discovered the egg a couple of months ago, my belief in its authenticity had gradually transformed from doubt to certainty. If it wasn’t real, why would Richter have followed me from Michigan to London to Prague?
Caulfield’s own excitement at the London pub had been enough to convince me. But hearing the tests line up one by one was different. This was science confirming what I’d hoped. Didi’s little blue egg really was a lost Imperial treasure.
I was part ofhistory.
“I have a few more tests,” Caulfield said, pulling his magnification visor down, “but so far, everything points in the direction we’d hoped.”
Garrett stood near the garden doors, half-turned so he could see both me and Aleš, who was stationed just outside on the flagstones. His arms were crossed over the tactical vest Pendragon had loaned him—whether his stance radiated boredom or alertness, I wasn’t sure. With Garrett, those probably looked the same.
A memory flashed through my brain of when I’d woken up inside those arms this morning. Of his big hands on me. Of sliding down his body in the shower.
After the shower, I’d had the opportunity to watch him kit up. The vest had a million pockets and hiding spots. He’d let me lift it, and it must have been forty pounds with all the metal plates in it for protection. While he couldn’t carry a gun, he was armed up, including a few knives, an expandable baton, two canisters of pepper spray, and a stun gun.
Arthur and Merlin were dressed the same, while the two Pendragon men added guns and ammo. Arthur was somewhere on the property doing another perimeter walk; Merlin wason the second floor with binoculars, moving from window to window as overwatch. Radek was positioned at the front door.
“The diamonds are so stunning. Can you see the slight irregularities in the prong work?” Dr. Caulfield tilted the hen in my direction under the light, snapping my attention back to the room. “Machine settings would be perfectly uniform. These are handmade.” He set the hen down and made a note on his pad. “Beautiful.”
This was how the past two hours had gone. Every few minutes he’d narrate what he was doing, and even though half the terminology went over my head, his excitement was genuine. Whatever else he was, he loved this work. That part wasn’t a performance.
The rest of him, though? Every few minutes he’d drop in a question that wasn’t about the egg, like how Henri and I had found each other, whether I’d spoken to other collectors, and what my timeline was for next steps.
It was phrased as small talk, but Morganna would have called them patterns. I called themslimy, but I smiled and answered without saying much, the way I’d smile at a customer who was taking too long at the register while the line grew behind them.
