“I told you to screw off!”
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. “Hello, Rory.”
“What the hell is that package for?”
Wasn’t it obvious? “Triple pay. The balance I owed for the ring.”
Rory sucked in a breath. “I don’t deserve that.”
Arthur flinched. “I realize that no amount of money can make up for endangering you—”
“That wasn’t—”
“—but the deal was triple pay for scrying the ring and you scried it.” Arthur infused his words with finality. “End of discussion.”
“No,” Rory said, surprising Arthur with the steel of his spine. “I’m not fancy like you, but it doesn’t make me a thief. I don’t deserve it ’cause I didn’t earn it and I’m sending it back.”
“Don’t be absurd.” Arthur flopped back in the club chair. “I’m a paying customer and we had a deal. If you don’t want it, give it to Mrs. Brodigan.”
“Don’t worry, we’re gonna talk about Mrs. B. too,” Rory said darkly, which was terribly ominous. “You paid her debt.”
“I said I would.”
“You said you would if I came to that meeting. You didn’t say bunk about it being already paid!”
Oh. Bollocks. “You found out.”
“Yeah, I did, and you can stop wasting your dough. Maybe you think ’cause you hold her debt now that you got a hold on me—”
“I don’t hold the debt, the debt is gone,” Arthur snapped. “It was the least I could do, because believe it or not, giving twenty-year-old paranormals dangerous magic and brandy isn’t my usual style. Leaving innocents to suffer isn’t my style either, so the Hyde Park offer is still on the table. Name the time and I’ll pick you up and drive you there myself.”
“What a crock of bullshit,” Rory said, bitter and biting. “You’ll say or pay anything to get me on your leash.”
Anger surged in Arthur’s blood. “It’s not aleash, it’s alifeline. I’m throwing a drowning man a life preserver. And maybe I can’t make you take it butyoucan’t make me take it back. If you need it, my lifeline is there, and the only leash on you is the one you’re using to choke yourself.”
Rory went deathly silent.
Arthur winced. Too far. “Theodore—”
“Go to hell.”
And the line went dead in Arthur’s ear.
Damnation.He immediately redialed the appraisal shop’s party line. It rang and rang until finally, a woman with a pleasant voice picked up. “Bethany Meyers, may I help you?”
Poor woman must have been another building tenant, stuck hearing the antiques shop’s ring on their shared line with no one picking up. Arthur tried anyway. “May I speak to Rory Brodigan, please?”
“I’m afraid Rory’s just left,” she said apologetically. “Unless someone else downstairs slammed the door of the antiques shop on their way out. May I take a message?”
Arthur sighed. “No, thank you.” He put the phone back on the cradle. “Stop fretting, Ace,” he muttered, in his best impression of Jade. “Rory will come around, Ace. He’ll come back to you, you haven’t lost him, I promise.”
In the dark quiet of his flat, he was very alone.
Chapter Fourteen
“Yes. This is it.”
A small group is huddled together in the dark on a dock, the smells of salt and diesel thick in the frigid air. Waves black as the night sky lap at the sides of a cargo ship with proud letters on the hull:Stjärnfall.
