Gigi realized something then. “So if Calla’s fatherdidhave an illegitimate child and Helena found out about it—”
“There’s no way.” Knox cut Gigi off and stood. “A man like Orion Thorp would never risk being disowned. This Zella woman, I promise you she isn’t Orion’s. I’m going inside.”
Gigi followed him, and this time, she saw something on the floor between Brady and Nora.The calla lily someone left me.Gigi took a step toward it, but Knox caught her by the arm.
“Stay put, Happy. Don’t go anywhere near her.”
“No offense,” Gigi told Nora hastily.
“None taken.” And just like that, their captive’s hours-long silence came to an end. She wasn’t looking at Gigi, though, or at Knox. Nora’s attention was on Brady and only Brady.
Brady didn’t seem to mind. “Would now be a good time to ask you what that means?” he asked, nodding toward the flower on the floor.
Nora leaned back on her hands, and Gigi realized with a start that Knox had been right: Bradyhaduntied her. When it became clear that Nora didn’t intend to answer his question, Brady leaned forward and drew a shape in the thick dust coating the floorboards of the shack.
A fleur-de-lis. The one from Calla’s necklace.
“What is it you think you know?” Nora asked Brady, her voice somehow both calm and sharp.
“Quite a bit about symbology, as it happens,” Brady replied. “For example, I know that the fleur-de-lis dates back to the Middle Ages, at least. For centuries, it was used as a common heraldic symbol, associated with the noble families of France, England, Albania, and the Roman Empire, among others. Here in Louisiana, it has a darker history. A version of it was branded into the flesh of enslaved people caught trying to run away.” Brady gave the horror of that a moment to breathe. “The Thorp stylization of the fleur-de-lis, however,” he continued, nodding to the one he’d drawn, “is, to my knowledge, unique. I have only ever seen this particular stylization used here in St. Adelaide Parish, on buildings erected by the Thorp family, starting around the nineteen-fifties. The library. The town hall. The Musée.”
“Is that it?” Nora said calmly. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
Brady set the paper with that image of Saint Adelaide and Gigi’s name on it down next to the fleur-de-lis. “Adelaide of Burgundy. She was a saint, an empress of the Roman Empire, and arguably the most powerful woman on the planet in the tenth century. In her lifetime, she married two kings, at least one of them on her own terms. In addition, she was imprisoned at one point for a marriage she wouldnotconsent to, but she managed to escape and eventually ascended the greatest throne of her time. Interestingly enough, St. Adelaide Parish, as such, did not exist until the Thorp family swept in and renamed it.”
Nora stared Brady down and shrugged.
“That slice of history I just recited meant something to you,” Bradysaid evenly, his eyes making yet another study of hers. “But the Thorp fleur-de-lis means more.”
“That symbol,” Nora said, “has no place in this town.”
Gigi couldn’t bite her tongue any longer. “What does it mean? The symbol, the calla lilies, Saint Adelaide—all of it.”
No response.
Brady brought his hand to touch first one side of the fleur-de-lis he’d drawn, then the other.
“The leaves on a typical fleur-de-lis are top-heavy. Not so for this one. There are additional lines of symmetryhereandhere—and see these embellishments? Turn the leaf portion of the symbol on its side, and suddenly, it begins to look more like a symbol of a different sort. The Greek letteromega.”
“Stop.” Nora’s voice was commanding in ways that Gigi couldn’t even describe. “You know nothing,” their prisoner told Brady, “and you are a man. The wrong kind ofnothingcould be a death sentence for you.”
“So you’re going to kill me now?” Brady said calmly.
“Not me.”
Death sentence?Gigi’s mind was reeling. Before Avery disappeared, Eve had mentioned three things to the Woman in Red in her attempt to throw Grayson and Lyra under the bus, and one of those things had beenomega.
The other two had been calla lilies and Alice Hawthorne.
“What did you mean when you said that it’s not going to be me?” Gigi burst out. “Whatisn’t?”
Nora answered in a language that wasn’t English or anything even remotely close.
Brady glanced back at Gigi. “Run away, little girl. You’d never survive.” It took Gigi a moment to realize that he was translating, and by that point, Brady had already turned back to Nora. “I have an affinity for languages, as well as symbols.”
“Survive?” Gigi repeated.Death sentence. Survive.She wrenched her arm out of Knox’s hold. “What do you meansurvive?” Gigi had signed an NDA. She couldn’t say Avery’s name, but she had to ask. “If I have a friend who—” Gigi didn’t even get the chance to say the worddisappeared.
“Your friend,” Nora said, her voice going eerily quiet in a way that struck Gigi aslethal. “It was not supposed to be her.” Nora switched back into what Gigi assumed to be her native language, the words coming fast and furious and sharp as all of those knives.
