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She rose and helped me to my feet. My legs remained unsteady, but I could stand without leaning against her.
When Tone opened the door, Demitri was waiting in the hallway.
Atlas and Raze stood beside him.
None of them had gone further than the other side of the wall.
Demitri looked at my face first. Only after he had assured himself that I was standing did his attention move to Tone’s closed hand. His expression tightened. Tone stepped into the corridor and opened her fingers. The rosary lay across her palm.
Atlas reached for it, but she drew her hand back.
“Adriana’s father told her this was the key,” she said. “She doesn’t know what it opens.”
Raze’s gaze narrowed on the medallion.
Demitri continued to look at me. For a moment, his expression was unreadable. Then I saw what lay beneath the control.
Hurt.
“You knew there was something different about it,” he observed.
“I knew only what my father told me.”
“You believed it enough to hide it.”
“I was afraid.”
“Of me?”
He asked the question quietly, without anger or accusation. That made it impossible to defend myself against it.
I lowered my gaze.
Demitri drew a measured breath through his nose, but the movement did nothing to ease the tension in his face.
Atlas took the rosary from Tone and turned the medallion beneath the hallway light. He ran his thumbnail along the silver edge, pausing when he reached a narrow seam.
Raze stepped closer.
“There’s something inside it,” Atlas remarked.
My stomach twisted.
Demitri’s gaze remained fixed on me. I forced myself to meet it, though I couldn’t undo the answer my silence had already given him.
The secret was no longer mine to carry. Neither, perhaps, was the trust that had grown between us. The distance opening in Demitri’s eyes felt heavier than the rosary ever had.
25
DEMITRI
The drive concealed inside Adriana’s rosary was smaller than my thumbnail.
Atlas had removed it in less than a minute, using the point of a narrow blade to prise apart the hollow medallion without damaging the silver casing. His hands had been steady throughout, while Adriana watched from the opposite side of the table and worried her lower lip between her teeth until the skin turned raw.
When the casing separated, a black sliver of plastic slid into Atlas’s palm. Atlas had passed it to his tech guy Artemus for examination. Then we had waited.
Adriana and I had spent the two days that followed on opposite sides of every room. I told myself the distance was necessary because anger sat beneath my ribs, hot and persistent, though it had no clean place to land.
