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Desmond nodded.
“I saw it.” A scratchy female voice cut into the thick air of the library.
All of them looked to the doorway.
Wrapping a shawl tight under her chin, Jules moved into the room, her steps wobbling, her body and face looking beaten to hell.
Desmond was to her in an instant, his hands around her to support her. “You need to be upstairs resting. How did you even walk down here? You don’t need to worry on this.”
“No. Not until I tell you this.” She glared at her husband. “You know I will worry and will get no rest if this isn’t resolved.” She pointed to the settee.
Shaking his head, Desmond gingerly walked her over to the couch.
She settled onto the cushions as Desmond stuffed small round pillows behind her back and around her to support her wrecked body. She fussed with her wrapper and shawl for several seconds before waving Desmond off and she looked to Wes and Laney as they moved in front of her. “I saw it—the box. In the middle of the pain I was in when I was having the babe. Such pain searing through my body—but there it was, in the middle of it all clear as the sun in a cloudless sky—I saw it.”
“Saw what?” Desmond asked, his hands at his sides twitching as though he wasn’t sure if he should pick her up and carry her to bed or step back and let her be.
She looked up to her husband. “What needs to happen to the box. Where it needs to go.” She looked from Desmond to Wes and Laney. “It needs to go to its origins—its home. That’s where it needs to be to set the curse to rest.”
Desmond heaved a sigh. “What? Jules—”
“No—listen to me,” Jules said. “I know this sounds mad and I don’t know if I imagined it or if I heard it once upon a time from my father or one of his men and am only just remembering it now. But the box needs to go home to where it was incepted. The power of it never should have come into the world as it did.”
The room went silent.
Jules looked to Wes and Laney. “Did you two see it? Do you know? Know the power it wields, what it can do to a mind, how it can rot it from the inside out?”
A quivering intake of breath came from Laney and she nodded. “We know. We’ve seen it.” She reached into the pocket of the plum dress and pulled the Box of Draupnir free, holding it outright in front of her in her palm.
No one made a motion toward it.
Laney lifted it slightly. “I was hoping someone might take it from me at this point.”
Wes tried to stifle a guffaw. Unsuccessful.
Jules’s look latched onto Laney. “You know, don’t you? You know we can’t just set it back into the world again in an indiscriminate way. We tried that.” Her hand ran across her brow, shoving back auburn strands of hair. “And we were wrong—so wrong to try and get rid of the Box of Draupnir to someone that deserved the curse. It was happenstance that your brother got the box instead of who it was intended for, and then he paid the price of it. I am so sorry. We had hoped…”
She paused, shaking her head as she looked solemnly to Laney. “It was wrong of us and the box cannot go to an innocent again. Nor can it fall into the hands of anyone evil enough to deserve the curse as they could hurt too many innocent people along the way. It has to go home.”
Madness.
As much as Wes liked Jules, she spoke of madness and was clearly addled from just giving birth. He had no patience for it, his fist curling, aching to strike the box out of Laney’s hand. He needed to get rid of it—for both their sakes.
His eyebrows lifted and he glanced at Desmond, then looked to Jules, keeping his eyes averted from Laney’s outstretched hand and the box. He was too close to acting like a madman as it was. His words came out strained through clenched teeth. “But where is it that the box belongs? Where is its home? Laney cannot hold it any longer, Jules.”
Jules’s right cheek pulled back in a cringe. “That I don’t know. I just know that I saw what I saw in the middle of the pain. The curse of it will not rest until it is returned to its rightful home.”
“What is that thing?” Jules’s aunt stepped into the room, holding a thick swaddle in her arms. Muffled cries drifted upward from the folds of the blanket. Lady Raplan lifted the babe in her arms. “This one is fussy, looking for his mama.”
Jules’s lifted her arm, waving her aunt into the room. “Elle, thank you for bringing him down. I’ll take him.”
Elle moved into the thick of the room and set the swathed babe into Jules’s arms. She stepped back, her gaze moving to the box in Laney’s hand, a curious smile on her face. “What is this? What are we looking at?”
Desmond moved slightly in front of Elle, his arm lifting between her and the box. “Nothing, Elle—it’s trouble—best you forget you ever saw it.”
She leaned to the side to look past Desmond to the box. “But I recognize that box.”
Everyone in the room froze, all eyes shifting to Jules’s aunt.
