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The man he’d idolized since he could walk.
The man that had never given up on him.
The man that was everything he ever wanted to be.
Dead.
He didn’t get to say goodbye. Tell him everything he would become as a man. Tell him his life was not for naught. That he wouldn’t let the dream die.
That he would pick up the mantle—continue on with the lifework that had consumed their bloodlines for centuries.
He couldn’t tell him any of that.
All Rune could do was look up and find the gun that had just killed his father.
Trace the gun from barrel, to finger, to arm, to face.
One face.
The man he would kill one day.
But not today.
Strider knew it as well as he did.
He moved forward and he was dead. Stay in the shadows. The shadows would keep him alive.
The shadows would hide him until he was strong.
And then he would dole out justice.
Dole out death.
{ Chapter 1 }
June 1826
Somerset, England
The carriage hit a sharp bump in the road and Elle’s hand dropped to the side of her thigh for the hundredth time that day to finger the small wooden box hidden in a pocket under the skirts of her deep blue carriage dress.
The Box of Draupnir.
Discover its origins. Break the curse of it.
It’d seemed like such a silly, simple task the previous evening when she’d committed to doing it. The promise to research the history of the box and hopefully discover where it came from had come easily from her lips partly because the adventure of a cursed box sounded like a wonderful distraction, but mostly because she would do anything for her niece, Jules. And it wasn’t just Jules—truly, she’d do anything for Jules and her husband, Des, the Earl of Troubant, and most importantly, for their newborn babe, only a day old.
All of them deserved the peace that would come only by removing this cursed box from their lives for good.
Jules and Des were the only family she had. The only people she could unequivocally count upon. She was younger than the two of them—a late-in-life babe born after her elder sister had Jules—and she knew how seriously both Jules and Des took protecting her.
It was her turn to return the favor.
She would find where the Box of Draupnir had come from and return it to its origins, giving them that peace.
No matter what.
The wheels of the carriage suddenly lagged, the constant clitter-clatter of the rear left wheel and its loose steel tire slowing into a dull thud.
