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his hotter emotion, leaving her confused and more determined to keep her distance. If that meant letting him search the cottage for this ridiculous box of his, so be it. Let him find it or not and be gone. “Just one,” she said. “Will you help me look for the reliquary? If it’s here, it’s yours. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I told you I haven’t seen it since I left Spain.”
He straightened, and Ellery found herself staring. She imagined herself held protected in those hard, muscled arms while the worries of the world faded to less than nothing around her. A pretty thought. But not likely. Those arms didn’t gentle, they controlled. And those hands didn’t caress, they crushed.
She snapped her gaze back from his chest to his face. She wouldn’t make a fool of herself—again.
“I’ve searched the ground floor,” he said. “It must be in one of the upper chambers.”
Her lips thinned to a line. “You searched my home? When?”
“This afternoon. You were out.”
“It’s obvious this family of yours never taught you any manners. How dare you creep around my home?”
“I didn’t creep, and you just said I was free to look.”
“The point being that I just said it. I hadn’t said it this afternoon, and unless your powers include telling the future you didn’t know I’d let you.”
“I haven’t got time to argue. The Keun Marow were confused, but they’ll return.”
He glared at her, and Ellery’s gaze flicked back to his arms. How easy it would be for him to subdue her and take what he wished without her consent. But he hadn’t. He’d asked—almost politely. She thought back to the hundreds of tracks in the soft mud around the cottage and shivered. Not exactly paw prints, not exactly handprints, but something in between.
She met Conor’s whiskey-gold eyes. Not exactly human, not exactly fey.
Something in between.
She swallowed hard. “We’ll start upstairs.”
“How could Molly have kept such a secret from me?” Ellery looked up at him from where she knelt upon the floor, her feet tucked under her skirts, her dark curls cobwebbed and dusty from their thorough search. “I know she always envied me the money, but I shared all I had with her.”
Her expression held such bewildered sorrow Conor thought that if Cousin Molly stood alive in front of him, he might kill her all over again.
He cursed himself—not the first time—for his moment of weakness. He couldn’t begin to care for Ellery. He couldn’t begin to think of her in any way. She was a means to an end. Nothing else. “A family member’s treachery wounds more deeply than the mightiest sword thrust.” He ought to know.
She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and sniffed. It was the closest she came to crying. “She was all the family I had. I thought…but I was wrong.”
“You’re right to grieve, but let it be a small grief. She doesn’t sound as if she was worth too many tears.”
Ellery’s gaze returned to her lap.
The reliquary lay there, pulled from the back of a clothespress in her cousin’s bedchamber. Wrapped in cloth and placed within a larger box, they’d almost passed it by. But Conor had felt the power pulling him forward as they searched the room, sensed the reliquary’s dark magic in his blood. He knew it was there.
It had taken one year, nine months, and sixteen days, but he’d found it again. The ancient silverwork was tarnished black, the jeweled lid warped and twisted as if a great energy had forced the metal open. These things Conor knew he’d find.
It had only been as Ellery pulled away the last scrap of fabric that they’d seen the recent damage and the reason her cousin had kept it hidden. Decorating the face of the casket was one great onyx, the black stone seeming to swallow the very light around it. On either side, nothing but two empty settings. One had held a ruby, the other a pearl. Both were gone. But this alone was not enough to cause such pain to shadow Ellery Reskeen’s face. It was the letter folded into a corner of the outer box. A scribbled note to Mr. Porter from Molly, requesting aid in selling the last stolen jewel and keeping the money safe from the “peasant whore’s whelp.”
It had never made it to Mr. Porter’s hand. Cousin Molly had died before she could pry the onyx from its resting place.
“Here. It’s yours,” she said, holding out the reliquary, her lip caught between her teeth.
“I’m sorry about the damage. I’ll pay you back if you give me the time. I promise.”
The mage energy surrounding the box sparked like lightning in the space between them. But it was a dark energy, a subtle drag on his own powers. He murmured an incantation, strengthening his wards of protection, hoping they’d be enough to hold the pull of the reliquary at bay. More sharply than he intended, he answered, “The jewels alone are worth more than you could make in ten lifetimes.”
She lifted her chin. A flash of the fighter glittered in her eye. “I said I’d pay you, and I will.”
He took the reliquary, wrapping it back within its cocoon to muffle its influence. “I think your cousin should repay her own debts, don’t you?”
She frowned. “She’s dead.”
