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“I was wrong about that plan,” I smile sadly. “As it turns out, it’s a fucking moot point, since Cleo and her demon child are going to swipe Blackwich Castle out from under us.”
“Wait, Cleo’s pregnant?” Eli’s brows knit together. “With Gabe’s father’s kid? She’s going to be Gabe’s stepmother?”
Noah makes a gagging noise.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Gabe says quickly. He leans against me, snuggling his head into the crook of my arm. He feels so tiny, so vulnerable like this. “Nothing good has ever come out of that castle. We don’t need my legacy – we’re building our own right here.”
I gather them to me again, holding them so tight I hear Gabe’s spine crack. I’ve been such an idiot. I’ve been like a tiny bird pecking at the bars of my cage, completely oblivious to the fact I’ve got three lovers who’ll help me smash down the door.
I love that they have our future mapped out. That’s adorable. But their plans are small. They’re right – I can’t run this family on my own, especially not once I dethrone Constantine and Nero. I’ll need my own Triumvirate in place. Gabriel will run the entertainment side of the business, and Noah will be in charge of Dio’s assassins. Eli shall remain by my side as my advisor, although I do like the idea of arming him with a thorough knowledge of the law.
But for now, I keep my plans to myself. This isn’t a time for plotting, it’s a time for kissing my loves and feeling their still-beating hearts in their chests and remembering that today, this day, we’re still alive. We’re together. And we are invincible.
A while later, Yara barges into the ballroom (thankfully, we’re all buttoned and zipped up by then), with a damp t-shirt of her own, a grease stain across her brow, and a self-satisfied smirk on her pretty face. “All fixed.”
“You’re a genius.” I pat the sofa beside me, where only fifteen minutes earlier, Eli had thrust inside me so hard he jerked the sofa leg across the marble, leaving behind a permanent scratch. Yara dumps her toolbox on the table and drops into the pile of cushions.
“I know,” she grins. “What the fuck were you trying to do to the wall, anyway?”
“I thought the treasure might be hidden there.” George follows her into the room, her head in her hands. “But I give up. I’ve scanned and measured every inch of this house. Unless Malloy Manor is secretly on Ash Tree Lane and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, there’s no hidden treasure room or secret stash.”
“Points for the House of Leaves reference,” Yara nods to her. They’re both huge horror geeks.
George slumps further into the sofa cushions, looking sorry for herself. Queen Boudica, the lap-seeking missile, leaps up and makes herself a comfortable nest between George’s thighs.
“We’re missing something,” I say. “We know the treasure is in this house.”
“I’m telling you, I’ve measured every wall in this house against Howard’s schematics. There are no other secret passages apart from the one Mackenzie used to escape,” George says. “Maybe Ainsley moved the treasure before she was killed? Or maybe we’re wrong, and Mackenzie really does have it already?”
I shake my head. “Mackenzie thinks it’s here. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be on my ass about the house. There are no other clues in the diary?”
“I’ve scoured that thing from cover to cover. All that the last entry tells us is that the treasure is in this house. But I’m telling you, it’s not here.”
“Maybe it’s under the marble in the entrance hall?” Noah says.
George shakes her head. “Please don’t start guessing. Trust me, I already thought of everything. It can’t be under the floor because lifting these marble tiles would take a team of guys days to do and it would create a lot of dust and mess. Ainsley might’ve had help, but she’d have to work quickly.”
“Maybe we’re thinking about this in the wrong way,” Eli says. “We don’t even know what this treasure is. We’re assuming it’s something big – like, gold bars and statues and stuff, because it’s shipped in a crate. But Claws’ father is the person who gave Howard this treasure, right? And it had to be something worth giving up for the child he always wanted. So we’ve got to think like Claws’ father.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we should challenge our assumptions. Until we know what the treasure is, we can’t find it. And if we want to know what it is, we need to think like Julian August. Maybe the treasure is actually tiny. If it was small and fragile, it might’ve needed cushioning during storage,” Eli says. “Or Howard might’ve hidden it inside a shipment of something else.”
“But what’s tiny that could be valuable enough to exchange for a daughter?” I ask. “A check?”
George shakes her head. “If it was a check, Howard or Ainsley would have just cashed it in. No need to hide it. A check also couldn’t be used the way Ainsley described, as collateral for illicit business deals. But Eli makes a good point. If the treasure is tiny, it could be anywhere in this house – hidden in a drawer or stitched into a headboard. It could even be something on paper – property deeds, maybe? Or a really valuable diamond?”
I shake my head. “If we’re thinking like… like Daddy, then Julian August wouldn’t have batted an eye at a diamond. But you might be onto something with the property deeds. That might have value to my father. We should check Howard’s office again, maybe something will pop up.”
Claudia
But nothing pops up. And I’m getting more and more desperate.
Cleo and her baby, Nero, Constantine, the Lupercalia wedding, Grey Death, graduation, the guys acting weird, monkeys in my closet, a lion in the swimming pool. Mackenzie and her scattershot bullets of Damocles hovering over my head.
Around and around they whir. All my problems. All my fears. All the evil that could befall my family if we don’t hold back the onslaught of bullshit. The weight of my savage and precarious empire is stacked on my shoulders like Mackenzie’s dolls in that closet upstairs. If one piece slips out of place, the entire stack comes crashing down, limbs everywhere, glass eyes shattering.
I’ve got 99 problems but at least Brutus ain’t one.
