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I hated the dolls. Mackenzie kept some in her room, but her father made her display the rest in this room of horror. Sometimes she’d break one accidentally, and her mother would fix it for her. Ainsley loved those dolls more than she loved Mackenzie. I think she was the one who chose them from catalogs and auction houses.
I hang in the doorway, not wanting to step into that room of unseeing eyes and frozen smiles. “What are we doing in here?”
Claudia picks up one – a French bisque doll with a mop of golden curls. “This is it.” She shakes the doll in my face. “This is the treasure.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Claws. George already researched the dolls. They’re valuable collectors’ items, but you couldn’t secure an illegal trade with them. They’re not the treasure—”
Claudia shoots me a triumphant glare as she tears the doll’s head off.
I’m so shocked I can only stand with my jaw open. Claudia tosses the head on the floor. It bounces on its curls and rolls against my feet, the glass eyes peering up at me with silent accusation.
Claws digs two fingers inside the neck of the doll, biting her lip in concentration as she fishes around inside the porcelain and fabric. She tips the doll upside down and shakes it violently. An arm falls off. And a long metal cylinder slides out the neck hole into Claudia’s hand.
What the fuck?
“Daddy’s story gave me the idea,” Claudia says. “Thinking about those orb people with their doll hands – one orb holding the souls of two people. And I thought this would be the perfect place for Ainsley to hide the treasure. Especially if it is what I think it is.”
I hear footsteps behind me. George pokes her head in the room, and from the look on her face, I can tell she’s immediately grasped the situation. “Of course.” She slaps her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that? She hid the treasure inside the dolls.”
“It’s perfect, right?” Claudia looks down at the row of dolls in front of her. “What better way to get back at Howard than to hide the treasure right under his nose?”
George picks up the cylinder and frowns at it. “So what is it?”
“I’ve seen these before. Daddy used them to transport ancient documents to his clients. They’re temperature and humidity controlled and you open them—” Claws flicks a clamp, and the cylinder pops open with a hiss, “—like that.”
Claudia tilts the cylinder on its side, and a brown roll of paper falls into her hand. Noah, Gabriel, and Yara have appeared at the doorway now, and we all crowd around her as she unfurls the paper.
I don’t know what I expect, but when I peer at the rows of Latin script scrawled in short columns across the page, I can’t help but feel a little… disappointed. This is the treasure Julian traded for Claudia? Is a dusty old manuscript really worth all this pain and bloodshed?
“Any idea what this is?” I ask Claudia.
Claudia’s eyes scan the document. “My Latin is a little rusty, but I believe this is the book called Exhortations on Philosophy, by the Roman Emperor Augustus.”
“Oh, that explains it. No wonder Julian considered this a treasure.”
“Eli, you don’t understand,” Claudia’s icicle eyes sparkle with life. “This document doesn’t exist. It was thought lost to time. But it’s here in my hands. And I’m willing to bet it’s not the only one.”
Claws grabs a large stuffed teddy bear and tears off its head, pulling at the stuffing. She yanks out another cylinder and opens it. Another ancient scroll tumbles into her hand. Behind her, Noah smashes the head of a doll against the shelf and digs a cylinder from her innards.
Claws tears into the cylinders, unfurling the scrolls just enough to glimpse their titles. With each one, her eyes widen.
“Here’s the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, and this is one of Cato’s lost books on the history of Rome. And if I’m right and this is a page from the Emperor Claudius’ Etruscan dictionary, then… holy shit.” She looks up at me, her eyes wide. I’m surprised to see them brimming with tears. “Of course. Of course. Daddy’s most precious treasure. These are lost scrolls – works of literature that have never been seen before. He must’ve found them in that cache in Alexandria.”
“Alexandria?” George perks up. “You mean, like the place with the library?”
“I mean exactly the place with the library.” Claudia stares at the object in her hands. “And I don’t know, but a cache of work this valuable… perhaps the librarians hid these scrolls when Julius Caesar entered the city in 48BC, to keep them safe. The dates are right. We could be holding some of the lost knowledge of the Library of Alexandria.”
All this time, the treasure was here with us.
Julian August was right – his daughter, my love, is worth the greatest treasure of all time.
Claudia
By the time we’ve torn off the heads and smashed open the porcelain stomachs of every doll, we have a total of eighty-six cylinders stacked on a towering pyramid in the middle of the room.
Eighty-six ancient manuscripts, each one a lost treasure from the Classical world. Each with the potential to answer questions scholars have debated for centuries.
My father’s greatest treasure – until me.
