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“Hmm. Too cliché for a man.” Sylvia clicked the shutter.
“Is she dead?” a voice yelled from Hugo’s pocket.
He fumbled for his phone, pulled it out, and put it on speaker. “No. She’s not dead. I thought she was, but she’s not dead. She’s just strange. Lovely, brilliant, and strange.”
Alive. She was alive. And Eric wasn’t the mastermind.
“Hey!” Sylvia protested. She turned to look at him for the first time. His face must have showed the mingled relief and leftover panic he felt because she set the camera aside and jumped to her feet, racing to him. “Hugo, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“Who’s on the phone?” Eric asked.
Hugo held out the phone. Eric shrugged on his shirt and then took it. “Who am I talking to?”
“I told them it wasn’t you!” Josephine yelled.
“Told who I wasn’t what?”
There was what sounded like a brief scuffle, then James was back on the line. “Fleet Admiral, we have a problem.”
“We almost always do. What’s today’s?”
“The name Alicia gave you. Varangian. It means Viking.”
Eric went stiff, seeming to grow an inch. “What?” His voice was cool and calm.
Sylvia gasped and looked at Hugo, who nodded.
“Fleet Admiral,” James continued. “You’re being framed.”
* * *
Have you met the Trinity Masters. Hidden Devotion, available now, is a great place to hop in!
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Join the society! Hey fans of Facebook! Did you know there’s a Trinity Masters/Masters’ Admiralty fan group? Come join the fun—behind the scenes news, exclusive sneak peeks, cover reveals and (gasp) too many screenshots of texts between Mari and Lila.
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And…be sure to turn the page for an excerpt of Hidden Devotion.
Hidden Devotion
Prologue
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She pulled the scarf over her hair out of habit. Her mind was thousands of miles away from the sun-warm streets of Istanbul, her thoughts of home, of Boston.
She held up a small laminated badge, skirting the line and the admission fee for the Aya Sophia. Called the Hagia Sophia by westerners, the museum was one of her favorite places in the world. Though hundreds of thousands of people visited the church-turned-mosque-turned-museum every day, it was far more than it seemed. Aya Sophia’s secrets were right there, waiting to be uncovered—hiding in plain sight.
The same could be said of Juliette, and of the man she’d come here to meet.
Sebastian Stewart was waiting for her on the second floor. The crowd in the gallery was an eclectic mix of people and styles of dress. From the back, with his dark hair, jeans and long-sleeved button-down dress shirt, Sebastian could have passed for a variety of ethnicities. Rather than tap him on the shoulder—though in this heavily trafficked place, in the less-than-strict Istanbul, she doubted anyone would have taken offense—Juliette stood beside him, close enough that he’d notice her.
They stood in silence for a moment, a silence that was anything but tense. Sebastian was one of her oldest friends. The kind of friend who knew all her secrets.
“It always awes me that this wasn’t destroyed.” Sebastian gestured to the Deesis mosaic of Christ, which had been preserved under Islamic decoration and calligraphy when the church was converted to a mosque and uncovered during restoration in the twentieth century.
