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The burly man approached, dragging Elvira down the side of the rocky hill. A bruise marred her cheek and her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying. Someone had gagged her with a thick rope. The material had rubbed her skin raw. Fury bubbled in my veins, threatening to spill over, but Mr. Burton still had his weapon aimed straight at me.
“Elvira,” I said raggedly.
She met my gaze. In the span of twenty-four hours, she’d lost something vital. The ability to look at the world and see promise. Now she looked at the world and it scared her. I wanted to tell her that it would be all right, but I didn’t want to lie to her.
“Where is your sister?” Mr. Burton turned toward my uncle. “You know her better than anyone.”
The words came out slowly, each one pulled out of my uncle as if with pliers. “Not as well as I thought.”
“You suspected her involvement with The Company,” Mr. Burton said. “And I know you followed her to the warehouse, Mr. Hayes. Where could she have gone? Because she’s not in Cairo.”
My uncle flinched. Something had clearly occurred to him.
“Tell me,” Mr. Burton said.
“I will once you release my nieces, and Whit. They have nothing to do with this.”
Mr. Burton narrowed his gaze. “Seems highly unlikely.”
“It’s the truth.”
There was a long pause while Mr. Burton and my uncle stared at each other in silence.
“Do you know what I think?” he asked softly. “I think you know how much money you can make by hoarding all of the treasures yourself. You want what Lourdes stole as much as I do.”
“First,” Tío Ricardo said, somehow still managing to sound disgusted while panting, “they aren’t treasures, they are objects with historical significance to Egyptians—”
Mr. Burton sliced the air with his hand. “I don’t give a damn. Believe me when I tell you that you’d much rather deal with me than with my associate. He won’t take your refusal as kindly as I have done.”
I blinked at the revelation. “There’s someone else?”
“Everyone works for someone, my dear,” Mr. Burton said. “Ricardo. The location.”
“Release them first.”
Mr. Burton had a manic gleam glowing in his eyes. He waved the gun, first at Elvira and then at Whit. “Are you really going to let them die?”
My mind was still unable to connect how this man was the same foppish, kind gentleman who had delivered our mail, who had asked me to dinner. They couldn’t be the same, and yet they were. Mr. Burton beckoned the burly man with his index finger, and Elvira was dragged forward, squirming.
Mr. Burton said, “I will shoot her.”
“Boss said not to harm the girl,” the burly man said uneasily.
Elvira flinched as Mr. Burton caressed her cheek. “So he did. But that was before he knew we had the spare.”
I gasped as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.
“Thomas,” Tío Ricardo said coaxingly. “I’ll tell you once—”
Mr. Burton lifted his weapon to Elvira’s temple. She yelled, the sound low and muffled, full of horror. Time seemed to stall as her head swung in my direction, her eyes wide with terror meeting mine. My heart wrenched in my chest. In an instant, memories assailed me. One after another.
Elvira on her sixteenth birthday, standing in the middle of my mother’s garden, for once still and patient as I painted her writing in her journal.
A blink, and I was nine years old at the dinner table, and she was sneakily eating the boiled carrots off my plate because she knew I hated them, and I’d get in trouble for not finishing every last bite.
Another blink, and Elvira was sitting close to my side the night I’d readmy uncle’s letter for the first time. She’d hugged me while I cried myself to sleep.
I blinked again, and I was back in the desert, and the horrifying sight assaulted my vision once more. The barrel of the gun pressed close to her temple.
