Page 27 of Shattered Jewel
Rossi closes in. I fight the urge to back away and put distance between us. “Your brother is dead, Elara. If it is indeed real, the Heart can’t change that.”
“Yes, but it can give me answers. For so long—too long—I accepted his death as cruel and terrible bad luck. I was willing to live with that open wound and just cover it with a bandage. But now? When the answers are so close, and four incredibly skilled men want to find the Heart as much as I do, how can I say no? Why would I ever stop? You don’t know what finding the Heart could do?—”
“I know enough.” A muscle knots in Rossi’s cheek. “I know the price of involving yourself in Sarah Anderton’s lost treasure. I know the destruction the search for it leaves in its wake. And I know that no one, not even you, should unearth what she was willing to die for to keep hidden. What her daughter was willing to die for.”
Tears burn my eyes, blurring my vision. I blink them away, refusing to let them fall. “I have to try. I can’t just let his death go.”
For a brief instant, the hard lines of Rossi’s face relax. “I understand your grief. But this isn’t the way. Searching for the Heart will only bring you more pain, more loss. Let the treasure stay buried. Let your brother rest.”
A sob catches in my throat, my chest aching with the weight of it. I want to scream, to rage against the unfairness of it all, but I push it down, Kaspian’s hand my anchor.
“I can’t,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”
Rossi sighs, rubbing a hand against the stubble on his jaw.
“Then I’m sorry, too.” He looks at Tempest, and a silent communication passes between them. “We can’t let you do this, Elara. Sarah’s treasure is too dangerous in anyone’s hands. Our job is to keep it from ever coming to light.”
Fear prickles my skin. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Tempest draws closer, reaching into his jacket. If I knew him better, maybe I’d believe the line between his brows means he feels somewhat regretful when he says, “What we have to, so we can keep our loved ones safe.”
I stumble against the sofa chair, Kaspian’s dead weight nearly toppling us both over. “No, wait?—”
Tempest draws a gun from his coat, its muzzle gleaming in the dim light.
Rossi moves to block the door, his broad shoulders filling the frame.
Chapter 7
Kaspian
THE BOGEYMAN
Through a wasteland of black and white noise and nothingness all at once, the voice I would never choose to hear first says, “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be, Miss Wraithwood.”
Rossi.
Fucking Miguel Rossi.
I haven’t heard from that old man since he left campus last year, with Cav smirking at Rossi’s back as the former professor walked away from his assassin’s life and carved a name for himself through the city in his enemies’ blood.
I open my mouth to welcome him back to my turf and then promptly stab him, consequences be damned, until two things hit me at once.
One, my tongue is too big for my mouth, and it’s sticking to the roof, brushing along my gums like a dehydrated, mewling street cat. And my throat pulses with swelling irritation. Like I’ve been screaming.
And two, Rossi said her name.
Elara.
My eyelids swing open.
Rossi’s form snaps into focus first, his large, oversized body taking over the doorway—the one exit out of this sitting room.
At Farrow Estate. Elara’s mother’s house, where I’d headed to after being forced to endure Cav’s mutilation and wondering who would be next, who else will fall victim to our failure to secure the whole Heart…
And Cav had looked at me, his face speckled and painted with his own blood. Looked at me in a way that his thoughts lined up with mine. Find her.
Yes, it’s all coming back to me now. Rossi had worked on me, using his expertise and sadism to make sure my shoulder was stitched up nicely. And the reason he was here was because Elara called Tempest… because her mother had a gun … yep, and fucking shot me.