Page 49 of Girl Anonymous
Oh, and a baby she had to feed and change, and she had no experience and no way to support it…
Fine. Her conscious mind refused to consider the chance of a child. Her subconscious mind was not so easily coerced.
“You have a security system,” he said. “Nothing and no one shows on the video, so whoever placed this commandeered your system. I’ve got my people looking into it.”
“How do you know what’s on my security system?”
“It’s basic home security, nothing fancy, good enough for most situations, but also easy to hack as needed. I needed.”
She wasn’t speechless, exactly. She just didn’t know what to say. “I’ll…upgrade.”
“Not tonight.” He stood with his head down, clearly thinking. “You got home. You came in and walked right here to find the bottle.”
She didn’t know what to do first. Combat outrage that he’d hacked into her camera and watched her recent movements? Or be glad he cared enough to come so quickly and investigate so conclusively? And keep a car here to come to her when she needed him… She remembered his expression when he heard the shipment had been stolen, the ruthless cast of his face, the chilling manner in which he’d weighed her involvement and found her guilty. Worse was that moment when she’d admitted she killed his father…
She had blood on her hands. His father’s, and she did not care about that.
But her mother’s.
Dear God, Mama.
All his preparation had been in case she were pregnant, yet she was not and he was here, now, anyway. What did it mean…other than the fact she didn’t understand Dante Arundel? She didn’t understand him at all.
“You knewla Bouteille de Flammewas here. Maarja, how did you know that the bottle was here?” The way he spoke, she thought he’d asked more than once.
“I told you. In your mother’s library. Remember that day? I told you I have a sense about these things.” Yet his first thought might not have been that he knew that, but that she’d somehow set it up herself.
He said, “The Chinese scroll you said was a fake? You were right.”
Ah. She’d proved herself. “I know. Usually I have to touch something to sense its past.” She half smiled. “The Chinese scroll didn’t have much of a past.”
“But tonight, you don’t have to touch the bottle.”
Yeah. Proving herself wasn’t so easy to this doubtful asshole. “Inside the glass is the blood of my blood. I know when it’s near.”Believe me or not.
As swiftly as a snake striking, his hand reached out and gripped her wrist. “Do you know where the stopper is?”
“Nobody ever told me.”
“Do youknow?”
He’d spotted her prevarication, damn it. “I know. I didn’t until I held the bottle the first time, in your mother’s library, then I understood what I’d only sensed.” She shook herself free, went to the jewelry box that sat on her dresser, and in an act of great courage, lifted out a necklace. Courage, because she was alone with an Arundel, the son of the man who’d been willing to kill a woman and a four-year-old child for this, and Dante could casually take her life, dispose of her body, and no one would ever know what had happened to her.
Dante’s gaze narrowed on the shiny stone that hung on the sturdy gold chain. “Of course. You were wearing that the day your mother—”
“Yes. That morning, she put the chain around my neck. She told me it was my heritage, the only thing she had to leave me. She told me to remember her when I wore it. None of it made any sense to me at the time, but I have treasured it.” Maarja cupped the stone in her hand and stepped close to show him. She lowered her voicewhen she spoke of it, using the reverent tone one used in church. “Viewed close, it really didn’t look like much, a black stone with a hole in it. But it’s not black, it’s a blue so dense it seemed to be impenetrable. A hole was carved, not by human hands, but by water.” Her eyes fluttered closed as she sensed the tumult of a cascading waterfall, relentlessly grinding the stones at its base until this one broke free. “Years and years it traveled down, down toward the sea. The waves found it, played with it, smoothed the stone—feel it—” Blindly she reached for his hand and guided his finger to the rock’s silky surface. “A girl discovered it. Many years ago she found it, glinting in the bright white sand. She took it to the glassmakers on the island, and they created the blood-red vessel to give it purpose, and the girl carried it to her tribe, to her father.”
“What happened?” Dante’s voice coaxed Maarja, lulling the portent of anguish.
“She was the daughter of Jånos, our founder, our visionary. He foretold that we would come to a place where we could live at peace with man and nature, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. When he spoke, we could almost hear the waves crashing, imagine a life of fishing and farming. The tribe traveled north and west, walking, pulling their wagons, caring for their horses, seeking the home that Jånos foretold. When they came to the land of the Normans, the man who called himself Lord of the lands, Èrthu Arundel, saw the girl and wanted her…for a moment only, for he had a wife great with child. Instead Jånos offered the glass bottle and stone stopper. Èrthu took the gift, raped the girl, slit Jånos’s throat.” Dante’s fingers flexed in hers, offering his strength. “As her father died, the girl captured his blood in the bottle, and thus it became a holy object to us.”
“What happened to Èrthu Arundel?” Dante’s voice barely pinged into Maarja’s consciousness.
“Jånos’s sons castrated him as they would have an unruly horse or a wayward ox. He lived, but it was too late. His wife gave birth to a boy child, Èrthu raised him in cruelty and vengeance,the years of battle and blood had begun, and for a thousand years the bottle and the stopper changed hands, were separated, sought each other, until…today…”
Taking a deep breath, Maarja opened her eyes. She looked right into Dante’s face…into the face of a fiend.
His complexion had bleached to a waxy tint, with furious red on his cheeks and lips. His nostrils flared, his cruel white teeth were bared. His eyes…heavy-lidded, dark-lashed, with a gold flame lit deep within.
