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Chapter 92: The Door With Our Name
The Carpathians in winter do not look like a place. They look like a rumor.We came up the last road in two Cross jeeps and a borrowed farm truck, nine of us wedged between the crates of supplies and the shotgun Marcus refused to put down. The snow had been falling for six days. It lay on the ridges in smooth, blue-shadowed drifts, and the pines stood in it up to their knees, black and silent and unimaginably old. There was no sound but the engine and the creak of tires on ice.Julian, in the passenger seat, had stopped talking an hour ago and begun to pray in a whisper."There," Elias said.He had been silent the whole way. He sat pressed against the cold window with his hands knotted between his knees, watching the white world go by, and I had seen him flinch twice at nothing at all. Now he lifted one hand and pointed.Far ahead, above the tree line, a gray shape stood against the sky.A monastery. Not a grand one. A low, hunched cluster of stone buildings, with a squat bell tower a
Chapter 91: The Empty Vault
They flew home through the night.Nobody spoke on the plane. Caius sat with his eyes closed and his hand wrapped around the stone ring, and every few minutes, when he thought no one was looking, his thumb made a slow circle over it, as if checking a pulse.The call had come at four in the morning, before the jet had cleared the Alps. Alfred. His voice on the line, tight as a drawn wire.Sir. The vault.They landed at Dragonport in the cold gray hour before dawn and drove straight to the castle without a stop. The gates stood open. Guards lined the drive with the gray faces of men who had been awake for two days. Inside, the Great Hall was strangely, horribly quiet.Alfred met them at the foot of the stairs."Two of the night guards were drugged," he said, without preamble. "They're alive. They'll wake by noon. The vault door is open. There is no damage to the lock, the hinges, or the frame. No alarm was triggered. The cameras recorded nothing." His voice dropped. "I'm sorry, Young Mas
Chapter 90: The Calm one (b)
It was a chase through the bones of a building, and I remember it in pieces.The cloakroom door banging back. A guard flung into a coat rack, a shower of brass hooks and wool. The pop of a pistol and a fan of glass from a chandelier. Marcus's shout, Take the stairs! My own legs moving before I had decided to move, my heels skidding on slick marble as I tore after the shape of a black jacket vanishing around a corner.Rask knew the hall. That was the horror of it. He took the service corridor behind the great chamber without breaking stride, up a narrow stair that smelled of boiled cabbage, through a kitchen where a startled cook dropped a pot of broth, and out the far side into a long hall of closed doors. A guard stepped out of a side room to cut him off, and Rask put a bullet through the man's thigh and kept running.Elias was faster.I will say that for my brother, that he ran like a man who had spent ten years being hunted and had finally been handed something to chase. He took th
Chapter 89: The Calm One
"Start with me," said Marcus.He said it again, quieter, when nobody moved. Caius had taken the Concord's private cloakroom for the questioning, a long, paneled room with brass coat hooks and a single table, and a hundred and forty people were waiting in the hall outside with the doors bolted against them. Madam Fontaine had refused to leave Lord Wynter's side. The Chairman had demanded his lawyers, then his tea, then his lawyers again. Somewhere in the building, the Swiss police were pounding politely on a bronze door and being told, equally politely, to wait.Marcus pulled out the chair himself and sat."Name, rank, post," Caius said."Marcus Williams. Chief of Personal Security, Cross Enterprises. Disgraced." Marcus folded his hands on the table. They were perfectly still. "Ask me anything. Ask me twice."I stood by the wall with my arms wrapped around myself and watched my husband interrogate the man who had once stood outside our bedroom door. It was the strangest thing I had see
Chapter 88: The Gallery
The sound was small.That is what I remember most. Not a roar, not a crash, only a clean, flat crack from somewhere above, like a branch snapping in a cold wood. Then the world turned over.I did not see Caius move. One moment I was standing at the foot of the table with my mouth half-open on the next name. The next, a hard arm had come around my waist and I was falling sideways, and the black stone floor came up to meet me with a crash that rattled my teeth.His body covered mine."*Down!*" Caius roared.A second shot. Granite exploded off the table's edge in a spray of white dust. Someone screamed. A chair went over. I heard Madame Fontaine's glass shatter on the floor."Marcus! The gallery!""I see it, sir!"Gunfire, close, loud. Marcus and two of the Cross guards had drawn and were firing upward into the ring of dark above the lamps. Plaster rained down. A figure moved in the shadows, a quick lean silhouette against the high, curved wall. He fired once more, wildly, and then he wa
Chapter 87: The Concord
There are twelve chairs in the Concord Hall, and eleven of them were already filled when I walked in. It was a round room, built like a vault, with walls of dark Swiss granite and a floor of polished black stone. There were no windows. A single circle of golden light fell from a ring of lamps overhead, and under it stood a long oval table so old that its edges had been worn smooth by centuries of leaning elbows. Around it sat the people who owned the world's money. I recognized some from magazines. A silver-haired woman in white, Madame Odile Fontaine, whose family had financed three revolutions and two restorations. A heavy, red-faced man named Silas Brandt, of the Brandt-Meier Bank. A gaunt old lord in a velvet coat, Percival Ashdown, whose estate was said to hold more gold than the Bank of England. Others I knew only by their crests, pinned to their lapels in small, plain metals. Not one of them smiled. Caius walked at my right shoulder, upright, pale, in a black suit that hid
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