I throw my arms around Eli, plastering his face with kisses. “I know where the treasure is hidden.”
37
Eli
Claudia refuses to sit still on the ride back to the manor. She calls the others – interrupting Gabe’s practice session with Broken Muse and George’s college interview – and tells them to get home immediately. She barks orders to the driver and keeps urging him to take dangerous shortcuts. She won’t stop kissing me, which despite how angry I am with her right now, I can’t help resist. I’m caught up in her excitement.
That’s what Claudia August does to you – she dazzles you until you don’t know which way is up.
Her face lights up like Christmas as we pull up behind the house. She tears off toward the maintenance shed. I jog after her, my head still spinning from the conversation with Nero.
She leaves the maintenance shed door hanging open – something she hasn’t done since Brutus got into the house. I step into the car tunnel, but she’s already disappeared.
“What’s it? Claws, where are you?”
I follow the sound of her footsteps – through the garage, up the stairs, down the hall, to the large display room beside Mackenzie’s old bedroom where she kept most of her doll collection. I remember. Her father got her those creepy dolls – one for every birthday and Christmas, and every time he made a visible mark on her body he needed her to cover up.
“He’s trying to buy my silence,” Mackenzie used to say, staring into the eerie, silent face of her latest acquisition.
I hated the dolls. Mackenzie kept some in her room, but her father made her display the rest in this room of horror. Sometimes she’d break one accidentally, and her mother would fix it for her. Ainsley loved those dolls more than she loved Mackenzie. I think she was the one who chose them from catalogs and auction houses.
I hang in the doorway, not wanting to step into that room of unseeing eyes and frozen smiles. “What are we doing in here?”
Claudia picks up one – a French bisque doll with a mop of golden curls. “This is it.” She shakes the doll in my face. “This is the treasure.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Claws. George already researched the dolls. They’re valuable collectors’ items, but you couldn’t secure an illegal trade with them. They’re not the treasure—”
Claudia shoots me a triumphant glare as she tears the doll’s head off.
I’m so shocked I can only stand with my jaw open. Claudia tosses the head on the floor. It bounces on its curls and rolls against my feet, the glass eyes peering up at me with silent accusation.
Claws digs two fingers inside the neck of the doll, biting her lip in concentration as she fishes around inside the porcelain and fabric. She tips the doll upside down and shakes it violently. An arm falls off. And a long metal cylinder slides out the neck hole into Claudia’s hand.
What the fuck?
“Daddy’s story gave me the idea,” Claudia says. “Thinking about those orb people with their doll hands – one orb holding the souls of two people. And I thought this would be the perfect place for Ainsley to hide the treasure. Especially if it is what I think it is.”
I hear footsteps behind me. George pokes her head in the room, and from the look on her face, I can tell she’s immediately grasped the situation. “Of course.” She slaps her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that? She hid the treasure inside the dolls.”
“It’s perfect, right?” Claudia looks down at the row of dolls in front of her. “What better way to get back at Howard than to hide the treasure right under his nose?”
George picks up the cylinder and frowns at it. “So what is it?”
“I’ve seen these before. Daddy used them to transport ancient documents to his clients. They’re temperature and humidity controlled and you open them—” Claws flicks a clamp, and the cylinder pops open with a hiss, “—like that.”
Claudia tilts the cylinder on its side, and a brown roll of paper falls into her hand. Noah, Gabriel, and Yara have appeared at the doorway now, and we all crowd around her as she unfurls the paper.
I don’t know what I expect, but when I peer at the rows of Latin script scrawled in short columns across the page, I can’t help but feel a little… disappointed.Thisis the treasure Julian traded for Claudia? Is a dusty old manuscript really worth all this pain and bloodshed?
“Any idea what this is?” I ask Claudia.
Claudia’s eyes scan the document. “My Latin is a little rusty, but I believe this is the book calledExhortations on Philosophy, by the Roman Emperor Augustus.”
“Oh, that explains it. No wonder Julian considered this a treasure.”
“Eli, you don’t understand,” Claudia’s icicle eyes sparkle with life. “This document doesn’texist. It was thought lost to time. But it’s here in my hands. And I’m willing to bet it’s not the only one.”
Claws grabs a large stuffed teddy bear and tears off its head, pulling at the stuffing. She yanks out another cylinder and opens it. Another ancient scroll tumbles into her hand. Behind her, Noah smashes the head of a doll against the shelf and digs a cylinder from her innards.
