After everything I did, they came back for me.
“Mackenzie’s outside, opening the gates.” Noah frowns at the window, his finger drumming on the trigger. “If it weren’t for that fucking garish fountain, I’d have a clear shot.”
“Why is she opening the gates?”
“A car’s driving up. It’s Nero. He’s got men behind him. They’re surrounding the place. We can’t take all of them. Fuck,fuck.”
“We could go over the back fence?” Eli suggests. “They don’t know the paths through the trees like I do. But we’ll have to go fast, or they’ll see us.”
Noah’s mouth twists into a frown. His shoulders hunch. He wants to fight. But even he has to know we can’t shoot our way out the front gate. “Claudia wouldn’t want us to leave the house. She’d stay and fight.”
And you know what? He’s right. I’ve lived and died a thousand times for this house. It’s the hill I would die on, the place we’d make our final stand.
But that’s the old me.
Now I know that none of this shit matters without love.
They came back for me.
My three princes could have walked away from all of this. They could have left Emerald Beach and the Triumvirate behind and gone on with their lives as they should have been. But they came back for me.
And I’ll never, ever let them go again.
I manage to pry my lips open. I push the air from my heavy lungs. I form a single, shaky word. “Run.”
Let Mackenzie have the house, the empire. It’s only fair. I stole her life – she can have it back, curses and all. The four of us can make something different. Something better.
Gabriel brushes my face with soft kisses. “That’s the sweetest word I’ve ever heard from these perfect lips.”
Noah hauls himself away from the window. “They’ve stopped to talk. No one’s seen us. We’d better go now.”
Noah darts into the hallway, looking both ways. His weapon swings through the air as he checks for Nero’s men. Gabriel jogs after him, cradling me against his body, still singing those beautiful, haunting melodies even though I’m now so fully awake and alive that not even the drugs could pull me back.
My boys are in danger.
Eli takes up the rear, backing down the hallway as he keeps his gun trained on every closed door, every bulletproof window. We pass by the drawing room, the dining room, Howard Malloy’s office—
The treasure.
Minus the two cylinders I sent with Livvie for partial payment to make our trap appear real, the documents are still locked in the panic room. My heart aches. Before I know what I’m doing, my fingers reach out for it, grasping thin air.
“It stays here,” Eli says firmly, hurt flashing in his eyes. “We came back foryou, Claws. You’re our treasure.”
In that flash of a moment, I see my father. He would have wept to see this treasure go to Howard Malloy, who cared not one bit for its true value, who saw only dollar signs when he should have seen knowledge. Eli saw what my father saw, which is why he wanted to give the treasure to a museum. And now, Mackenzie will take the house and find it in the panic room and it’ll go back on the black market and the world will never get to learn what those scrolls contain.
Answers. Questions.
The ancient wisdom my father loved.
His legacy.
Gone.
Even as I think the word, I feel lighter, like I’m floating away.Gone.
I let go of the hold the treasure has on my heart.Gone.
I already had the greatest treasure of all. I had three broken princes.
