Kurt rubs his hands together. “Well, I’ll leave you to it then. I think I’ll check on my men’s progress.” He turns to Elise, all smiles. “Did you know, my dear, that looking for a small object buried a cellar is a terribly slow process? One cannot use an excavator, you see.”
“You’re the one who shot us down, right?” She glares at him. “You’re the one responsible for Jordan’s and Darrel’s deaths.”
“Collateral damage,” he says.
She snarls. “You’re a monster! An evil beast from hell parading as a human being!”
“You’re mistaken,” Kurt chuckles. “If there’s a beast among us, then it’s the man standing by your side.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turns on his heel and strides back into the house. His security detail goes in behind him, while the guards posted outside close ranks.
ELISE
We drive back to the airport in silence. As far as Theo is concerned, it’s a defeated and deflated sort of silence that makes me feel sorry for him.
It isn’t so much the fact that he didn’t get what he wanted. Frankly, I don’t quite see how that key was going to help him help Monaco save the world. What pains me is the sadistic pleasure the murderous Kurt Ozzi took in putting Theo down.
I wanted to pounce on him and strangle him with my bare hands. Seeing Theo clench his fists, then force himself to unfurl them, and his struggle to stay calm despite Ozzi’s taunts did something irrevocable to my heart.
Everything that went down between Theo and me over the past few days had already affected me. I’d been falling for a man possibly involved with someone else.Hello again, moral dilemmas!It has been fun living without you for a couple of days after Theo paid off Doc and set me free.
His decision to end our affair left me relieved, morally speaking, but shaken heartwise.
The preexisting turmoil that the humiliation Ozzi inflicted on him upset me so much. I’m no stranger to empathy, and it isn’t unusual for me to hurt for wronged people or mistreated pets. That hurt typically spurs me into action to find ways to help them. But never before have I experienced such profound despair on behalf of another, and such frustration over my inability to help them as in that moment.
“We’ll take you back to Chambéry,” Theo says without looking at me. “I’m assigning two experienced agents to your security detail until we’ve made sure Doc is no threat to you or your brother.”
I knit my eyebrows. “How can you make sure of that? It’s not like you can trust his word.”
“I don’t trust his word,” Theo says.
Abdel and Roberto exchange a quick, meaningful look that makes me suspicious.
“You aren’t going to have him killed or maim him to scare him into staying away from me and Gilles, are you?” I ask no one in particular.
“Me? No,” Theo says.
Roberto glances at me over his shoulder with a glint in his eyes. “Me neither.”
“I’m just here to pilot and drive,” Abdel offers, his tone falsely innocent.
Uh-huh.
We don’t talk much after that. Once at the airport, we board the same jet and take off in the direction of Savoie.
I take a seat across the aisle from Theo and look out the window. Regret plagues me, mostly because I’ll never seeing him again. But it also bugs me that the quest for Simon’s key had such a disappointing denouement. What a shame the key will end up in the hands of the despicable Kurt Ozzi! Darrel and Jordan’s sacrifice was for nothing. Forcing Grandpa’s hand to let me read my great-grandparents’ letters, against their express wishes, was for nothing.
I wonder if Grandpa François will forgive me for that. Then again, he’s admitted to reading them too when he was young. It was shortly after Simon died in a tragic accident at work. Grandpa François was in a dark place, so he stole the letters from his mother’s room and read them. He regretted it afterward.
Suddenly, an image pops into my mind. It’s a tin box in Grandpa’s apartment. An amateur treasure hunter in his youth, he keeps his finds in it. Most of the collection is junky bric-a-brac, but a few items stand out.
As a child, I was particularly fascinated by an antique brooch encrusted with semiprecious stones and a metal ashtray shaped like a frog with emerald eyes. “I wish those were real emeralds!” Grandpa had laughed when I’d asked. “But they’re just glass.”
I remember there were four or five old keys in that tin box, too.
What if… What if Grandpa’s treasure hunter instincts had kicked in when read his parents’ correspondence? What if he’d gone after the key?
Nah, that’s too far-fetched of an idea.I shouldn’t even mention it to Theo because I don’t want to give him false hopes. If Grandpa had tried to find Simon’s key, he would’ve recalled it when Theo and I were in his apartment. He would’ve told us about it, I’m sure.
