“Wherever that is,” Easy muttered.
The stairs creaked.
Flash didn't turn. He felt her at his back before he heard her. She came down slowly, her booted feet on the wood. She'd changed out of the robe into a seamless black catsuit, weapons on her belt, a pack slung over her shoulder, those slim NVGs around her neck, her hair ruthlessly braided. “I know where the font is. We need to leave. I’ll open it, get you inside, then I’ve fulfilled my part.”
The woman he'd held twenty minutes ago was tucked away inside a tactical shell that the team would recognize as professional.
She walked around the table and took the chair across from him. The chair that put the full width of the table between them.
Flash absorbed it.
He met her eyes. She held his gaze for one count, and the dark gold in her irises had gone dull, the orange threads dimmed, and her face did nothing he could read.
“It’s in the Andes, near a cloud forest north of Vilcabamba, never recorded by the conquistadors because it was hidden, accessible only by a path her family knew. My ancestor was running back to her settlement,Inti Llaqta. City of Gold.”
Easy opened his mouth and Twister nudged him hard. “Don’t say it.”
Lechuza looked up at him, her brows raised, a wry look on her face. “El Dorado. Maybe.” Easy’s eyes widened. “I don’t know if it’s ever been found. My father would know. He’s very knowledgeable about our history. If he doesn’t, we have a library at my ancestral estate in Peru.”
“What happened up there?” Fly asked.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t really know. My ancestor was running from conquistadors, and somehow I’ve tapped into that memory, probably through my bloodline.” Her tone was soft, as if she were remembering instead of recounting. “I killed one of them. I think he was important to her. His name was Cisco.”
Jealousy slid through him like a poisonous, green-coated blade and took him over. Even though that fucking Cisco was long dead and gone, her voice told him that there was more to the story than she was admitting.
* * *
He opened his mouth,but she desperately cut him off. “Flash suspects he’s being manipulated through me. It’s best if I keep my distance.”
“Let’s try the Guardian again,” Fly said, and what they discovered sat in her gut like a stone.
Flash was just too in tune with her, and he caught the lie in her omission, even though he couldn't name what she'd left out. He kept silent, and she could only feel guilty relief. He was too, too sweet, still trying to give her space she'd told him she needed. He didn't push. The not-pushing hurt worse than the pushing would have.
She made herself breathe.
"Try him," she said.
Flash held her gaze for one count more, the gray of his eyes flat in a way she'd never seen before, the easy light in them banked down to something steady and wounded. He closed his eyes and opened the channel. He’d done it before in the moments when his attention pulled inward and the air around him changed pressure.
This time was different.
The air shifted around all of them.
She felt it in her chakana first. A low warmth, not the searing white of the bedroom, something gentler, the way warmth carried through a closed door. Her ribs answered without her permission. Her breath caught. She set her hand flat on the table to keep it steady.
A voice arrived.
It was in the chest of every person at the table. It moved through her sternum the way water moved through a riverbed, finding old channels she didn't know she had carved.
Killa.
She knew this voice.
The knowing was instant and total. She didn't have the name yet, but she had thevoice, and she had been hearing it for as long as she had been alive. The dreams she'd woken from at six years old, sobbing for a man she'd never met. The visions she'd had on the edge of sleep at sixteen, the year her grandmother died, when the air in her bedroom had felt full of presence she couldn't see. The whispers she'd written off as fatigue during the bad years in Caracas, the year of Eva, the year after. The voice she'd told herself for thirty years did not exist.
He had been calling her for her whole life.
Her hand on the table was shaking. She pressed it harder against the wood.
