Page 95 of Take Me Darkly

“You have exactly ten seconds to tell me who the hell you are and how you got this number,” I said, my voice shaking with pure venom.

“I’m a servant for the Shadow Order of Isis.” A pause, heavy, weighted, and entirely deliberate. “How I got your number doesn’t matter. What matters is finding your princess.”

The word hit me like a physical blow, choking the air straight out of me.

Princess.

My private moniker for her. The deeply intimate, possessive word I had never, not once, uttered aloud in front of another living soul. I tried to tell myself I was losing my mind, that the sheer panic had warped the audio in my ears, but I knew with brutal clarity that I hadn’t misheard a thing.

The room went dead silent. Zeke was staring at my pale face, horror in his eyes. Hale’s fingers had already begun to fly across his keyboard, bypassing firewalls at lightning speed.

“You have my attention now,” I whispered, my voice thick with terror and rage.

“I belong to an ancient priesthood. We are sworn to Isis—the goddess who was the divine patron and protector to Cleopatra herself. The powers I serve are acutely aware of your current crisis, and they wish to negotiate a meeting.”

As the stranger spoke, I watched the large monitor while Hale’s fingers flew across the console.

He struck the enter key.

Whatever deep-web data he had just extracted appeared on the screen on the far wall. My eyes rapidly scanned the fragments of translated Latin texts, redacted intelligence dossiers, and scanned archival pages while the calm voice continued to vibrate through the speaker.

“Our purpose has remained singular for millennia,” the man on the line said smoothly. “We exist exclusively to ensure the survival of Cleopatra’s bloodline. It has endured, Mr. Romano—unbroken, carried down through more than sixty generations. The woman you call your princess is not merely a pet name. She is a sovereign princess in the truest, most literal sense the world has ever held.”

My eyes continued to read the screen as I tried to process the surreal nightmare unfolding before me.

The Shadow Order of Isis was a devotional, underground priesthood predating the literal fall of Alexandria. From what I could gather quickly from the files on the screen, they were sworn upon the suicide of Cleopatra VII to shelter, conceal, and preserve the sole surviving branch of her sacred bloodline—the descendants of her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, who had been spirited out of Rome and married into the royal house of Mauretania. They spent two thousand years operating entirely in the shadows, moving unseen through the Vatican, the upper echelons of academia, and the international trade of antiquities.

But most importantly, the Shadow Order of Isis was universally dismissed by every credible modern historian as a myth. If this was some sort of sick game, it needed to end now.

“What exactly are you trying to say?” I impatiently asked.

“Serena is the living end of that ancient line, and she has been under the protection of our Order since the day she was born.”

I stared at the screen, my mind fighting to reconcile the sheer absurdity of a dynastic lineage with the terrifying reality of her being taken from right under my nose. My grip tightened on the phone until the plastic casing creaked under the pressure, my knuckles turning stark white. Every possessive, desperate instinct in my chest rose up like a cornered beast.

“If she’s a protected asset to a multi-millennial shadow network, then who the hell just dragged her off my property?!”

“The Serpent’s Disciples,” the voice answered, the unhurried composure slipping into a dark, grim gravity. “An international cartel that controls billions in narcotics trafficking and global money laundering. They have absolutely nothing to do with our Order, Mr. Romano. They are monsters of a much more modern, rapacious design. They murder indiscriminately to achieve their own selfish ends.”

The jigsaw pieces in my head violently collided.

“Then why did they murder Carlo?” I asked, taking a chance that our theory was correct.

“Carlo Martinelli was an academic, but in his research, he accidentally stumbled right into the high-level financial infrastructure of their laundering operations. He realized too late what he had uncovered, putting himself and his entire family in immediate, fatal crosshairs. Now he’s dead, and we are here to make sure Serena does not meet the exact same fate.”

“I don’t care about a dead Egyptian queen, and I don’t care about a narcotics network,” I snarled into the mic, my voice vibrating with an icy, lethal focus. “Tell me where they took her, or I will use every resource at my disposal to paint this city red.”

The line fell into a brief, heavy silence, the man’s unhurried composure remaining utterly unbroken by my threat.

“Locating her is not just of importance to you,” he said, his voice echoing with chilling authority. “Her survival has global implications. Working with us is your only chance at finding her.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Serena

* * *

Consciousness didn’t return gracefully. It clawed its way back into my skull in jagged, agonizing shards, every single one of them coated in acid and blinding heat.