Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
“They will be right.” He smirked. “I’m glad that I already sent Bram and Walter ahead to the party. Then I can make good use of the limo.”
She laughed. “I don’t think the boning in this dress is really equipped to handle you getting under my skirts.”
“Alas,” he said. “I do have one more addition to your costume.”
He reached into the pocket and removed a knife in a sheath.
She recognized it on sight. “My father’s knife?”
“I felt it only right for you to kill the Fae Killer with it.” Graves dropped to one knee, and her pulse skyrocketed. He lifted her skirts up to her hip. His eyes sparkled with mischief as he strapped the knife to her inner thigh. He pressed a kiss to the sensitive skin. “There. Now you’re ready.”
“And how am I getting it out?” she asked, half dizzy as he stood.
“There’s a slit in the pocket of the dress.”
She reached her hand into the pocket and, just as he said, touched the smooth handle that had molded to her father’s grip. “A perfect present.”
He stepped forward, kissing the lobe of her ear. “Tonight, we’re going to get justice for them.”
Their eyes met, and she nodded in agreement.
George took them in the limo and pulled up to the red carpet outside of the Morgan Library, a white building on Madison Avenue in Murray Hill. It housed the private collection of a 1900s robber baron and had been a public museum since his son donated it in 1923.
Kierse had never been over here or inside it. Like most things during the Monster War, even public museums had been closed to the rabble.
George hurried around to the back of the limo, pulling the door open and helping Kierse out first.
“Give ’em hell,” George murmured to her as Graves stepped out behind her.
She grinned at George, taking the advice as fortification. Graves offered his arm, and she let him guide her into the modern museum full of early 1900s books and antiquities.
Graves passed their invitation to an attendant and walked up a short flight of stairs and past the wooden museum entrance. The room beyond had sky-high ceilings with floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking out over a courtyard. Already the room was full of monsters on the prowl, drinks in hand. Convocation members and their retinues were in attendance, rubbing elbows with each other, high on their own importance as the tides turned in the streets. A band with long, white-feathered wings down their backs played music on a stage at the other end of the room.
“Holy shit, is that Legion?” Kierse hissed.
“I didn’t know you listened to popular music,” Graves said with a smirk.
“Who hasn’t heard their music, Graves?” Her eyes skipped over his shoulder to check out the lead singer, who went by the nickname Saint. He was six-and-a-half feet of well-muscled rockstar. The angel wings at his back were a mockery to his leather attire and black eyeliner, his sleek hair falling into his eyes as he crooned like he was made for it.
“Would you like to wipe up your drool?”
She shot him a disbelieving look. “Like Saint would look twice at me.”
“I would guess he’d look more than twice. I’d run him out of Manhattan first.”
“He lives here?”
Graves arched a brow. “Who knew you were into celebrities?”
“I mean…I hate most people, to be fair,” she said. “But I prefer a god, myself.”
“Right answer,” he said. “Anyway, this isn’t the interesting part of the evening.”
“There’s something better than Legion?”
“A library,” he teased.
He pulled her past Lyra, who tipped her head at Kierse as she passed. She stood a step away from Quint, his father laughing boisterously at a table nearby. Quint eyed Lyra like he wasn’t sure whether he should kill her or kiss her.
But then they were past the crowds, through a bronze door, and into a colossal marble rotunda. “Whoa,” she whispered.
He smirked. “Not this.”
They passed through another door and into the press of the crowd once more as she looked up and all around her. She had seen photos of the Morgan when doing her research. She’d downloaded the floor plan and memorized all the entrances and exits. She’d even cased the building a few times but opted out of paying an entrance fee. Enough other team members were inside to guarantee this would work. That was the benefit of a team.
But now she regretted it. She could have stood in this library all day. It was not unlike the one that she got to stay in at Graves’s brownstone. Though this was much more ostentatious and a little gaudy. But with thousands of books on the shelves, it was impossible not to be impressed by the scale.
“Isn’t it remarkable?” Graves asked, his voice slow and certain, but his eyes utterly covetous. “The volumes deserved to be housed in a real library. A perfect place to do business. There’s even a steel vault in the study.”