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)
“Can I help you?”
He looked around Graves to glare at Kierse. “You did this. I know you did.”
“Did what?” Kierse asked, hoping she sounded more concerned than smug. “What’s going on?”
He glanced between them. “You know perfectly well.”
“Sir, you will need to take your seat,” the security guard said again. “Or we will have to dismiss you from the convocation at this point.”
“Me?” Amberdash said, sneering down at the guard. “They are the ones disrupting the peace.”
Graves sighed as if inconvenienced. “This whole thing has been a nightmare.”
“We’re so sorry, sir,” the guard said to Graves. “We’ll get it under control to begin discussions.”
Graves buttoned his suit coat and offered Kierse his hand. “We’ve been insulted enough. I thought you had a policy about disruptions.”
The guard sighed. “Everyone is tense. If you would just return to your seat…”
“This isn’t over,” Amberdash snarled.
Graves squeezed her hand and gestured for her to exit the row. “We don’t have to hear about this anymore. Let’s leave the convocation to their discussions.”
Kierse headed out, head held high. Graves grasped her hand again as soon as they were through the door with multiple apologies from the security team. They shared a secret smile as they exited to the main circular drive.
The air was chilly and crisp. Halloween was a thinly veiled time of the year and the added cold that promised snow would soon arrive. As they crossed the sidewalk to the drive, Graves’s season came full tilt into prominence.
Only instead of going down to the garage and taking the car that Graves had stashed there earlier in the day, a black van was waiting. Edgar rolled down the window.
“Sir, I couldn’t get ahold of you. Communication was down. Lyra never showed for the handoff.”
“Lyra said she did make the handoff,” Graves said, his voice like steel. “Where were you?”
“In the garage waiting for your signal.”
“Fuck,” Graves said, turning back to the assembly building like it had the answers he needed.
“What van did she put it in if not ours?” Kierse asked in horror.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry, sir,” Edgar said. “I waited until I heard from you, but I only got confirmation a few minutes ago.”
Graves ran a frustrated hand back through his hair. They’d had the stone in their possession. It had been transferred perfectly. Lyra walked it right out of the convocation and secured it in the van.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Graves said.
And then Niamh dashed out of the exit, clutching her phone in her hand. “We have a problem.”
“Tell me about it,” Kierse spat. “The stone is gone.”
“Bigger problem.”
Niamh held up her phone, which showed a perimeter alert on the Druid headquarters.
“I don’t understand.”
Graves sighed. “Lorcan is in Brooklyn.”
“He’s infiltrating the Druids. We need to get there now.”
Interlude
Maureen
“Sir, the stone is secured,” Maureen said into her phone as she navigated the van out of the security checkpoint and south toward Brooklyn.
“Good work, Maureen,” Lorcan said. “We’re poised at the entrance to headquarters. Dermot is going to let us inside. Provide backup if we have any dissention.”
“Do you expect to have any?” Maureen asked.
“No,” Lorcan said flatly.
Maureen nodded. There he was. Her king, ready to sit back down on his throne and reclaim his titles and lands and people. The only rightful ruler of the Druids. He who would never work with their mortal enemy to steal their own artifacts. Niamh had this coming.
Not that she could exactly blame her after everything that happened in the last year with Kierse. Maureen liked Kierse. She thought she was smart, resourceful, and even funny. She seemed a perfect match for Lorcan in every way. They had been made for each other, after all. It made no sense that she would choose Graves. That Lorcan would be forced to endure his enemy to get to his chuisle mo chroí.
The name alone was sacred.
The idea that someone could come between them was heresy.
The fact that she wouldn’t choose him back was unthinkable.
Maureen wasn’t sexually or romantically attracted to another soul. She never had been. And still she would have agreed to the bond if it had come to her. It was her duty. Her life.
So she understood when Lorcan said that Graves had turned her mind. That Graves would try to wipe the bond. That he was going to do the thing he had always done. Because why else would Kierse make this choice?
“I’ll report in when I’m close,” Maureen told her king.
“Excellent.”
The line went dead in her hand, and she tossed the phone onto the dash.
She could just imagine Graves’s face when he realized they had outsmarted him again. The man who prided himself on being knowledge. Such a bullshit response to his magic, which was really less knowledge and more some depraved sort of mind reading and mind wiping. It had never been used in the pursuit of knowledge despite the library he owned. He was no better than when Lorcan had chased him from Ireland all those years earlier.