Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(77)

I hold my breath and take a corner. The rug starts to disintegrate beneath my hands, but I keep pulling and pulling until I can see the stone floor give way to wooden planks. It used to be a door, I can tell, and I think about the tunnels that crisscross the city. Many caved in ages ago, filled with rocks and dirt and debris. There’s not a doubt in my mind this used to be one of them.

Now the trapdoor is nailed shut, and the wood is still solid.

I know I should wait for Dominic. We need tools and more light—workers and archaeologists. This is history that I’m unearthing, and even though I know that I should wait, I can’t. This secret is like the telltale heart, ticking beneath the floor of this room, and I have to make it stop.

Iron sconces are set throughout the room. On the ceiling, you can actually see the soot and scars from hundreds of years of fires that burned through the night. But the torches are cold now, and when I reach for one, I have to use all my strength to jerk it free—but it comes off, dirty and dusty in my hands.

Heavy.

The iron is solid, and I swing as hard as I can, sending it crashing into the wooden planks that fill that section of the floor. I swing again and again and again, until wood splinters and dust scatters.

I’m breathing too hard, coughing and gagging, but I can’t stop until the old door breaks and I’m able to reach down and pull it open, watch as the narrow beam of light from the window shines onto four ancient bundles that lie, resting in the shallow space below.

A part of me wants to ease forward and pull back the ancient cloth, look down at the remains just to be sure. Another part of me wants to turn and run from this dark place, go just as fast and as far as I can.

But all I can manage to do is sing.

“‘Hush, little princess, wait and see. No one’s gonna know that you are me.’”

And then I hear it, a shuffling behind me. I start to turn, expecting to see Thomas and Dominic, but instead a pain shoots through me, jarring me forward.

I double over and I sway, but I see nothing but stars.

When I wake up, I can’t be sure that I’m not dreaming.

At first, I think I’m back in the little cabin on the island. That the thumps and thuds I keep hearing are the sounds of Alexei and my brother fighting and training in the cool ocean air.

But the floor beneath me is too cold and too hard. In spite of the mind-numbing pain that is reverberating through my head, I desperately want to sneeze. But as I try to push myself upright it’s all I can do not to vomit, not to sway and sink back to the floor again. I’ve known pain like this only once in my life, and that was when I was twelve and jumped off the wall.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that, this time, my foolishness really should kill me.

But worse than the pain and the nausea and the confusion is the fact that I’m almost certain I smell smoke.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Ann sounds so calm and so at ease as she walks around the room. There’s a gun in her hand, though, and she’s lit all of the old-fashioned torches. Storm clouds must have covered the sun, because flickering fire is the only light and the room smells like smoke and death.

“You found them, Grace.” She stops and looks down into the shallow grave where my ancestors lay, waiting. “I’ve lived here for eighteen years, and I never found them. Can you believe it? I feel like a fool. I feel like … it is a shame, really.”

“What’s a shame?” I ask, because I don’t know what else to do.

“It’s a shame that now they have to disappear again. Forever.”

I push myself upright, ignoring the white-hot pain that still shoots inside my head.

“Funny, I didn’t even know this room was here,” the princess says as she walks around the room’s perimeter. “But I guess no one did, did they? After a century or two I suppose it’s easy for things to get forgotten. Even a room that seems to be used mainly for the storage of lamp fuel.”

That’s the smell, I realize. Something more powerful and pungent than gasoline, and a new terror shoots through me. One of the big barrels has tipped over. A hole has been punched in the side and liquid is seeping out, running across the floor and then pooling in the shallow grave.

“What are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to burn the bodies,” Ann says, and then she laughs. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to die as well.”

Maybe it’s that she looks like Karina.

Maybe it’s that she sounds like me.

But it’s more clear than ever that Ann’s not well. That this isn’t about bloodlines and legacies and history anymore. It might have started that way, but now it is about power and some misguided belief that two hundred years later we can make it right.

She is a woman obsessed, and I wonder about the weight of carrying this kind of secret—this responsibility. As a child, Ann decided to right a two-hundred-year-old wrong, and for most of her adult life she thought she’d succeeded. She’d thought her son was the answer. And then she learned that she was wrong. That—if anything—her son was at risk.

I know how the human mind can be—how it’s both wonderfully strong and terribly frail, and how, if necessary, a person can rewrite history, even if only for themselves.

Ann has done that. She’s given her life to this cause and now …