Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(39)

“If you want to know more,” he said, “call me.”

“Smooth,” she said. “Well done.”

He smiled his straight-teeth corporate smile at her again.

“Declan.”

He was gone. Other viewers came to take his place, but Jordan found she kept looking at that business card. LYNCH.

Get your head in the game, Jordan, she told herself. Tonight’s about something bigger than that.

The phone rang. It was Hennessy. Jordan’s heart revved way up as she picked it up.

“Someone bought it,” Hennessy said. “Just now.”

“What?”

“Someone bought it. Right before I got there. It’s gone.”

Of all the paintings for sale under this roof. After all this time tracking it. Someone else had gotten to The Dark Lady first.

Jordan’s stomach dropped out. “Do we know who?”

“It’s not like we could roll up and ask that fucking bum nugget,” Hennessy said. “But Brooklyn saw the mark. We’re gonna see if we can find him before he leaves. Then, like, assess the goddamn situation.”

Jordan was already scraping her tubes of paint into her bag and looking around for someone holding a parcel of the correct size. “What’s the buyer look like?”

“Young. Twenties. Dark hair, blue eyes. Brooklyn said he had full on blue eyes.”

Dark hair. Blue eyes. Jordan looked at that business card: LYNCH.

Crumbs.

She jumped to her feet, but Declan Lynch was long gone.





21

The brothers Lynch were back in the mirrored elevator, the sounds of the library left behind, replaced with the dead-air silence of the descending elevator car. The quiet was punctuated only by the muffled ding of it marking off floors. Ronan’s body still felt revved up from the truth of Bryde, the shock of seeing his mother’s face, the charge of the completed deal, the heat of Declan’s anger. His older brother still looked pissed. More pissed than he’d been in months.

“I can’t believe you,” Declan said. “I brought you here. I trusted you.”

“What’s the big deal?” Ronan demanded. Ding. “People recognized your face all over this place.”

“They didn’t enter my name into a log for some syndicate to monitor,” Declan said.

“Is that what Boudicca is?”

Declan shrugged. “Did you see that guy’s face when he said it? That’s called fear, Ronan, and you might try getting some.”

Declan had no idea.

Ding.

“Did you know it was going to be a painting of Mom?” It was a peculiar likeness. Aurora’s head, on someone else’s body. Aurora would never stand like that, petulant and challenging. Even her face was a little different than Ronan remembered, the features more acute, more spoiling for battle, than Aurora’s had ever been in real life. It was possible it wasn’t a very good portrait, he supposed. But it was also possible there was a side of his mother he hadn’t known.

Before tonight he would’ve denied that possibility, but at the moment, almost anything felt possible.

Declan had begun to peck at his phone, his peculiar thumb and forefinger technique. “I had a guess.”

“What else do you know that you haven’t told me?”

Ding.

The elevator door opened. It was not the ground floor. It was the third floor, the one with the masks. A woman waited on the other side, hands in the pockets of a gray bomber jacket. First Ronan saw the way she stood. Tense, coiled, a predator. Then he saw her hair: golden. Then her eyes: pretty, blue.

Cornflower, sky, baby, indigo, azure, sky.

For the second time that night, Ronan found himself looking directly at his dead mother, only this time she was in the flesh.

His brain was rejecting it—this doesn’t happen when you’re awake, it’s not what you think—

And she was just looking at him, staring at him, her gaze petulant, spoiling for battle, just like the portrait leaned against Declan’s legs. Then she looked at Declan, and she flinched.

None of them moved—not toward, not away—they just looked, looked, looked. Transfixed, like Matthew at the falls. Bespelled, lost. The brothers Lynch and their dead mother.

Then the elevator doors closed on Aurora.

Ronan was startled into action. “The door, Declan—”

Both slammed the door open button, but the elevator ignored them, already on its way down. Ronan mashed the second-floor button just in time, and the doors obediently opened. Ronan bolted into the hallway.

“Ronan—” Declan started, but Ronan was already gone.

He pounded down the hallway, leaping over a woman who’d bent to pick up her dropped bag. He swerved around a couple of men stepping out of a room. He hurdled over a tray, noticing in strange, heightened detail as he flew over it that it was set with an ornate, old-fashioned tea service, complete with a tiered sandwich tray.

He had to get to the third floor before that woman caught another elevator, before she moved.

He skidded to slow just before he got to the exit door at the end of the hall. Don’t be locked, he thought, and it wasn’t, and he was through it and hurling himself up the metal stairs in the stairwell. They clanged and roared like a steam machine as he took them two at a time. Here: the door for the third floor. Don’t be locked, he thought, and this one wasn’t, either, and he was through this, too, running back down the hall toward the elevators where she’d been.