Vespers Rising (The 39 Clues #11)(14)

“Indeed? Leaving you all alone?”

“I’m sure they’ll be back soon,” she lied, “with the priest and the town elders and a good number of townsfolk. Gideon was well loved by your people.”

Lord Vesper tensed, and Olivia knew he understood her meaning. Vesper might have many servants and allies around the world, but he was not well loved by his own people. If word began spreading that Vesper had a hand in Gideon’s death, killing a man the peasants believed was a saint, working to free them from the plague …

“I see.” Vesper backed up a step. He looked down at Gideon’s body, and his nose wrinkled with distaste. Then he froze. Vesper had noticed the ring.

“A beautiful trinket,” he mused. “It looks different somehow….”

“A token of my love to Gideon,” Olivia said as casually as she could manage. “An heirloom of my family.”

“Will he be buried with it?”

Olivia felt the moment’s importance, as if she were poised on the edge of a knife. Generations of Cahills — the future of the world itself — might be shaped by what she said and did next.

She tugged the ring off her husband’s finger and thrust it toward Lord Vesper. “Do you want it, my lord? My wedding token to Gideon? Would you deprive me of that, too? Go on, then. Take it!”

Vesper’s lip curled. He stepped away, immediately losing interest.

As Olivia had hoped: Anything freely given couldn’t be worth much to a man like Damien Vesper. And a token of love? Worse than useless. He was a predator, a hunter by nature.

“There is no need to search the ruins,” he decided. “Nothing could have survived.”

“Because you were here when the laboratory exploded,” Olivia guessed. “You saw it yourself.”

Vesper smiled coldly. “We’ll leave you to your grief, madam.”

Olivia eased Gideon’s head off her lap. She stood, clenching her fists. “You’ll do more than that, my lord. You’ll leave this island, and you’ll never come back.”

The guards frowned, obviously confused. Had a ragged, soot-covered woman just ordered Lord Vesper to leave?

“This is Cahill land,” Olivia said. “Given by royal charter. You are a guest here, but no longer. Leave now, my lord. I must bury my husband.”

Vesper stared at her, his knuckles white on the pommel of his sword. Olivia met his eyes and let him know that she — a woman, a grieving wife and mother — was more dangerous right now than any weapon he could ever create. She would get her way, or she would destroy him.

One dangerous predator to another, Lord Vesper seemed to understand her. He nodded, his cold eyes boring into hers.

“Very well,” he decided. “There is nothing left here worthy of my attention, at any rate. But, madam, I am still the lord of these lands. I will keep my eye on you and your family. If I find you have deceived me, if I come to suspect that you have hidden anything from me —”

“A widow and her children?” Olivia asked, feigning amazement. “How could we hide something from the eyes of Lord Vesper?”

Vesper wavered, perhaps catching a whiff of her sarcasm, but his pride won out. “Indeed,” he muttered. “Remember me, madam. For I will remember you.”

He turned and left, his guards falling in behind him.

Olivia did not relax until they reached the docks in the distance. She watched as the guards began preparing the lord’s boat for crossing.

She turned to the ruins of her family house, the burned garden, and the dining table sitting in the fields, the only part of her old life left unscathed.

She looked down at her husband’s pale face. No one would help her bury him, but she would manage. She would lay him to rest in the same graveyard where Cahills had been buried for generations.

Olivia might not be ladylike, young, or beautiful. She might not warrant a second look from a man like Lord Vesper, but she was strong. She could handle a shovel as well as a dagger or a cooking fire.

She slipped Gideon’s gold ring on her finger, though it was much too big. She would need a chain to put it around her neck, she decided.

“I will keep it safe, Gideon,” she promised. “Vesper will never have it.”

Whatever Lord Vesper was hunting, he wouldn’t succeed — not as long as Olivia Cahill drew breath. And she had a more important goal to keep her going. She must find a way to bring her children back.

“Some day, Gideon,” she swore, “our family will sit again around this dining table. We will come together.”

She glanced up as the morning sun illuminated the cliffs. Near the top was the cave where Gideon had proposed to her, and where Gideon’s great ancestor, Madeleine the Matriarch, had surveyed the island and claimed it for her own.

Olivia rested her hand on her belly, though she could not feel the child kicking yet.

“I will name you Madeleine,” she said. “You and I will preserve this place and bring our family back together.”

Olivia kissed her husband’s golden ring. She would keep the ring a secret, next to her heart, for the rest of her life.

She must be strong. She needed no serum for that. She only needed her faith in her family. Someday, the Cahills would reunite. No one, not even Lord Damien Vesper, would stop her from succeeding.

She picked up a shovel from the garden and went to dig her husband’s grave.