“You flatter me.”
I glanced up at the wooden sword mounted over the fireplace. It was old and crumbling, barely held together by some stained twine, but carefully preserved behind a glass case. Two thousand years ago, Geminus had gotten his start as a gladiator, one of the few ways for poor young men of the time to rise to fame and fortune. He was rumored to have been fearless, despite a seer prophesying that he would die on the arena sands. He hadn’t, instead winning the sword and his freedom after successfully defeating numerous opponents.
By all accounts, he’d been doing the same thing ever since.
“I don’t think so,” I said simply.
He laughed. “Strong enough but not stupid enough. No relic is worth that kind of trouble.”
“Not even if it gets you control of the Senate?”
“But I do not wish to control the Senate,” he told me easily. “Let them bicker and squabble and plot and plan. My interests lie elsewhere.”
“You expect my employer to believe that you just shrugged off what happened at the auction? Come on, Geminus. That’s not your style.”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Then what did you do?”
He sighed and kicked back against the wall, one foot propped up on the desk.
“After Cheung did his fiddle with the auction, I was . . . annoyed. It was obvious that he’d never intended to give the stone to anyone but Ming-de. I don’t like being played, so I had my servants to do some checking. They discovered who the sellers usually used for authentication. And fortunately for me, the little bastard was swimming in debt.”
“You’re talking about the luduan.”
“Yes. I offered him a deal. I’d pay his debts if he switched the rune for a fake when he examined it.”
“And once the fey found out and tracked him down?”
“That was his problem. But he could always deny it. There was no way anyone was going to know where, exactly, it went missing.”
“Why were you at Ray’s, if you already had a plan in place?”
This time, he didn’t budge. “I wanted to make sure he didn’t double-cross me. The stone was worth considerably more than I was paying on his debts. I didn’t trust him.”
“What happened?”
“My men and I surrounded the building, and the luduan went in. He was supposed to bring me the rune, but he never came back. I finally sent one of my boys in to check on things, and he found the luduan gone and Raymond screaming about a dead fey. I decided it might be prudent to leave at that point.”
“You’re telling me a luduan killed a fey warrior?”
“They’re both fey, and the guard might not have been expecting it.”
“If I were him, and I had something worth a king’s ransom, I’d have been expecting it.”
“Yet someone managed to do it.” He had a point there. “I don’t know if he killed the guard. I don’t know that he has the rune. I only know I don’t. You can tell your lady that.”
“I will. And she may even believe you; Claire’s the trusting type,” I said, standing up and tucking my card under a corner of his blotter. “Unfortunately, her family isn’t, and they’ll be here tomorrow. Knowing Caedmon, he may decide to find the rune in the most efficient way possible.”
“And what would that be?”
I shrugged. “Attack everyone who was at the auction and see who doesn’t die.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Five minutes later, I hit the sidewalk in front of Geminus’s building. Not literally, this time; he hadn’t thrown me out, but he also hadn’t admitted a damn thing. Leaving me hours away from the trial and fresh out of ideas.
Two silent shadows peeled off the bricks and followed me as I headed down the street. They didn’t say anything, including asking about what had happened upstairs. Of course, my cursing had probably already told them it wasn’t good.
I leaned against the side of a building a few blocks over and lit the crumpled old joint I found in my jacket. Sucking in a long breath, I held it for a second before letting it out. Drugs don’t do a lot for me thanks to my revved-up metabolism, but they’re better than nothing. And this was excellent weed.
After a moment the wave hit, lifting my bones away from one another and loosening the joints in sequence—neck, shoulders, wrists, fingers—leaving me feeling like I was floating on the tide. The tension washed out of me from spine to fingertips before coursing away, leaving me calmer, if not any happier.
Not that I needed to be calmer. That little scene with Geminus had disturbed me, but probably not for the reason he’d intended. It wasn’t the first time I’d been assaulted; it was, however, one of only two times in my life I could remember really wanting to fall into a dhampir rage and being unable to do so.