No frakking way.
Ambrose did not just speak to me.
I wasn’t standing on the precipice of death. There was no leeway here, but there was magic. Maybe, for him, enough of one overrode the other.
A tickle in the back of my mind, more Ambrose’s usual style of communication, prompted me to shut my eyes.
A familiar sigil flashed in pure light against the darkness of my eyelids, searing my retinas as if I had been staring into the sun. The design was one we had used before, an obfuscation sigil, but as soon as he was certain I understood, he altered one bit with a splash of color.
Confident I would recall the tweak, I palmed the modified pen in my pocket and opened my eyes. “This will keep our footsteps silent?”
The bright design faded into a simple word.
Yes.
But there was more, teasing the edge of my understanding. “And…our voices?”
Yes.
Again, I experienced the sensation of more tickling my thoughts. “Until we’re seen?”
Yes.
A sigil designed to mute you would help if you could be seen, so that worked for me.
With the design fresh in mind, I drew the sigil onto the backs of everyone’s hands, including mine. Before I gave the word to test it, Remy had already started hopping up and down the stairs, shaking her butt, and singing—badly—at the top of her lungs.
“Thank the goddess that worked.” I wiped sweat from my brow. “Otherwise, we would be in—”
Busy amusing herself, Remy ranged ahead of us for several flights before skittering back with a curse.
“I see them.” She bumped into me. “Maybe five flights down.”
That didn’t leave us much time to hide before they were on us, and they held the home-field advantage.
“These tombs are all marked.” I scanned the level to either side. “We need to go lower.”
“You aren’t serious.” She made a face. “You want us to hide in an unmarked tomb?”
“I’m open to suggestions if you’ve got a better idea.”
“Will that work?” Midas stared at his hand. “Will the sigils protect us from discovery?”
“There’s only one way to find out.” I tugged on his wrist to get him moving again. “Hurry, Goldie.”
A jolt went through him, and his pace slowed. “You haven’t called me that in a long time.”
“I don’t know why I did it.” I frowned back at him. “It just popped out of my mouth.”
Insulting him had been my hobby when we first met, I admit, but I put that behind me as we grew closer. That I had reverted told me I was more freaked out by his sudden appearance than I wanted to admit.
Argh.
Forget BFF jewelry. I owed my paranoia an engagement ring.
But it couldn’t have mine.
The diversion at the warehouse might have been that—a diversion. But I could have been wrong about the target. The coven might have used Midas’s likeness to nudge me on, to guide me into danger, to get me out of their hair.
But he knew about the Goldie thing. That was a Midas and me thing. An us thing. It was a point in his favor.
Cradling his cheek in my hand, I searched his face, desperate to be convinced. “Why did you risk it?”
A brittle smile tipped his lips. “I couldn’t let you go without me.”
Tightness around his eyes hinted at a bigger reason, but a warning hung there too, one I couldn’t read.
“Midas?”
“Bishop texted me after you left.” He leaned in, and his breath warmed my cheeks. “I had to act based on his intel.”
A cold lump formed in my gut. “What did he—?”
“Not here,” he whispered. “Not now.”
“Okay.” Thumb stroking his cheek, I couldn’t stop touching him. “How did you know you would survive?”
“Ambrose is bonded to me through you.” He pressed a kiss into my palm. “There was no guarantee he could protect us both, but I had to try.”
His quiet answer slammed on my mental breaks, and I skidded into a tailspin of indecision.
There hadn’t been time between when we left Midas and when he located me outside the bay doors for the coven to perform a dark rite on him. He didn’t smell like black magic either.
The mate bond would have told me if Midas had died. Failing that, Ambrose would have enlightened me. Therefore, Midas was not dead. He wasn’t a suit ready to hang in this grisly closet. That meant the coven had no access to his memories.
Call it a charm, or call it a glamour. No matter how fancy the trick, it was just an illusion. No one on Team Evil knew about the bond. Without cracking his head open and sifting through our prior conversations, they had no means of divining the bizarre nature of our three-way entanglement.
Dybbuks were too rare for people to know much about them. They were hunted and killed as soon as they were identified. As they tended to prioritize murder above romance, I had found no information on the mating habits of dybbuk in any book I had ever read on the topic. Neither had Linus. Therefore, the coven couldn’t know either.
That meant…this really was Midas.
“I was an idiot.” I cringed at how I had treated him. “I should have believed you.”
“You were being smart.” He slid his fingers into my hair. “I’m glad you didn’t trust me on sight.”
The mate bond wasn’t the same as a photo ID. I knew that. I just wished, in addition to a soul-deep connection to another person, it came with flashing lights or something.
“There,” Remy butted in on my epiphany to point out a row of unfinished tombs. “Two are open.”
She bolted for the first one, but she didn’t get far. It was more of an alcove. Unfinished. Or locked. Hard to tell from this angle.
“I can make this work,” she promised when she read my worry. “You two take the bigger one.”
Mashing her back against the wall, she did her best to let the shadows conceal her. That left one vacancy the next row up on the end. She was right. It did look bigger, but not by much.
Whatever soul had lived there, it must have been taken out of commission. The rune above its doorway was scratched out with a rake of massive claws. I worried that meant it would be sealed, but slight pressure from my fingertips nudged open the stone door.
The interior was three feet wide and three feet deep. I could stand without bumping my head, so I put the ceiling at a hair less than six feet. It would be cozy with a man Midas’s size, and I didn’t mind an excuse to plaster myself against him.
Twisting to fit myself into the corner, I made as much room for him as possible, sucking in my breath when he pressed fully against me. He got the door shut behind him and scooted back to give me room.
“The intel I mentioned?” He wasted no time updating me now that we were alone. “The hearts are missing.”
The hearts?
Missing?
Frakking cheese on frakking crackers.
This could not be happening.
“How is that possible?” I rubbed the fabric of his shirt between my fingers, more proof this was him, that he was real, that he had survived his fraught entrance to the archive. “No one knows where Bishop hid them.”
“He brought them to OPA HQ after the coven arrived in the city in numbers. He believed it was the most secure location.” He took care with his next words. “They were already there when Bishop left us in the closet.”