“It was supposed to be me,” Brady translated. “It was promised to me.”
“What was? And promised by who?” Gigi asked, her mind going five thousand miles an hour. “The same person who sent you here? The one who gave youmyname?”
Without warning, Nora was on her feet, and Brady was flat on his back. Half a second later, Knox was down, too. And then Nora was gone. Just…gone.
Brady leapt up, blood dripping from his mouth, and bolted, clearing the door, leaping the railing.
“Stay put,” Knox ordered Gigi, as he took off after them.
Gigi did not stay put, but by the time she’d made it to the ground, she couldn’t even see Brady or Nora anymore. Knox was slowing to a stop forty or fifty yards away when Rohan and Savannah suddenly appeared. Savannah had something cradled in her arms, but Gigi couldn’t tell what.
Knox turned toward them, and he must have said something, because Rohan shot off like a well-muscled, British bullet. Savannah followed suit, and Gigi broke into a jog.Curse you, cardio.
Knox met her halfway, positioning himself firmly in her path.
“I’m not a little girl,” Gigi informed him. “And I’m not running away.” Nora’s words had stung. “And okay, maybe I’m not fast. Maybe I can’tfight and have no real physiological endurance to speak of. But if you can’t play hard, you play smart.”
“Define smart,” Knox said, pinning her with a look.
Gigi’s brain kicked into overdrive as she went back over the exchange between Brady and Nora. Not the way it had ended. NotIt was supposed to be me, it was promised to me. NotRun away, little girlorYou’d never survive, but the rest of it.
Gigi thought about Nora telling Brady that he knew nothing and that the wrong kind of nothing could be a death sentence for a man. She thought about Brady calling Nora on the fact that the history of Adelaide of Burgundy meant something to her.But the Thorp fleur-de-lis—that means far more.
“Which way to town?” Gigi asked Knox.
Knox narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Because once I win this argument,” Gigi told him, “and I will win, you’re taking me to the statue of Saint Adelaide, in front of the museum Brady said was marked by a Thorp fleur-de-lis.”
Chapter 26
GIGI
The Musée de St. Adelaide was a square building with Grecian columns. It didn’t take Gigi long, after darting up an impressive concrete staircase to get a better look at the building, to ascertain that all of those columns had been marked with the same fleur-de-lis from Calla’s necklace. Now that Brady had decomposed the symbol—at least partially—Gigi saw it in three parts.
A lily. Two omegas. And a point.After dwelling on that for a good, long moment, Gigi turned her attention to the statue of Saint Adelaide.
“You came. You saw.” Knox glared encouragingly at Gigi. “Now it’s time to leave.”
“Nora won’t,” Gigi pointed out. “She won’t leave until she gets what she came here for, and I’m starting to have some pretty compelling theories about what that might be.”
It’s not going to be you.
You’d never survive.
Run away, little girl.
“Inside.” Knox’s voice tore Gigi from her thoughts. His tone was the kind that was meant to be obeyed. Immediately.
Unfortunately for him, Gigi had never really been all that good at following directions, so instead, she turned around to look past Knox, half-expecting to see Nora, but at the bottom of the staircase, there was a man who looked to be in his fifties, flanked on either side by two twentysomethings. The younger guys were enormous, at least six feet five, built like linemen and clearly related to each other.
“Welcoming committee?” Gigi said under her breath.
Knox didn’t reply.
“I’d heard you were back in town.” The older man had a rich voice, his accent more pronounced than either Brady’s or Knox’s. He had long, black hair that was streaked silvery gray at the temples and wore it tied back, which made his features—including eyebrows that appeared to have been viciously plucked—look that much more severe. “Or more accurately, I heard you were hiding out in the bayou. Pity you chose to show your face here.”
For me, Gigi thought. Knox had come into town for her.