“A little more detail,” she pressed.
“Well, we’d been sort of seeing each other off and on, but things really heated up after we came to Khalijji. We came here a year ago to break into the palace and steal some statues,” he said. At Gwenneth’s dirty look, he said, “What? It’s what we do. It’s what you used to do, so don’t act all superior.”
“And then I quit.” She stared at him stonily.
“Too bad. You were great at it.” Corran shrugged easily. “Rhonny and I liked it so much here, we hung out for a couple of months. Then things changed. She suddenly started acting concerned about those street urchins, the gang from the shanty town. I suggested to her that we could take them under our wing, and she seemed all happy, and then I said we could teach them the tricks of the trade and make them as good as we were, really top-level, and for some reason she got really angry with me.” He paused and took a sip of his coffee, staring into space.
“Go on.” Gwenneth kicked him under the table, none too gently. He winced again, pulling his legs back out of her reach.
“Out of the blue, she said we should just quit and get normal jobs.” He looked bewildered. “I said no, never. This is all I know, and I couldn’t think of screwing Henri over like that. He took me in when I was selling myself to tourists for a crust of bread.”
“How exactly would it be screwing him over? We’ve made him an enormous amount of money over the years. He always made us feel obligated to him, like he’d saved our lives, but that’s crap,” Gwenneth said heatedly. “He plucked us out of one hell and dropped us into another. We were the ones running around risking life in prison while he sat back and took three-quarters of the profits. We bought him his damned mansion and his fancy cars and fancy clothes. We owe him nothing.”
“That’s pretty much what Rhonny said,” he sighed. “After our argument, she cut me dead. We flew back to the States the next day, and then she packed up and moved out of her flat and ditched her phone and shut down her email account, and I haven’t seen her since. I would have thought she’d vanished from the face of the Earth, except from time to time I’d hear rumors about her accepting assignments from Henri. Other than that, it was radio silence.”
“Did she accept those assignments, though? Was it her?” Tyler said suddenly. “I mean, how would you know it was her on those jobs?”
“What do you mean?” Corran tilted his head quizzically.
“Oh god.” A look of shock and understanding dawned on Gwenneth’s face. “All those assignments that were screwed up – that only started after she disappeared. The dumb mistakes she supposedly made, the people who were murdered. That’s not Rhonwen, Corran, you know that. It’s not her style. She’s not a fuckup and she doesn’t hurt people. Who does that sound like?”
He stared at her, light dawning on him. “Nadette.”
“Yes.” She nodded vigorously, enormous relief washing over her. Her sister wasn’t a killer; she’d known it all along. “My sister really did quit. She really disappeared. Nadette accepted those assignments in her place and pretended to be her.”
She frowned. “There was physical evidence left at the scenes of the murders. Her hair. Nadette had been friends with her for years; she’d have been able to grab some hair from Rhonny’s hairbrush and use it to frame her.”
Corran flashed a sudden look of alarm at her. “What if she’s dead? What if Nadette killed her?”
“No,” Gwenneth said quickly, her stomach lurching. “I’d know. She’s my twin. If she were gone, I’d feel it. I’d know. I’m sure of it. She’s just gone off the grid, like I did.”
“I hope you’re right.” He didn’t look as certain as she was.
She looked at him accusingly. “You had an affair with Nadette, didn’t you? That’s why she’s so jealous and bitter.”
“Not an affair, for god’s sake. It was once. One night.” He winced. “And it was before I ever got involved with your sister. And I accidentally called out your sister’s name when I was in bed with Nadette, and she got pissed off with me and screamed out, “If you want to be with her so much, why don’t you?” And she stomped out.” He shuddered at the memory.
“So after Rhonwen quit, Nadette pretended to be her, accepting all those assignments. How would she get away with that?” Tyler wondered.
“Well, I hadn’t seen Rhonwen since she broke things off with me, so it’s not like it would have come up in conversation,” Corran said, pondering. “I had assumed that she just was avoiding me, but let’s say she told Nadette she’d quit and was leaving the group. And Nadette didn’t tell anyone else. You know Nadette always operated as Henri’s right-hand man, so to speak, handling all the assignments. Hell, with Henri’s health declining, the rest of the group has barely spoken to him in the last couple of years.”
“His health is declining?” Gwenneth said, surprised. “I never heard anything about that through the grapevine.”
Corran nodded. “He did his best to make sure word didn’t get out, but those of us in the group knew. His three-pack-a-day habit finally caught up with him. He wears an oxygen tank and lets Nadette run the business end of things almost exclusively these days.”
Gwenneth nodded. Everything was making sense now. “She just took all the jobs that were meant for Rhonwen. Henri wouldn’t have bothered to question his niece. He might not even have known that the jobs were getting screwed up.”
“Why would Nadette have accepted a job to steal the Eye and not completed it, though?” Tyler asked.
Corran frowned in thought. “She’s always been jealous of Rhonwen. She wanted to destroy her. You know how much she hates it when anyone outshines her. So Nadette took several assignments on Rhonny’s behalf and screwed them up royally; she was already ruining Rhonny’s reputation in the thieving community. This would have been the coup de grace. But she miscalculated. She thought the Shadow Lord would only go after Rhonny, but he put the kill order out on all of us, including her, so she had no choice but to try to fix things.”
“And so when I contacted her pretending to be my sister and asked her to help me complete the job, she jumped at the chance.” Gwenneth nodded her understanding.
“But…wouldn’t Nadette be afraid that Rhonwen would know she’d set her up?” Tyler asked.
“Not necessarily,” Gwenneth said. “If I really had been Rhonwen, I would have known that somebody had set me up, but I couldn’t have been sure it was Nadette or Henri. I’d have come here and tried to investigate, tried to figure out who had done it. And Nadette must have planned on killing me as soon as we’d successfully stolen the Eye. She kept trying to get me to meet up with her alone, remember?”
“But now she’s been arrested, which complicates things,” Tyler pointed out. “How did the police know to arrest her, anyway?”
“I’m not clear on that,” Corran said. “I have a Thieves Guild connection here who has a police sergeant on his payroll. He was the one who told me that she’d told the police chief about the meetup at the park.”
“So where does this leave us? We’re still stuck here.” Gwenneth leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee.
“Yes, and now the police are going to be looking for me too,” Corran said gloomily. “And by the way, I haven’t been able to find out who the client was who wanted the Eye stolen, and Nadette was the one who took the assignment, and now she’s screwed us all over she’s certainly not going to talk.”
“I have a thought,” Tyler said.
“What’s that?” Corran didn’t look particularly hopeful.
“We may need some help from the priestesses for this.”
“They won’t help,” Gwenneth protested. “You said yourself that they never get involved in politics.”
“But they do care deeply about their sacred mission to help infertile couples conceive. Trust me on this, I think they’re going to want to help us.” He gave Corran a look of annoyance. “You may as well come with us.”
Chapter Sixteen
“This is dreadful. I cannot believe it.” Belij shook her head unhappily, dismay rippling over her handsome features. She sat in a high-backed, throne-like chair, clenching her fists so hard her knuckles were white. There were a dozen priestesses in the room of the temple known as the Great Room, fluttering their hands, pacing the floor. They didn’t know what to do with themselves.
Gwenneth, Tyler and Corran sat on hand-carved wooden chairs, facing them. Tyler had to convince Belij that he was telling the truth. Everything depended on it.
“Think about it,” Tyler said. “Think about all these couples coming to you now. Many, many more couples than before. Why? Because the island’s fertility magic is weakening. Failing. Just like everything else here is failing.”
“It is true,” one of the priestesses said, nodding. “Even when they come to us, it is taking them longer than it should to conceive. Who knows how long even our magic will suffice?”
Belij’s coppery skin had taken on an unhealthy pallor. Her air of quiet strength and command had vanished, leaving her looking lost and distressed. She couldn’t meet Tyler’s eyes. He was telling her things she desperately didn’t want to hear – but he had no choice.
“Everything started going wrong at once,” Tyler continued relentlessly. “At the same time that the king vanished from the public eye, the economy failed, and the fertility magic began to wane.”
“You really believe that the Witch Doctor and the Police Chief sold the Eye of the Jaguar and replaced it with a replica.” Belij shook her head in an attempt to deny it.
“Yes. Years ago. And then they hired thieves to steal the crown right before the Jubilee, because they wanted to hide the deception,” Tyler said. “On the day of the Jubilee, the crown is taken from its display case and examined by the Island Council before being passed off to the king, right? So the Island Council would have spotted the fakery, and there would have been an outcry, and the Witch Doctor would have been exposed. If the crown was stolen, then everybody would be searching for the thieves, and nobody would know what the Witch Doctor and the Police Chief had done.”
“What monsters would steal our sacred national treasure like that?” Belij held her palms up and importuned the heavens.
“The worst kind of monsters,” Corran said, keeping a straight face. “Terrible, terrible monsters.”
Tyler shot him a look of annoyance, and Corran returned a wide-eyed look of scandalized innocence.
“And you feel that if you can gain entry to the palace, you will be able to track down the crown’s whereabouts.”
Tyler nodded. “Yes. We need access to Wife Number One. She has also been largely absent from public view, but she was seen on the day of the Jubilee – with guards standing near her at all times.”
Corran jumped in. “Yes. Wife Number Two was definitely very chummy with the Witch Doctor. You could pick up on the vibes. Wife Number One was putting on a good show, but you could tell there was severe tension there under the surface; something was troubling her.”
“How can you be so sure?” Belij asked him. “Did you question her?”
“No, but a large part of my livelihood depends on reading people and their emotions.” At Belij’s quizzical glance, he added smoothly, “I’m a therapist.”
He hadn’t lost his knack for lying under pressure, Gwenneth thought.
“We think she’s being coerced somehow,” Tyler continued, “and she’s not in on the whole scheme. If we could get private access to her, we’d at least have a hope of finding out what’s going on. And I don’t know anyone else who could get away with just strolling into the palace uninvited, much less anyone who’d be able to get access to any person in there.”
Nobody refused the High Priestess of GuRa – and nobody had reason to suspect that she would be interfering with the Witch Doctor’s political coup.
Belij closed her eyes and stood there with her hands folded together and her lips moving for what felt like a very long time, murmuring in a voice too low to hear. Finally she nodded in acceptance, although she still looked as if she’d tasted something very sour. She stood up straighter, and the strength seemed to flow back into her as she made her decision. “Very well. I know that you are truthful; I can feel it in my heart of hearts. I can get you into the palace,” she said to Gwenneth.
Tyler waved at her to get her attention. “And me, of course.”
“Only women are priestesses. There is no way I could get a man into the palace.” She shook her head, standing up and smoothing out her gown.
“I could pose as a bodyguard,” he argued.
Belij looked at him with derision. “We don’t ever use bodyguards. We don’t need them,” she said. When he tried to argue, she cut him off. “If we walked in there with a man, it would attract attention and suspicion.”
“But it’s too dangerous for you to go alone,” Tyler protested to Gwenneth. Gwenneth stood up too, shooting him a reproving look.
“I have done much more dangerous jobs than this. I will be with the priestesses; I’ll be fine,” she said reprovingly.
When he started to protest, she took a step closer to him and put her hand on his arm. He felt a delicious sizzle of heat wash through him, the same way it always did when she touched him.
“Tyler, I must and I will do this. Please don’t try to stop me. There is more at stake here than just you and me,” she said. She cast a quick glance at Belij. They hadn’t told the priestesses everything; they couldn’t very well tell them that she had originally come to the island to steal the crown. Instead, Tyler had told them about his job as a security consultant. Then he’d spun a tale about how he’d started investigating on his own when he heard about the island’s growing misfortunes, and that investigation had led him to interview members of the Thieves Guild.
Gwenneth turned and followed Belij out of the room without giving him a backward glance. Corran sat there with his arms folded, frowning, but he didn’t seem too perturbed. Of course not ; it wasn’t his fated mate who was marching off into a lair of serpents.
Anger and helplessness swirled inside him. She was his. He should be there by her side to protect her, always – but arguing with her would be useless. He’d already experienced the steel backbone underneath that velvety coat of hers. Forbidding her would accomplish nothing.
* * *
The morning sun gleamed off the gilded turrets and lacy spires of the castle. Lines of soldiers in blue uniforms trimmed with gold stood at rigid attention on either side of the crushed gravel pathway that led to the broad marble front steps, their bayoneted weapons resting on their shoulders.
Gwenneth walked with a dozen other priestesses who trailed behind Belij. She was dressed in an orange tunic that apparently indicated she was in the fifth year of her training. Her skin was darkened to match their skin tone, and she wore a wig to mimic their long, dark, streaming hair. They were all barefoot.
They were greeted by a lieutenant colonel who marched smartly up to them and saluted Belij. She nodded in return.
“Number One Wife has summoned us,” she informed him. “You will take us to her at once.”
“Why did she wish to speak to you, Blessed One?”
“The affairs of GuRa are not your concern, and it is not your place to know.” She had the tone of an angry schoolmarm, and he wilted visibly.
“She said nothing of this to me.” His tone was conciliatory, but he looked alarmed. So, access to Wife Number One was being strictly limited, Gwenneth thought to herself.
“You question me?” A hint of steel in Belij’s voice made him wince. She gave a quick glance in the general region of his crotch, and he stepped back quickly, his hand instinctively dropping to protect it. Gwenneth had to struggle not to laugh at the alarm in his eyes.
“No, no, of course not,” he wheedled. “Please, Honored Priestess. Enter the palace and rest in comfort while I summon the Number One Wife.”
They were led inside, through rooms with soaring ceilings and paint
ed friezes on the walls, the marble floors cool beneath their feet. They threaded through a maze of hallways until they reached a drawing room with twenty-foot-high windows and thick, lush carpet.
The lieutenant colonel clapped his hands imperiously at several ladies-in-waiting who had hurried after them when they entered. “Bring refreshments for our honored guests,” he said. “I will return shortly.”
“No,” Belij said loudly. She turned her attention to the ladies. “We need no refreshments. I need you to summon the Number One Wife to this room at once. We are here for the meeting that she requested, and my time is quite precious. And you, my dear Lieutenant Colonel, you will remain here with us and we will talk about your family.”
He opened his mouth, shut it again, then nodded at the ladies in waiting, clearly unhappy.
Gwenneth turned away and permitted herself a small smile of triumph as the ladies hurried off. Belij was no fool. The lieutenant colonel would be in on the conspiracy; he’d had no intention of summoning the Number One Wife. He’d wanted to stall the priestesses so that he could hurry off and consult with the Witch Doctor, but now he had no choice. No man on the island would risk incurring the wrath of a priestess who had the power to shrivel his private parts and curse him with infertility.
Gwenneth and the other priestesses sat down on the plump velvet sofas, and she looked around the room, examining the massive portraits of the royal family.
There was the king, handsome and much older than his young wives. There were half a dozen children crowded around them.
She glanced closer at the portrait, seeing a familiar face, and shock rippled through her. Could it be?
She leaned close to one of the priestesses. “Who the heck is that in the picture, leaning on the Number One wife?” she asked in a low, conspirational voice.
Spotting His Leopard (Shifters, Inc.) Page 11