Chapter 12

  I left Nina with a hug, a strained smile, and half a promise to text her in the morning. I felt so awkward, and yet, off I went with Mr. Bossy Pants.

  Then I let Richard follow me downstairs like a bad decision I couldn’t quite stop making.

  The hallway outside my hotel room smelled like lilacs and mineral water. The keycard stuck twice before the lock clicked open. My hands were damp, and I was slowly getting angry. My desire to run was high. Flight Risk Sadie at your service!

  Inside, Tudor darted ahead and claimed the arm of the chair like it was a throne.

  I dropped my bag and leaned against the desk, arms folded. The journal sat on the nightstand, looking deceptively asleep.

  Richard didn’t say anything right away.

  He stood in the doorway like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to enter. Or maybe like he didn’t want to see what happened if he did.

  “You’re mad,” he said eventually. “Sharp as ever.”

  He stepped inside, shut the door, and stared at me like I might break. Or bite. “You and Nina—” he began.

  “Were two people having a drink in public,” I snapped. “Which you decided to crash like a little bitch.”

  “She’s not just a student.” “No shit. Neither am I.”

  “She’s a siren, Sadie. Or descended from one.” I blinked. “What the fuck is a siren?”

  Richard exhaled. “Sailors got the story wrong. It’s not just singing women on rocks. Sirens were guardians of forbidden knowledge. They could lure the mind, not just the body. Some seduced, some warned. But they were never just beautiful. They were dangerous—especially to men who underestimated them.”

  He hesitated. “Thomas Seymour—Elizabeth’s stepfather—encountered sirens during his naval travels. There are obscure Vatican texts that claim he brought something back. Not just treasure. Something with teeth. Whatever it was… it didn’t die.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he was watching me like he wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the rest.

  Finally, he said, “You need to understand the Vatican isn’t one mind. It’s factions. Old orders. Rivalries as bitter as any family feud. I was sworn into the Order of Malta—a branch that exists to keep balance. We don’t hunt for sport. We don’t burn unless we have to. Our goal is containment, secrecy, equilibrium.” His tone softened, but there was a steel line under it. “Other factions don’t agree. The Puritas Veritatis—‘the Pure Truth’—believe eradication is the only way. They don’t care if history goes up in flames, so long as the threat is gone.”

  I felt my stomach twist. “And Nina?”

  Richard’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know her allegiances. It’s convenient—too convenient—that she found you, asked questions, offered help. She could be a voice for your side… or sent to disrupt mine. I’d be a fool not to consider both.”

  I blinked at him, heat prickling at the back of my neck. “What exactly is your mission, Richard? To figure out who’s killing people in Boston—or something else?”

  His eyes didn’t move from mine. “To find Elizabeth. And to nullify her.”

  For a moment, the room felt like it tilted under me. “Nullify?” My voice came out sharper than I meant. “That’s just your polite knightly word for destroy, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t flinch. “If she rises fully—if she breaks free—she will burn through every life she touches. You’ve read the fragments. You’ve heardthe myths. This isn’t an exaggeration.”

  I shook my head, anger buzzing up through fear. “You can’t just erase someone because they terrify you. Even if she’s twisted. Even if she’s dangerous. You don’t get to make that decision.”

  “Sadie—”

  “No,” I cut in, crossing my arms tight against my chest. “If this is about balance, then maybe balance doesn’t mean wiping her out. Maybe it means figuring out why she’s still here. Maybe it means listening before you swing the sword.”

  His expression was unreadable for a long beat. Then he said, softly, “You don’t understand. But you will.”

  And I hated that a part of me was afraid he was right.

  .”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So instead, I pointed at his chest. “Take the tie off.”

  He looked away. “I can’t.” “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve tried, Sadie. It won’t come loose.”

  I looked closer. His pupils were dilated. A fine tremor traced his fingers. His knuckles were pale from how tightly he’d clenched his hands.

  “How long have you felt… off?” I asked.

  “Since Corwin gave it to me.” He laughed once, hollow. “I thought it was just fatigue. Jet lag. But I started forgetting things. Walking in circles. I had to check my notes three times yesterday to remember your name.”

  That landed like a punch.

  I walked over slowly, heart pounding.

  He sat motionless. I stepped between his knees. My fingers brushed the knot—silk, warm, almost breathing.

  He closed his eyes.

  I swallowed. His stubble was golden in the lamplight. His breath was steady, but his hands were clenched.

  The second my fingers brushed the knot, my palms tingled—then my arms, a shimmer like pins and needles under the skin. A lump swelled in my chest, heavy and urgent, and it was as if something black and powerful was pulsing out through me, beating in rhythm with my heart. The tie seemed alive, resisting me, tightening instead of loosening. My whole being narrowed to that one point of contact.

  I yanked harder. The fabric burned against my fingertips but didn’t give. It wanted to stay put. To hold him. To hold me.

  “Release,” I shouted, my own voice echoing in the small space. “Now!”

  The word cracked like lightning. Power shot through me, hot and cold at once. The knot shuddered, then gave.

  The scarf slid loose, falling between us like a surrendered flag. My pulse was hammering so hard I wondered if he could hear it. Richard didn’t move, but the muscle in his jaw ticked, like he was holding back more than words.

  For a second, all the Vatican secrets, the murders, the endless shadows outside the window—they fell away. It was just him and me, the heat of the lamp, the sharp awareness that I was stepping into something I couldn’t undo.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  His eyes flicked to my mouth and back again, faster than breath. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he murmured, voice low, almost hoarse.

  “Maybe I do,” I whispered back, though the lie quivered in my throat.

  He lifted a hand—hesitant, restrained—and stopped just short of my cheek, fingers hovering like I was something fragile. His knuckles were pale with the effort of not touching me.

  I leaned forward, barely an inch, and that was enough to shatter the distance.

  Then—

  Tudor leapt onto the bed, grabbed the tie in his teeth, and bolted across the room like he’d stolen a curse. Within minutes the tie was a pile of silk threads.

  We both stared after him, stunned. Then we laughed.

  I flopped t down next to Richard, exhausted. He turned to me, suddenly quiet again. “Sadie… can I see the journal?”

  I hesitated, then handed it over. He opened it slowly.

  Blank. At first.

  Then the words burned onto the page: “You’re too late, friend.”

  Richard flinched.

  “It… it moved,” he said. “It changed.” “So it’s not just me.”

  He shook his head. “It knows me now.”

  The book hummed between us. His eyes lifted to mine.

  And then—my phone rang. Mom.

  I stared at the screen like it was a joke. Richard raised an eyebrow.

  I answered.

  “Hi honey,” Martha said. “You’re not dead, are you?” Not yet, I thought. But it’s getting close.

  Martha hung up after three minutes of maternal triage (“hydrate, avoid cults, call me tomorrow”), and the second my phone went dark, it lit up again.

  Nina: If you’re spiraling, come over. Nina: My place keeps secrets.

  Me: Address?

  Nina: Top floor, 5B. Don’t touch the bowl of pins by the door.

  Me Sold.

  Richard and I just… stood there for a beat too long. Neither of us moving toward the door, neither of us saying the thing we were clearly thinking. The air between us was heavy and oddly warm, like we’d stepped into the wrong elevator and couldn’t figure out which button to press.

  Then Tudor padded in from the hallway dragging a crinkly bag of beef jerky. He dropped it with the ceremony of a cat offering a fresh kill, ripped into the corner with his teeth, and disappeared under the bed with his spoils. The sound of enthusiastic chewing followed.

  I grabbed my coat. “Guess he’s moved on to new prey.”

  Richard smirked faintly but didn’t say anything as I headed for the door.

  Nina’s building was a wedge of old brick at the edge of the Mission Hill neighborhood, sandwiched between an auto shop and a Hilton. Stairwell painted the color of bandages. The hall smelled like someone’s garlic and someone else’s laundry. On the landing outside 5B, wind chimes whispered though there was zero wind.

  She opened the door before I knocked.

  “Shoes off,” she said, stepping aside. “And don’t touch the bowl of pins.”

  I glanced at the entry table. There was, in fact, a blue-glass bowl full of straight pins and a little handwritten label: NOT FOR SEWING.

  “Noted.”

  Her apartment was small but rooted. Bowls of salt on the windowsills. Charcoal sketches taped to the wall with washi tape. A string of shells over the kitchen pass-through that made a sound like distant water when she walked under it. The air smelled like sea salt and ocean roses, with a warm undernote of something baked recently and eaten too fast.

  “Tea or contraband?” she asked, already opening a cabinet. “Dealer’s choice.”

  “Contraband, then.” She poured amber liquid into two jelly glasses. “Stolen from my old bar job. Don’t narc.”

  I sipped. Smoky, floral, a little burn on the back end. Not bad for stolen.

  We sat cross-legged on the rug. She folded herself into place like a dancer; I flopped like a gremlin that had forgotten yoga existed.

  “So,” she said. “How’s your day of mirrors and men?”

  “Bleeding. Complicated. Both.”

  “Sexy.”

  “Alarmingly.”

  We let the quiet settle, the kind that feels more like permission than silence.

  “Okay,” Nina said at last, tugging a pillow into her lap. “I am a siren – I am sure you want to know more. Here’s the unsexy version.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “There’s an unsexy version?”

  “Alas,” she said dryly. “Sirens guard knowledge. Old, forbidden, unkind knowledge. People think we lure bodies, but mostly it’s minds—attention, certainty, loyalty.

  Historically, we show up where there is a reflection. Harbors. Wells. Mirrors. Anything that can hold a reflection long enough to extract what we are looking for.”

  I swallowed. “And your family…?”

  “Mixed bag,” she said, not quite looking at me. “A long line of women who ‘hear too much’ and men who pretend they don’t. Sometimes the gift skips a generation.

  Sometimes it bites down hard. I started hearing echoes when I was twelve—bathrooms, puddles, the aquarium field trip from hell.”

  “Are they clearer when you’re underwater?” I asked. “Like in Harry Potter?”

  Her smile tilted. “Exactly like that. Only less whimsical and more don’t-look-over-your- shoulder-right-now.”

  “It’s… better now,” she continued. “I ground it. Salt, iron, routines. But when something big is thrashing? I feel it.”

  “Like at the museum.”

  She nodded. “Like at the museum.”

  Nina’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling, as if she could hear it even now. “You’re not crazy for thinking the Gardner is more than a museum,” she said softly. “I think something’s locked inside it. I can hear it sometimes—in the fountains, in the old water pipes that still run beneath the building. A voice. Not words, not exactly. Just this… calling.”

  A shiver worked down my spine. “Calling for what?”

  She shook her head. “Not for what. For who. Every forty to sixty days it begins again. Faint at first, like a hum in the pipes, then louder, rising until it rattles the glass. And then it goes silent.”

  Her gaze found mine, steady and haunted. “And every time the sound dies out, someone disappears. Or a body turns up in the city with no blood left in it. No pattern in the victims—poor, wealthy, men, women. Just gone.”

  I pressed my arms tight against myself, suddenly cold. “And no one connects it.”

  “Of course not,” Nina whispered. “Because no one wants to admit they hear it too.”

  She got up, crossed to an old desk, and slid a drawer open. When she came back, she set a photocopy between us—an image so grainy it felt haunted anyway.

  A portrait of Elizabeth I—or halfway. The ruff and red hair were there, but the eyes were gold, and the hands looked like they’d been caught mid-change: fingers tapering into something too sharp, too bright. Behind her, a bank of mirrors turned the same face into a ring of watchers, each one a fraction more inhuman.

  “Where did you—”

  “Back room of a library that hates me,” Nina said. “The note on the back is what matters.”

  She flipped it. In faded ink:

  The seal will break where fire meets glass.

  My stomach did a slow somersault. “The Spanish Chapel.”

  My stomach did a slow somersault. “The Spanish Chapel.”

  The place always felt colder than the rest of the museum, like the stone walls were exhaling straight from the fifteenth century. The air carried this damp, mineral tang that made the back of my throat itch, the kind of chill that sank past your coat and stayed. The floor dipped here and there, just enough to make you wonder if the earth underneath had shifted in its sleep. At first it felt more crypt than gallery—shadows pooling in the corners, silence pressed down like a hand. Then you turned, and the mural slammed into you: saints and angels exploding in color, halos still catching light like they hadn’t dimmed in centuries. A knight stretched out below, armor chiseled sharp, sword marked with prayers in a language no one bothered to translate. And just beyond him, the crypt—stone lid heavy and worn smooth, radiating the kind of presence that made you think twice about breathing too loudly.

  I muttered under my breath, “Yeah, nothing creepy about a knight babysitting a mystery coffin. Totally fine. Ten out of ten, would recommend for date night.”

  The lobby smelled like roses and boredom—the kind of place where time only moved if you made it.

  Nina insisted on walking me back, claiming she “needed the exercise,” but really she wanted a front-row seat for whatever circus she suspected was coming next.

  Richard was pacing near the reception desk, hands in his pockets, eyes flicking to the door every few seconds. He stopped when he saw us, every line in his body going sharp.

  “You didn’t tell me she was coming,” he said.

  “Didn’t know I had to clear my social calendar through you,” I shot back. Nina just smiled, slow and deliberate, like she’d found a shiny new toy. “Relax, Viking. I’m house-trained.”

  Richard didn’t laugh.

  “She’s not just—” he started.

  “A siren, yeah, we’ve been over that,” I cut in.

  “You think it’s cute, but you don’t know what she’s capable of.” Nina’s smile didn’t falter.

  “And you do? You’ve been stumbling around ever since your precious museum friend gave you that tie. Still shaking it off, or should we call this your natural state?”

  Richard’s jaw tightened like a lock clicking into place.

  They were circling me without moving, like a pair of cats pretending not to fight. I held up my hands.

  “Okay, before one of you starts throwing punches—why are we all suddenly in the same place?”

  Nina tilted her head toward me, eyes glittering.

  “Because I have something you need. A contact who’s been in the Spanish Chapel after hours.”

  That got Richard’s attention. “And?” he said.

  “They saw the coffin.”

  Richard frowned. “What do you mean?.”

  “It’s sealed shut. Wards as thick as tree roots wrapped around, over and under. That thing’s been sitting there open since the last renovation. Now it’s locked like it’s holding back something that doesn’t want to stay put. And the wards? They look old, very old. I think its been secured for a long time. And here’s the thing, what ever is in it has been crying out. I can hear it.”

  Richard’s voice turned flinty. “You’re lying.”

  “Prove it,” Nina said with a shrug. “Or… take me with you next time. I’ll show you where to look.”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Bringing you along would be like dropping a shark in a koi pond.”

  Nina smiled wider. “Deep water’s where I’m most at home.”

  As she turned to go, I caught it—a faint dusting of gold shimmer across her collarbone, catching the lobby light before disappearing under her jacket. I didn’t say anything.

  She tossed me a little wave and was gone. Richard exhaled hard.

  I turned toward the mirrored elevator doors. For a split second, my reflection stared back—except it wasn’t me. The face in the glass had gold eyes.

  And it smiled.

  How the tension?