Chapter 2 #2
I don't look at her. "History suggests people do reckless things around this mask. Belief doesn't matter. Outcome does. Keep your heads on straight."
A houseman raises a tentative hand. "What if a guest puts on a replica mask and goes... strange?"
"Then you call it in," Allison says. "Don't touch unless they're a threat. Use your words first."
"Your words," I echo, "and your radios. Channel three is event net. One is house security. Two is medical. Test them now."
Radios chirp, voices confirm. I nod at Allison. "Perimeter."
She steps forward. "Gates have cameras and motion sensors. Roving pairs cover garden paths. Two on the seawall. Anything out of place—packages, bags—you don't open it. You report and hold until cleared."
I pivot to the case. "Case is triple secured. Power fails, bolts hold. Glass is scored, pressure equalizes. Buys us time. Anyone too near this case who isn't me, Ms. Bennett, or the Murphys, you challenge them."
A guard leans back, testing me. "And if they don't stop?"
"Then you make them stop," Allison says coldly. "But if you lay a hand on a guest without cause, you'll regret it. Control your temper and your fear."
"Questions?" I ask.
An older maid raises a hand. "We heard a catering van went missing. Do we worry?"
"We prepare," I say. "Could be logistics, could be staging. Treat it as a warning. Extra eyes on deliveries. Nobody through a back door without badge and escort."
Allison tilts her chin. "Say it back."
Blank stares. She points at a server. "You. Repeat it."
The woman swallows. "No one through a back door without a badge and an escort."
"Good," Allison says. "Next." The pattern continues, a steady call and response, each answer drawing the staff a little straighter, a little more focused.
When the last voice fades, I finish. "If you get scared, breathe. If you feel stupid, ask. If you see something wrong, speak. We don't lose this mask on my watch."
Allison adds, voice even. "And we don't lose you on mine."
A few of the staff glance between us, their posture shifting. They respond to her differently than to me—less drilled, more anchored. My tone makes them snap to attention, hers makes them believe they’ll survive the night. It rankles, but it also explains why Fitz trusts her here.
Her words land heavier than mine, pulling the staff straighter. I let the silence hang. "Break. Hydrate. Posts in fifteen."
The team files out, a buzz of voices trailing. Staff shift uncomfortably, caught in the undercurrent. Then I dismiss them, and they scatter like gulls before a storm.
Allison stays behind. She lingers at the back of the room, her gaze locked on me as if daring me to move first. The door clicks shut, and we’re alone.
"You enjoyed that," I say.
Her lips tilt. "Watching them listen to me? Absolutely. Watching you try not to mind? Even better."
I cross the space between us slowly, deliberately. "They listened because they sensed conviction. Doesn't matter if it came from you or me."
Her eyes narrow. "You don't like sharing control."
"I don't share." I stop inches away. "I take."
For a heartbeat, silence stretches. Her chin lifts, proud and defiant. "And what if I don't give?"
My voice drops. "Then we'll find out how long you can hold your ground."
The air between us hums. For one reckless moment, I imagine closing the distance. Her pulse flickers at her throat, quick and tempting. But she turns first, brushing past me with deliberate indifference.
Allison gives me a cheeky grin. "Long enough for them to follow."
I step closer, close enough that she has to tilt her chin to keep eye contact. "They'll follow me because they know I won't let them die."
Her eyes spark. "And you think I would?"
"I think you'd take the risk without blinking. And that makes you dangerous, Allison. To them. To me."
Her breath shivers, though her expression never falters. "Dangerous is what's kept me alive."
As she walks away, her hips swaying just enough to drive me insane, I know two things with absolute certainty. One: the mask is dangerous. Two: Allison Bennett is more dangerous still.
And the worst part? I'm already planning how to let her wreck me.
The room is empty, leaving a silence so complete. For a moment I let myself breathe, shoulders loosening as the adrenaline ebbs. The quiet lasts only a heartbeat.
My phone buzzes with a text from an unlisted number:
The old songs are waking. The drums will sound tonight.
I delete it immediately, but my grandmother's warnings echo in my memory. Some artifacts choose their guardians as much as their thieves.
The ocean crashes against the shore outside, a sound like warning drums. Somewhere in the house, a door slams, and staff voices rise in sudden alarm. I catch Allison's gaze down the hall. Her hand goes to her weapon. Mine reaches for a weapon that was once there.
Now, it isn't, and trouble has arrived.
DRESCHNER
Three Years Earlier
Three years ago, I stood in a Miami courtroom while a federal prosecutor dismissed my life’s work as nothing more than ‘cultural theft disguised as scholarship.’ Her voice echoed off marble walls as she read the charges: trafficking in stolen artifacts, conspiracy to violate the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, wire fraud.
Each count landed like a nail hammered into the coffin of my career.
But it wasn’t the law that cut deepest. It was Ryan Murphy’s testimony.
He took the stand with quiet authority, his designer suit a gleaming contrast to my worn academic tweed. When the prosecutor asked how he’d uncovered my ‘illegal activities,’ his voice carried no malice—only disappointment.
“Dr. Dreschner approached me in 2019 claiming he’d discovered a new cache of Calusa artifacts in the Everglades,” Ryan said. “He told me they were at risk of being lost to development, that he needed emergency funding for preservation. I believed him. I gave him two hundred thousand dollars.”
The prosecutor nodded. “And what did you discover?”
“That the artifacts weren’t newly discovered,” Ryan replied. “They’d been systematically removed from protected sites for years. Dreschner was selling pieces to private collectors in Europe and Asia, using my funding to continue his excavations.”
His gaze locked on mine across the courtroom. “When I confronted him, he claimed he was preserving objects that would otherwise be destroyed by bureaucracy. He said academic institutions were spiritual graveyards that stripped away the power of sacred objects.”
“And your response?” the prosecutor asked.
Ryan paused. “I told him these artifacts aren’t just valuable objects. They’re sacred trusts. And he’d forgotten the difference between preservation and possession.”
The words struck me like physical blows. Sacred trusts. As if Ryan Murphy—with his climate-controlled vaults and armed guards—understood their spiritual weight better than a man who had devoted twenty years to studying them.
After sentencing—five years probation, crippling fines, a permanent ban from archaeological work—I returned to my empty office. The administration had already cleaned me out. Files boxed, research confiscated, classes canceled. Twenty years of work reduced to cardboard and debt.
I sat for hours in that hollow office, staring at the pale rectangles on the wall where my diplomas once hung. Harvard. Fieldwork certifications. Published papers. Achievements that had once defined me, now stripped of meaning. Worse—tainted.
That night I drove to the Everglades. To the site where I had first touched genuine Calusa artifacts, where something older than European conquest had reached out to me.
There, in the moonlight among cypress roots, I knelt and made a promise.
One day I would prove that understanding trumped ownership.
That spiritual connection mattered more than possession.
That Ryan Murphy’s sterile galleries could never contain true power.
Six months later, word reached me: the Reina de Oro mask had entered Murphy’s private collection. I heard through back channels—colleagues who still whispered my name, auction house contacts who remembered my expertise. Ryan planned to display it as the centerpiece of a traveling Calusa exhibition.
The irony burned. He would parade my spiritual heritage like a trophy while I was barred by law from even touching it.
But there are other ways to touch sacred objects. Other ways to prove worthiness.
For three years I have prepared—studying not from dusty academic texts, but from dreams that come when I hold lesser artifacts I kept hidden before the arrest. The spirits whisper their true names, their hungers, their need for a vessel strong enough to bear them.
In the candlelit chamber beneath Saltmoor House, the mask’s power presses against me even from a distance. Something inside it stirs, ancient spirits shifting in recognition, their gaze settling on me with the weight of an unwanted claim.
Ryan Murphy was wrong about me. I haven’t forgotten the difference between preservation and possession.
I’ve transcended it.