Chapter 28 Portals and Pride #2
“Did you hear that, Desi?” Camila grabbed her arm. “Five million! We could be rich!”
We? Desi thought bitterly. Of course Camila expected a cut. She’d brought him here, hadn’t she?
Briar snapped the book shut. “To be candid, yesterday my divers searched the wreck you discovered. The Sentinel, was it? But there was no ring. Then Cami mentioned you’d found a ring, so I knew I needed to speak with you. I’ve been searching for that artifact for a long, long time.”
His divers? The idea of strangers rummaging through Caleb’s ship made her stomach twist in violation.
“Why?” she asked. “Why is it so valuable?”
“If you’re thinking of selling it, you’ll never get what I’m offering. It’s a family heirloom. Sentimental value, nothing more.” He adjusted his cufflinks, the gesture so polished it was almost rehearsed.
Right. Family heirloom. Not unless his family name is Solomon.
But the number echoed in her skull—five million dollars. She could pay for Daria’s transplant, cover the anti-rejection meds for life. She could save her sister.
“Desi?” Camila’s voice swam through the haze. “Are you even listening?”
Desi straightened, forcing air into her lungs. “No promises,” she said at last. “But I’ll… I’ll do my best.”
Briar’s smile sharpened as he extended his hand. She hesitated, then took it.
An icy shiver coursed up her arm, spreading like frost through her veins.
“It’s a deal,” she said. “Mr.—?”
“Montverre,” he replied smoothly. “Briar Emrys Montverre.”
The name struck like a thunderclap.
Blood drained from her face.
Desi couldn’t get upstairs fast enough. Montverre!
The name had spilled from his lips like venom from a snake. The world spun around her; air vanished from her lungs. For one terrible second, she thought she might black out, until Camila’s hand gripped her arm.
She’d mumbled something about feeling ill, needing rest, and somehow managed to stumble out before the walls closed in.
Now, in the quiet of her apartment, she flipped open her laptop, fingers trembling over the keys as she typed his name. Briar Emrys Montverre.
The results appeared instantly.
Of course he had his own website. Sleek. Cold. Polished, like the man himself.
A financial prodigy, it read. Made his first million in the stock market by age twenty, a billionaire by twenty-five.
Photos showed him shaking hands with world leaders, lecturing at investment conferences, standing beside yachts and gleaming jets.
The bio was brief—too brief. Born in France. Raised in the U.S. in poverty. The only son of a postman and a stay-at-home mother, both deceased before his rise to fame.
Neat. Tragic. Sanitized.
But it didn’t fit. The name Montverre pulsed on the screen like a warning.
Desi leaned closer, scrolling deeper into the web’s labyrinth. She opened ancestry sites, genealogy archives, and obscure historical records. An hour passed. Then another. Her coffee grew cold beside her.
Finally, there it was.
The Montverres were an ancient French noble family tracing its lineage to Sir Géraud de Montverre, knight of the Order of the Temple, Second Crusade.
Her pulse quickened as she scrolled through the centuries of descendants, the names blurring together, until one leapt off the screen like a cannon blast.
Louis-étienne de Montverre.
Her stomach lurched.
She clicked the name.
Louis-étienne de Montverre, Marquis de Montverre.
Inherited the Montverre fortune and Chateau de Montverre in the Auvergne region of France.
The estate included Roman ruins and a private chapel built atop an ancient Templar commandery.
Later in life, the marquis moved to an island in the West Indies, where he squandered the family fortune, leaving little to his daughter Geneviève and son Marcel.
Desi sank back in her chair. “So… he never got it,” she whispered. “He never got the Ring.” If he had, he wouldn’t have died penniless. Which meant it had sunk with the Sentinel, right where she’d found it. At least that much of history had not changed.
But did that also mean Caleb’s life had ended at the bottom of the sea? Her heart shriveled.
She kept scrolling. Her eyes traced the dwindling bloodline, generation after generation, until the name Briar Emrys Montverre appeared at the end.
A chill slid down her spine.
He knew. He had to know. The Ring, its legend, its power. He wasn’t after an artifact. He was after the same thing his ancestor sought.
Pushing away from the desk, Desi crossed to the window. Sunlight spilled across the floor, catching dust motes that drifted like tiny worlds in orbit.
But why? she wondered. He already had billions. What more could he want?
The answer came unbidden. Power.
It was never about money. Never had been.
She let out a shaky laugh. “Funny how greed runs in the family.”
Five million dollars. Enough to save Daria. Enough to save everything that mattered.
But how could she get the Ring?
If it was still in the Sentinel’s wreck, would touching it again send her back through time? And why did it work only sometimes?
Her temples throbbed. She rubbed them and collapsed onto the bed, frustration pressing against the inside of her skull. Think, Desi. Think.
Her gaze drifted to the glow of her laptop, and memory tugged at her—Montverre’s library, the old map she’d found there. The one with red circles marked across the globe.
Her eyes fluttered shut as she pictured the ones in the Caribbean.
One circle near the wreck of the Sentinel. Another south of Puerto Rico. And the third around ?le Du Crane.
Desi bolted upright, heart pounding. “Portals,” she breathed. “They’re portals!”
She scrambled to her feet so quickly she nearly tripped over her shoes. The circles—gateways through time, maybe even between worlds.
One of her high school friends—a total science geek—had once ranted for hours about wormholes and Einstein-Rosen bridges. She’d laughed then. Not now.
The first time she’d appeared on the Sentinel and had returned so quickly, the ship must have been in the portal just south of Puerto Rico.
Then, when she appeared the second time and dropped the Ring, hoping to return home, the ship was no longer within the portal.
Which is why it hadn’t worked. And of course when she’d dropped the Ring at ?le Du Crane, she’d been transported back to her time.
The marquis knew about the portals. Which is why he’d probably established his estate on that island.
It was the only thing that made sense.
She sank onto the bed again and let out a weary, incredulous sigh. “Portals through time and space making sense,” she muttered. “My life has officially gone insane.”