34. Grace
Grace
The room was beautiful, and I hated every inch of it.
Silk wallpaper in a deep burgundy. Heavy brocade curtains framing windows that overlooked a manicured garden two stories below.
A four-poster bed with a cream duvet and an antique writing desk with fresh stationery, in case I might want to send someone a thank-you note.
I’d tried the windows first. Locked or sealed or reinforced—they wouldn’t budge, and when I’d smashed the heel of my shoe against the glass, it hadn’t even vibrated. The door was locked from the outside.
My phone was gone. My purse was gone. And the egg was definitely gone.
So here I was. Sitting on a kidnapper’s guest bed, alone and phoneless, in a little castle outside Prague.
Think, Grace. What would Izzy do?
Four months ago, a thief had grabbed Isabella to keep her from talking to the police. Tristan, Arthur, and Lancelot had gotten her out, but Isabella had kept her head the whole time. She’d told me the story over wine a few weeks later, laughing about it like it was an adventure she’d signed up for.
Of course, she’d also confessed that it hadn’t been her first kidnapping, so maybe she just had more practice at being calm.
Great. Was that my goal now? Get kidnapped enough times, and eventually I’d get good at it?
I pressed my palms against my eyes. Garrett’s face kept flashing through my brain. Him mouthing ‘I got you’ across Henri’s dining room while a knife pressed against my throat. Then him running on the road behind the car until the driveway turned and I couldn’t see him anymore.
What if I’d kept Kessler’s name to myself?
What if I’d let Caulfield finish his theater and Garrett come back to the table?
Would Caulfield have lost his nerve and revealed himself some other way?
Maybe. Or maybe the breach had already been coming, and all I’d done by testing him was given myself a few extra seconds to know.
Either way, I was here. And Garrett wasn’t.
Don’t think about that right now. Think about what you can do.
I paced the room again. Door to window, window to bed, bed to desk. The hallway outside was quiet. I’d heard footsteps pass twice in the hour since Richter had locked me in—a single set each time, unhurried, likely a guard making rounds.
I checked my watch. Seven-forty. The shadows in the garden were getting long.
A knock came at the door, and the lock turned before I could respond. Conrad Richter stepped in, wearing a holstered weapon visible under his jacket. “Werner would like you to join him downstairs.”
“Fuck you.”
Richter held the door open and motioned for me to go.
So I did. He walked me down the carpeted hallway and around a corner to a wide staircase.
I counted doors as we passed—four on this floor, all closed.
The staircase curved down to a marble foyer with a chandelier that belonged in an opera house.
Through one archway was a sitting room. Through another, a long corridor lined with oil paintings of landscapes in heavy gilt frames.
Two more guards stood at the base of the staircase. Both armed. Both watching me with the blank attentiveness of men being paid well to stand in hallways.
Three armed men so far. Probably more.
Could I outrun them? If I found an exit, could I sneak out and make my way… where? We’d driven for so long to get here, and the property was huge. I had no idea where we were, and if I found someone, I didn’t speak the language.
Garrett will come for you, just like Tristan risked everything to save Izzy.
My stomach tightened as we passed a set of French doors with two more armed guards. If Garrett tried to rescue me, he’d be walking into a building full of armed men. He’d get hurt. For me. I couldn’t let him do that.
What are you going to do, Grace? Link with him telepathically and tell him you’re fine?
Shit.
Richter led me through a corridor lined with paintings and stopped at a set of double doors. He opened them and stepped aside. The room was so beautiful, it stole the air from my lungs. I hated that too.
Tall display cases lined every wall, with soft museum lighting. Jeweled boxes, miniature portraits in gold settings, and porcelain figurines stamped with the Romanov double eagle. Glass-topped cases in the center held documents, medals, and personal effects.
Along the wall to my left sat a compact writing desk. Dr. Brandon Caulfield stood beside it, fiddling with a pen next to a sheaf of papers. He didn’t look at me.
Of course he didn’t.
But he wasn’t the worst of it. No, in a glass case at the far end of the room, lit like it was the centerpiece in the Louvre, was Didi’s egg.
My egg. Disassembled and nestled in three velvet cradles, the hundred tiny diamonds and the sapphire glowed as though the lights were designed specifically for this treasure.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Werner Kessler stood beside the case, one hand resting on its edge. He was maybe five-eight, lean, with blond hair, and wearing a tailored navy suit. His posture was relaxed, with a smile like he was greeting an old friend instead of a woman he’d had forcibly brought to him.
“Miss Laurent.” His voice was gentle, with a pronounced German accent. “Thank you for joining me.”
Like I had a choice.
“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” I kept my voice steady. Sunshine, Grace. Kill him with sunshine. “Though I’m guessing you’re Werner Kessler.”
“Indeed.” He inclined his head. “And I must apologize for the manner of your arrival. Mr. Richter can be... enthusiastic.”
“Enthusiastic is one word for dragging someone into a car with a knife at their throat.”
“An unfortunate necessity.” He strolled along the displays, hands clasped behind his back. “I’ve been trying to arrange a civilized conversation for over a week. Your protection detail made approaching you difficult.”
“Civilized conversation? You had your attack dog stalk me at my work, try to steal the egg from my purse, and threaten to kill me.”
Completely ignoring my words, he moved to one of the display cases.
Richter nudged me in that direction. When I channeled Garrett and glowered at him, he whispered, “Should I get the knife out again?”
Fine.
I crossed the room to stand next to Werner.
Inside the case was a collection of formal portraits in ornate frames, a family gathered on a set of wide stone steps and a woman in an elaborate high-necked gown.
“My great-grandmother, Olga Andreyevna. She was born in Saint Petersburg in 1889 and became a lady-in-waiting to the Tsarina after her first husband died, leaving her with a daughter. Later, she married Nikolai Petrovich Romanin, who was a cousin of the Tsar, and he adopted my grandmother.”
I looked at the photographs. They could have been anyone.
He opened the case and pulled out a smaller frame tucked behind the larger ones, of a girl with her hair tied in ribbons. She might have been eight or nine, sitting on the same set of stone steps.
“This was my grandmother.” His accent eased a fraction, as though whatever performance he was giving had slipped. “She was the one who told me. All of it. The palace, the carriages, the names of the horses in the royal stables. She remembered them the way other children recalled bedtime stories.”
He repositioned the small frame inside the case.
“When I was a boy, she would sit me on the floor beside her chair and—” He caught himself. His accent firmed up again; its polished angles returned. “Her memory was extraordinary.”
Didi had sat me on a kitchen stool with a jar of homemade jam and a bowl full of hard cream, teaching me to prepare scones properly.
She hadn’t needed me to know the names of anyone’s horses.
She’d needed me to know that jam went on first and clotted cream went on top, because that was the right way, and people who did it backward simply didn’t know any better and let their cream melt.
Kessler’s grandmother had given him a story about who he was.
Mine had given me herself.
“The Bolsheviks took everything from my family. Our property, our heritage, our place in history.” He closed the case with the portraits and moved to the next one.
“I’ve spent forty years reassembling what was stolen.
Every piece in this room is part of my family’s legacy, returned to where it belongs. ”
The hunger in his voice was almost physical.
This wasn’t a hobby or even an obsession—it was his identity.
Every artifact in these cases was designed to act as proof that Werner Kessler was who he claimed to be.
Without them, he was just a wealthy man with a story about a grandmother nobody could verify.
But did that mean anything? If I had my phone and searched the Internet for these people, did they really exist?
Was there any real tie to the Romanov family?
Morganna had done her research and said there wasn’t; if she was as talented as the men seemed to think she was, didn’t that prove he was making it all up?
“The egg is a Russian Imperial treasure,” he said, turning back toward the centerpiece case. “It belongs with the rest of my Imperial collection.”
“It belongs to Henri Dubois’s family,” I said. “His grandfather gave it to my grandmother to hold onto. And I mean to return it.”
“Yes, I am familiar with Mr. Dubois. And I know his great-grandfather stole many things from the Kremlin Armory during the Revolution.” His voice hardened. “Your grandmother, however noble her intentions, was safeguarding stolen property for a thief’s family.”
“Thief? You’re the one whose man stole the egg. And stole me, on top of it all!”
“I want to make this simple.” He gestured toward the writing desk where Caulfield stood waiting. “I want you to sell the egg to me. In return, I’ll wire forty million US dollars into any account you name.”
Forty million dollars?
I coughed into my hand. Forty million?
Forty million would pay for The Velvet Bean a thousand times over.
It would mean never having to worry about payroll, prices, or the table Mr. Kendrick occupied for hours every morning.
Never lying awake doing math on the ceiling at two in the morning.
It would mean my dad could stop grading papers, he and my mom could travel like they’d always wanted…
it would mean my children would have everything they could ever hope for.
It’s not yours to sell, Grace. Remember?
But it offered me so many options. So many good things for the people I loved.
Dr. Caulfield lifted a pen and held it out for me.
“How much are you making off of this?” I asked the slimy authenticator. “More than ten percent, I’d bet?”
Caulfield moistened his lips, clearly less comfortable with this whole setup than he was pretending to be. “It would be easier, Grace, if you accepted Mr. Kessler’s offer.”
Easier for him, maybe.
Didi had held it for Marcel Dubois through a world war and eighty years of silence, and I wouldn’t break that chain because a rich man waved a number at me, no matter how big the number was. “Why don’t you buy it from Henri?”
Kessler’s jaw tightened. “Mr. Richter approached him in Zurich, and Mr. Dubois made it abundantly clear he would not sell it to me.”
“So you need my signature because you can’t get his.”
“I need your signature because the egg was in your possession. The provenance chain requires?—”
“You need it to be a real sale, don’t you? A willing one?”
It all made sense. He needed a legitimate sale because the collection was about legitimacy.
It was about proving his bloodline and his claim.
A coerced transfer could be challenged, and a challenged sale wouldn’t prove anything at all.
“If you could just take the egg, you would have. You need me to choose this.”
Kessler was polished and pleasant, but both of those qualities would only last so long. He needed me to say yes, and he couldn’t make me.
You have power here, Grace.
For the first time since Dmitry Ivanov showed up in my café, I was in the driver’s seat. Or maybe I always had been and simply didn’t know it. Kessler had the guards, the locked doors, and the money, but he couldn’t get what he wanted without my cooperation.
“No,” I said.
Kessler marched to the desk and took the pen from Caulfield. “I’d encourage you to think carefully about?—”
“I have thought about it. The answer is no.”
He held my gaze. The pleasant mask didn’t drop, but it thinned enough to show his desperation, which forty million dollars and a castle full of artifacts would never fix.
Something inside me softened. Not from pity, but from the image of a boy on the floor beside his grandmother’s chair. He’d believed her stories and had spent forty years trying to turn the belief into reality.
But I wasn’t going to hand his grandmother back to him at the expense of my own grandmother’s promise.
Didi hadn’t needed anyone’s permission to be who she was. She’d been Delphine, a spy who was brave enough to smuggle that treasure out of France. And she’d been the grandmother who’d told stories and braided my hair before school. She hadn’t needed to prove any of it. She just was.
I wasn’t Didi. But I was her granddaughter. And goddammit, I would be as strong as she was.
Kessler studied me for a long moment. “You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe. But it’s mine to make.”
“You’ll have time to reconsider.” He placed the pen gently back onto the desk. “I’m a patient man, Ms. Laurent. I’ve waited decades to find this egg. I can wait a few days more.” He nodded to Richter. “Take her back to?—”
A guard appeared in the doorway and crossed to Kessler. He leaned close and whispered something I couldn’t hear.
Kessler’s lip curled. Then, very quietly: “How many?”
Another whisper.
“It would appear we have visitors.” Kessler smoothed his jacket, adjusted his cuffs, and turned to Richter. “Take Ms. Laurent to the wine cellar.”