CHAPTER 26 GIGI
GIGI
The Musée de St. Adelaide was a square building with Grecian columns.
It didn’t take Gigi long, after darting up an impressive concrete staircase to get a better look at the building, to ascertain that all of those columns had been marked with the same fleur-de-lis from Calla’s necklace.
Now that Brady had decomposed the symbol—at least partially—Gigi saw it in three parts.
A lily. Two omegas. And a point. After dwelling on that for a good, long moment, Gigi turned her attention to the statue of Saint Adelaide.
“You came. You saw.” Knox glared encouragingly at Gigi. “Now it’s time to leave.”
“Nora won’t,” Gigi pointed out. “She won’t leave until she gets what she came here for, and I’m starting to have some pretty compelling theories about what that might be.”
It’s not going to be you.
You’d never survive.
Run away, little girl.
“Inside.” Knox’s voice tore Gigi from her thoughts. His tone was the kind that was meant to be obeyed. Immediately.
Unfortunately for him, Gigi had never really been all that good at following directions, so instead, she turned around to look past Knox, half-expecting to see Nora, but at the bottom of the staircase, there was a man who looked to be in his fifties, flanked on either side by two twentysomethings.
The younger guys were enormous, at least six feet five, built like linemen and clearly related to each other.
“Welcoming committee?” Gigi said under her breath.
Knox didn’t reply.
“I’d heard you were back in town.” The older man had a rich voice, his accent more pronounced than either Brady’s or Knox’s.
He had long, black hair that was streaked silvery gray at the temples and wore it tied back, which made his features—including eyebrows that appeared to have been viciously plucked—look that much more severe.
“Or more accurately, I heard you were hiding out in the bayou. Pity you chose to show your face here.”
For me, Gigi thought. Knox had come into town for her.
“Is the Grandest Game over, then?” The man didn’t seem bothered by Knox’s silence. “Dare I ask who won?”
Gigi realized then who the man was: Orion Thorp, Knox’s sponsor in the game and Calla’s father, in name, at least. Does that make the other two some of the cousins who hated Calla?
It suddenly occurred to Gigi that the older boys who’d jumped Brady and Knox when they were in elementary school might have been Thorps.
“If you did win,” Orion continued when it was clear Knox wouldn’t say a word, “you’ll be hearing from my attorneys, who will collect my due. If you lost, our association is at its end. Either way, boy, there is no need for you to step foot in this town, now or ever again.”
Knox turned his head slowly toward Gigi. Inside. The order was silent this time.
This is bad, Gigi thought, as Knox began slowly descending the steps, stopping only when he was standing toe-to-toe with Calla’s father. Knox and Orion Thorp were the exact same height, their builds equally matched.
“Calla’s alive.” Knox came out swinging—metaphorically—and Orion Thorp responded by backhanding him hard enough to send a man twice Knox’s size to the ground.
Knox didn’t go down. He popped his jaw and cocked his head, and the next thing Gigi knew, Brady was there, at the bottom of the steps, holding Knox back, no Nora in sight.
“Get inside, Gigi.” Brady was the one who issued the order this time, and this time, Gigi did as she was told, not because she was scared and not because Brady Daniels had told her to do it but because she deeply suspected that if Orion Thorp said a word to her, Brady wouldn’t be able to hold Knox back.
So Gigi went inside the museum, her heart pounding and her mind roaring as she thought about Orion Thorp, about Calla and Calla’s necklace, about the entire Thorp family and the one person in this town, other than Nora and Calla herself, who might know something.
The person who’d given Calla that necklace. The person who had presumably plastered the Thorp fleur-de-lis all over this town.
“Can I help you, honey?” a big-haired, pearl-wearing docent asked Gigi.
Gigi offered the docent her most charming smile. “I would love it,” she said sweetly, “if you could point me toward a back exit and tell me where in this town a person might go if they happened to have information that would be of great interest to Helena Thorp.”