Page 13 of Midnight Torment

“As opposed to being almost empty?” Ash queried.

“Or full of poison?” I added, grinning when I saw their horrified expressions.

“Only you would consider that option,” Xavier said, shaking his head at me. “You probably were the one who put the poison in the glass.”

I winked at him. “If it was me, it would be odourless, tasteless, and damn near impossible to detect at post mortem.”

Ash chuckled and continued to flick through images on the tablet in his hand. “Knowing you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the pathologist on that day.”

I tended to draw a line at cutting up the dead, but there were times in the past when bullets needed to be retrieved, and I was thorough in my work. Grampa had taught me to take pride in my work.

“Fuck off,” I muttered and returned to the problem in front of me.

All of the clues were symbols, some from ancient dialects. “Maybe we should leave this in a room with the women?” I suggested. “The last time they decided to play investigator, they worked out about the Zodiac Brotherhood.”

Xavier threw me a filthy look. He didn’t like that his wife was involved in all of this. Right now, all the women were involved because they were nosey and couldn’t help themselves. That included Megan, who loved a mystery or something to dig her teeth in that wasn’t my shoulder during sex.

“My masculine pride would prefer for us to solve this ourselves,” Xavier said with a sheepish smile. “Especially since this is something we should all probably know.”

“Dad was hunting these art pieces for years, and the fucker never once mentioned it in any of our family meetings,” Ash replied. “Dad and Hugh were always as thick as thieves, so I imagine he knows something. Neither of them said a damn thing,”

Xavier sat down and rubbed his head. “I don’t need this. Cassandra is due in a few weeks and I should be decorating the nursery.” He sighed. “She’s been nest building again. My house has more cushions than I know what to do with.”

Yeah, the little fuckers had infested my house as well, not that I would ever admit that to the guys. Megan tended to pick the fluffy, feathered ones in various shades of pink. I swore they were breeding as there seemed to be more of them every time I arrived home.

She had once again got her own way and we were living in the house she loved, feeding that rodent walnuts. Right now, Flynn was watching over her since she had meetings booked in the conference room of her company. He not only ran my clean-up operation, but he was also the best rally driver I knew, and spent his spare time fiddling about with his cars and racing.

I doubted anyone would get within aim of her in that building. He was pretending to be an intern with her, scowling and grumbling because he was having to listen to the marital problems of women who were giving him the eye. He’d already sent me several rants via text message. I dreaded to think what he’d ask in payback for today.

“There has to be an order to it,” Xavier said. “A starting point that allows us to see the hidden message.”

Ash glanced up. “Considering the Zodiac Brotherhood uses a circle, maybe not. Also, the Council has used the symbol of the ouroboros for as long as these journals go back. They could have used it as a starting point for the message.”

Xavier groaned and closed his eyes. “I don’t need this right now.”

“Which brings me to the matter of what Dad had in the safe in Dragon’s Hoard that took his and Hugh’s key to open.” Ash sat back and placed the tablet on the table. “It has to be something to do with the Council since they had appointed themselves as chairpersons years ago. Why else would they have a safety deposit box together?”

“I’d forgotten about that,” I admitted. “It’s a good point.”

Ash reached into the pocket of his jacket hanging over his chair and produced a key to set it on the table. The top of it had a distinctive ouroboros symbol on it that fed into the main body of the key. “I found it in his personal possessions in his office when I was clearing it out. It made me think that maybe the Council has a safety deposit box and our dads were the custodians of it.”

“That doesn’t bode well,” Xavier replied. “And how the hell am I supposed to get my hands on dad’s key?”

“Do you know where he keeps all his keys?” I asked. Hugh tended to always have a new woman in his life and bed, there was no way he would leave something like that lying around.

Dragon’s Hoard tended to create their keys in twos, there were no spares, and if you didn’t have both then the box wouldn’t open. The other key should have the same symbol on it since their boxes weren’t numbered, but were designated by symbols.

“Was Dragon’s Hoard about at the time the Council formed?” I asked.

“No idea,” Xavier replied. “Why?”

“There seems to be an awful lot of overlaps that we aren’t seeing,” I replied. “I’m thinking about their reaction that day when you and Cassandra arrived with the keys to the Jenkins’ safety deposit box.”

Xavier leaned back in his chair and stared off into the distance in contemplation. “I’ve been in that place before and they never once reacted the way they did. It’s as if they were waiting for those keys to make a reappearance.”

“Which means they had knowledge of what happened to Frank Jenkins. His business partner and Malcom were both looking for keys,” Ash added, steepling his hands in front of him. “What were they looking for?”

“The deeds of the diamond mines were in there and the family documents from the Jenkins family,” Xavier said. “Whoever owns the deeds to those mines is a billionaire overnight.”

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