Page 60 of Midnight Torment

His arms held me securely every night, and I woke every morning wrapped around him. For the first time in my life, I finally knew what love felt like. When Cassandra had been swept off her feet by Xavier, I’d been envious deep down inside because I desperately wanted that—love without expectations. Jordan accepted me for who I was, never once asking me to change anything about myself.

“What are you studying?” I asked, leaning over his shoulder to stare at his doodles on a notepad on the table.

Jordan leaned back into me and I wrapped my arms around his neck, pressing a kiss to his bare shoulder. “These are some of the symbols on the different artefacts. They’re bugging me after what Johannes said the other day at the diamond mine. The other fact being what were they doing in the mine since they had only been on items before that.”

“What if the mine is just another item?” I suggested. “After all, if something can be owned, then technically, it’s a possession.”

“Huh?” Jordan turned in my arms to stare up at me. “What did you say?”

“I said you’re only looking for moveable items, when in reality anything can be a possession, from that dusty old mine to that fancy house that hosts all your Council meetings.”

His eyes widened and he lunged forward to grab his phone, his finger moving rapidly across the screen. “Why didn’t I fucking think of that?” he muttered.

I straightened and stared down at him. “Because you’re a criminal barrister and I am a divorce solicitor. We deal in estates and the value of them. If it can be owned and has a value, then technically your spouse is entitled to fifty percent of it.”

He slowly shook his head. “The fucking answer was there all the time and it never occurred to me because I was searching for antiquities.”

His phone pinged a few seconds before it rang. “Yeah?” Jordan glanced at me for a moment. “Megan figured it out. I think the last clues are places, not artifacts. I remember when I was converting the tunnels under the Council house seeing those symbols and merely thinking they were just etchings. What if that was where the original meetings were held? Literally an underground society that met in a fucking cellar.”

I heard raised voices from the other side of the conversation and wandered into the kitchen to pour some cool drinks. The sunshine and heat were lovely, but I was built for cooler climates. My hair in this humidity had taken on a lifeforce of its own, and was a mass of curls that refused to be tamed.

Jordan seemed to spend his time in bed playing with it and twirling my curls around his finger. I swear my mother must have eaten Curlywurly bars when she was pregnant with me, and they had infiltrated my hair genetics.

I sipped my drink and brought a glass into Jordan, who paced the room like an enclosed panther. He took the proffered glass from my hand and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

“Yeah, you can access it from the tunnel into the house without anyone knowing you’re there,” Jordan said. “Did you analyse the images from the mine? Yeah, I saw they were together like a sentence instead of one or two. In fairness, Ash, you were the one who deciphered Matteus’ diaries.”

Jordan trailed his fingers through his hair and stopped to glare at his reflection in the window. The storm brewing in his eyes told me he was slowing losing control. I moved across the room, my arms snaking around his waist, and my head resting between his shoulder blades. I silently breathed, and felt his body slowly begin to relax against mine as my hands moved up and down over his rock-hard abs.

I was able to read Jordan without words, see what he needed before he vocalised it. He had watched my every reaction until I was an open book to him. My entire life had been an elaborately constructed lie until this man. He tore down my barricades and made me feel.

“Yeah, I’m still here. We need to end this, guys. We deserve to have the happy endings that everyone else gets.” My heart thudded harder in my ears because when I first met him, he never visualised a future. His third rule was not to fall in love because he planned to die young in pursuit of vengeance and retribution.

“Gather all the information together. We need to figure this out once and for all…” His voice trailed off.

Since Jordan’s mood had calmed, I wandered over to the paperwork on the table. Jordan had sketched different artifacts and symbols beside it. Over the past few years, I tended to visit museums at weekends to fill the loneliness that sometimes hit me. It meant that I had acquired a deeper appreciation for history, and had particularly enjoyed the Egyptian collection on display last year in London.

Each piece on here appeared to be from a different time and place, nothing bringing them together as a common denominator. My fingers drummed the top of the table, my gaze jumping from one line to another. The ancient Egyptians read from left to right or right to left, the order heralded by looking at the way the human or animal figures faced, as that denoted the beginning of a sentence.

I slowly started to rip the page, until each sample was on a piece of paper by itself. The only logical order for them was chronological, so I set them out as best I could determine, although I was sure I had a few wrong.

A shadow cast over the table, Jordan’s body heat soaking into me from behind. “What are you doing?”

“Treating this as a puzzle,” I replied, placing the line of text from the mine above the other pieces. “As I haven’t seen the artefacts, I’m trying to gauge their age from your drawings.”

“Hold on, guys.” Jordan set his phone on the table beside me, his arm reaching over me to rearrange the order. “I think this might be the correct chronology.”

“Why are we looking at the dates?” Xavier’s voice sounded from the phone on the table and I realised too late Jordan had put it on loudspeaker.

“It’s as good an order as any,” I replied. “Men living in the same time period decide to leave a message for future generations to find and decipher. Why not leave all the items from the time period they lived in since it was personal to them?”

“No idea,” Xavier replied, even though I’d meant it as a rhetorical question.

“It only makes sense if they wanted you to place the items in a certain order. Humans tend to work in scales: low to high, left to right, pale to dark. If the same holds true, then we would apply the same logic to this.” I glanced up at Jordan. “Why? What were you planning on doing with them?”

He shrugged his left shoulder. “I planned to try and work out the meaning of the symbols and then rearrange the words when it was translated until it made sense. To do that, I was more focused on collecting all the clues.”

“What I don’t understand is the diamond mine,” I said.

---