Page 30 of Sins of Leo

“She’s not here to dissect my feelings but because someone tried to rob her and, when that failed, sent some mercs to kill her. I had no choice but to bring her here.”

“To your room.”

“Not my choice. Tower’s being a dick,” he grumbled. “I think it took Sage a little too literally.”

“What did Sage say?”

“That we have to work together to find the door in that picture you scanned yesterday. And now fucking Tower is making her stay with me, which is bullshit. We have tons of room.”

“Do we? Could be all of the other rooms are occupied.”

“We’d have seen some sign.”

“Don’t be so sure. There could be hundreds of people living all around us. You know Tower is good at hiding stuff,” Aquarius reminded as he leaned over to grab the book. “What do we have here?”

“Some kind of journal written by Ruth’s father. Same dude who drew the picture.”

“Let me guess, we’re looking for clues about the door’s location.”

“Bingo. I’d give you a treat for guessing right, but my presence is gift enough.”

Aquarius stiffened before turning to him. “Been a while since I’ve heard you joking. Glad to see this therapist is helping.”

“Has nothing to do with her,” he muttered.

“If you say so. Now let’s see what we have.”

Aquarius flipped through the pages manually, his brow creasing. “Sloppy handwriting. It will make it hard to transcribe.”

“But it can be done.”

“Yeah. It will be time-consuming. I’ve got to manually take a picture of each page.”

“There’s no better way?”

“Unless Tower suddenly figures out how to scan and upload image code, then no.” Aquarius grimaced. “I’ll get it done, but I probably won’t have anything for you until tomorrow.”

“I can help,” Leo quickly offered, not ready to leave.

“Appreciate it, brother. While you start, let me show you what I’ve found so far on that picture you brought in last night.”

Aquarius handed over his phone—because Leo didn’t own one—and Leo began taking pictures, page by page while Aquarius yapped.

“So, first thing I did was compare the image to the archives. First to see if it popped up as a known site, and second to confirm whether or not anyone else had documented it.”

“And?” Leo asked, pausing before clicking the next pic.

“Nada. The drawing appears to be unique. So next thing I did was run an internet search using several descriptors. Door in wall with vine. Zodiac symbols. But that pulled up a ton of garbage. Turns out people’s obsession with constellations makes them a common decorative theme.”

“Did you find anything at all, or are you simply going to dazzle me with useless results?” Leo drawled.

“Just informing you of what I’ve tried thus far. Next, I compared the visible building elements to known ruins. Since there was no scale to the image, I couldn’t predict measurements, though. Nor could identify the type of stone, which would have been helpful—some rock can only be found in certain parts of the world. I also closely examined the doorwayfor chisel marks and clues to the technique used to shape the arch and carve the sigils.” Aquarius pointed to an enlarged version of the image on his screen. “Different societies used different methods and tools to work with rock. Some had a distinctive style. However, in this case, I couldn’t pinpoint how it was made because the artist didn’t include those finer details, but I highly doubt lasers were used as my analysis program suggested.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Leo muttered.

“If the artist was accurate with his rendition, then it’s possible the doorway was created via magic. Kind of like how Tower provides.”

Magic. There was a time when Leo scoffed at the word. Like Ruth, he’d refused to believe until he couldn’t deny what he saw with his own two eyes.

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