Nero's Fiddle (43 page)

“Very well, I shall have them delivered to you.” She took her seat and pulled a dispatch from the pile in front of her. The audience over, she no longer saw Nate and Cara and it was their prompt to leave just as invisibly.

Cara chewed her lip all the way home while her stomach roiled and rolled. Everything converged, her nightmares returned and when she turned her mind to their new task, it recoiled and cowered as she once did. At the mansion, she stripped off her outer layers and handed them over like an automaton. Nate guided her to his study with one hand in the small of her back.

“It all centres on the Curator. We need to learn more about him,” Nate said once the door closed behind them. “We need to dig into his history and try to figure out if there is an artifact that could do this.”

Cold gripped her and slowed her heart. “I can’t do this.” She shook her head paced in the study.

“Why?” Nate asked, watching her move back and forth.

How to put it into words? The dread stirred in her gut, the sixth sense telling her that this investigation would not end well. The little voice telling her to turn back, that she was being led up the garden path of a very elaborate trap. “We cannot go up against the Curator.”

“Don’t you want answers?”

“Perhaps I would rather not know.” The Curator. She remembered his cold touch, sucking all the warmth from her body. Did he have something that allowed him to do that on a larger scale, to take the heat and hope from an entire city? The old nobleman set her father on his path of destruction. The man who fed his obsession with resurrecting her mother. The man whose face appeared in her nightmares and obscured Clayton’s features. What was the connection? Her mind drew back,
better to not know
it whispered.

She stopped in front of Nate. “You have your new position as the queen’s spy master. Let’s leave the cold and go to Russia, I long to catch up with Natalie and see my dragon.”

He wouldn’t be swayed, but took her hands in his. “Don’t you want peace, Cara?”

She raised her gaze to meet his. The nightmare grew in intensity, thrusting her back into her fourteen-year-old body and making her relive the terror over and over.

“I want peace for you,” he said. “I would do anything to tear that memory from your mind so it never disturbed your sleep again.”

She took a deep breath and willed her rampaging stomach back under control. “I know. But part of me thinks I can outrun this.”

He smiled as he drew her into his arms. “You tried running once but I still caught you.” He stroked her back. “Let us lay the past to rest, for once and all. Plus, the queen commands it and we are the only ones with some idea of what is at play.”

The fear bubbled up, the nameless worry that preyed on her mind in her weakest moments. “What if I lose you?” A solitary tear slid down her cheek. “What if this is the fight we cannot win?”

“Impossible,” he breathed against her hair. “It’s just the idea of digging up the past waking your demons. We will fight this, and him. Together.”

She nodded, the demons laughed, and the dread remained.

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