Carys grinned and rolled her eyes. “It’s perfect, Jordana, all of it. You thought of everything. The exhibit couldn’t possibly be in better hands.”
“Thanks.” Jordana smiled at the compliment, but she couldn’t help being reminded of her odd visitor, Mr. Cassian, and the fact that he’d said something very similar to her.
Carys gave her a quizzical look. “Did I say something funny?”
“No, it’s just …” Jordana shook her head. “A man came in to view the exhibit this afternoon.”
Carys frowned. “Someone you know?”
“No, I’d never seen him before. He apparently just wandered in from the street.”
“But the exhibit doesn’t open to the public until tomorrow night,” Carys pointed out.
“That’s what I told him.” Jordana took a sip of her wine. “He didn’t seem bothered that we weren’t officially open yet.”
“Weird,” Carys said, twisting some pasta onto her fork. “What did he want?”
Jordana shrugged. “I suppose he wanted to look at the art. That’s what he said, anyway. We talked for a while about Italian sculptors and compared some of the pieces in the collection, then he left.”
Carys eyed her over the rim of her wineglass. “Like I said, weird.”
“He was … nice,” Jordana said, taking a bite of her scampi as she thought about the man and the short time she spent with him in the exhibit.
He was a stranger, a peculiar one at that, and yet she’d felt almost instantly at ease around him. Despite his oddness and his uninvited presence in the museum, she had felt comfortable with him; safe, in some indefinable way. And she would have enjoyed talking with him a bit longer, had he not left the museum without explanation as soon as she turned her back.
Vanished, more like it.
Maybe Carys was right, there was something weird about the man.
Jordana’s musing was interrupted when her friend’s comm unit pulsed on the edge of the table with an incoming call.
“It’s Aric.” There was a note of bitterness in Carys’s voice as she spoke her brother’s name. Her fingers hovered over the device for less than a second before she drew her hand back onto her lap with a shallow sigh. The comm unit buzzed again, but Carys remained still, her mouth pressed into a flat line.
Jordana studied her across the small table. “You can’t shut him out forever, Car.” The Chase siblings hadn’t spoken since their heated confrontation over Rune the other night, and Jordana knew it was killing Carys to have a wall standing between her and her twin.
The device vibrated again, and with reluctance written all over her face, Carys finally picked it up. Before she even had the chance to utter a word of greeting, Aric’s deep voice came over the receiver. “Carys, where the hell are you right now?”
“Hello to you too, brother dear.”
His response was clipped and dark. “Are you at La Notte?”
“Since when do I have to answer to you, Aric?” Amber light sparked in the Breed female’s blue eyes. “Where I am is no business of yours. I thought I made that clear to you.”
“Dammit, Carys! I’m not playing a fucking game here,” he snarled, and suddenly it was obvious that Aric’s demanding tone wasn’t about anger but something more visceral. Something more urgent than that. He was calling out of fear and worry for his sibling. “Carys, tell me you’re nowhere near that goddamn place right now.”
Carys’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “What’s going on?”
Jordana could no longer hear Aric on the other end, but judging from his sister’s stricken expression, the news wasn’t good. Carys inhaled a sharp breath, her fingers coming up to her mouth for an instant before relief flooded back into her features. She listened for a moment, her face grim, then she quietly ended the call.
She glanced across the table at Jordana. “There’s been a killing at La Notte.”
“Oh, no,” Jordana murmured. “But it wasn’t—”
“No.” Carys shook her head. “Not Rune, thank God. Aric said it wasn’t any of the fighters, but he didn’t have any more information than that. Some of the warriors are heading there now to investigate. Aric told me to stay away from the club tonight.”
And yet Carys was already pulling out cash enough for the bill and a generous tip from her pocketbook. “I have to see Rune,” she explained as she got up. “I just need to see for myself that he’s okay.”
The depth of Carys’s love for the fighter was evident in her eyes. So was her fear. The strong Breed female trembled where she stood, visibly shaken by the news of a death at the place where her lover risked his life every night in the cages.