RICHARD DAMN FOX.
Somehow he seemed bigger than he was the last time I’d seen him, weeks ago, when he’d abandoned me in the Pera Palace in Istanbul. Looked older, too. His overlong dark hair was streaked with a little more silver above his temples. And his big, bushy beard was grayer than I remembered. Was that possible? It matched the steely eyes that blinked at me now.
All this time. Everything I’d been through . . . Here he was now. It felt like a mirage. Like I’d wake up from this nightmare any second and I’d be back at the Pera Palace Hotel, wrapped up in fine linens and Turkish coffee wafting next to my bed.
“Daddy?” I said, my eyes welling with tears.
“Empress?” he answered in his deep, bottomless voice.
Images flooded my head. Of him teaching me how to write ciphers. How to ride a camel in the Egyptian desert. Him giving me a polished Corinthian helmet when I was eight and his big, happy laugh when it slipped down over my eyes. Him holding me in his lap and quieting my crying when Mother died, night after night after night . . .
My father. Easy to love, difficult to like. That’s what Mother always said.
I just hadn’t realized how much I loved him until that moment.
I couldn’t hold on to the tears any longer. A feral sound escaped my mouth, and I broke down and sobbed.
“Hush now,” he said, reaching through the bars to curl his big hand around the back of my neck. “Foxes don’t cry. And you know I’ll be a blubbering damn mess if you don’t stop.”
I huffed out a little laugh and gripped his wrist, pressing my cheek against it. He smelled familiar, like Turkish tobacco and boot polish. “I thought . . . I worried you were dead.”
“Me? Never. I’ve told you a thousand times, the devil doesn’t want me and Saint Peter’s busy. You’re stuck with me,” he said, flashing me white teeth in the dark. But his mood sobered quickly, and he released my neck. “You aren’t supposed to be here. You were to be on an ocean liner headed back home.”
“And you were supposed to be in Bucharest! We waited and waited, and I heard all about your drunken misadventure with the major’s wife, FYI—”
“Christ almighty,” he muttered.
“And when you didn’t show up, we telegrammed Jean-Bernard and found out he’d been poisoned—did you know that?”
He nodded. “I talked to him yesterday. Long-distance telephone call cost me a fortune. He’s still in the hospital, but he’s awake.”
“Thank God,” I whispered. “Well, anyway, like I said, we didn’t know if he was going to live, and you didn’t show, so I figured out your cipher—”
“Goddammit,” he muttered.
“You told Huck to give me the journal!”
He groaned, but not unhappily. “How’d you get to be so damn smart? Not from my genes, I’ll tell you that. Unless stubbornness counts.”
“Yes, well. I imagine that doesn’t hurt.” As I wiped my cheeks, I saw his other arm tucked to his chest and bound in a dirty sling made from torn cloth. “You’re injured.”
“Not more than usual. Rothwild’s bruisers jumped me at the train station last night.”
“You’ve been locked up in here since last night?”
“We can talk about it later,” he said with his usual stupid machismo. Nothing ever hurt, he never got sick, and there was always a way out of trouble.
God, I’d missed him.
“No more of that, now,” he warned, eyes glossy. “Need to be quick and get out while we can. How did you get into the cavern?”
“Through the castle,” I said.
He gave me a concerned look, squinting over high, ever-pink cheeks that topped his bushy beard. “You just walked in here? Where’s Huck?”
“With Lovena at the Zissu brothers’ shop.”
“The witch?” He squinted at me, confused. “You found the Zissu brothers? Why is Huck there?”
“He got kidnapped and poisoned?”
“What?”
“Some kind of witchy herb—probably the same one Sarkany used on her sister and maybe Jean-Bernard. But Lovena says she can help him. She’s already helped us. You can trust her.”
He blinked at me with gray eyes and murmured, “Told that boy to protect you or I’d kill him.”
“Well, he’s getting a head start,” I said dryly.
“What in God’s name have the two of you been doing?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “A lot of talking, I can tell you that much.”
A guilty look crossed his face. But only for a moment. Richard Fox never admitted to anything. “Anything else I need to know?”
“I figured out the ring. You had it all wrong. All three rings are real. They’re bands that fit together like a puzzle to make one ring. And I’ve got one of the bands. Look.” I retrieved the iron ring box from my coat pocket. It wouldn’t fit through the bars, but I could tell by my father’s shocked expression that he knew exactly what it was.
“Where the devil did you get that? Was it those twins? How did you find them?” He shook his head. “You know what? Never mind. Put that damned ring away and just get me the hell out of here before that monster comes back.”
I shoved the iron box back into my coat pocket. “Where is he now?”
“Don’t know. Need to quit yapping and hurry. Find something to pry open the lock.”
Right. The lock. I wished Huck were here to pick it. “Can’t you break it open with one of those rocks over there?”
“Tried that. They just break up into pieces. Is that flashlight solid?”
It was metal and weighed a ton. “Pretty solid,” I told him.
“Could work. Let me see it—I think it’ll fit. So close . . .”
I stilled. “Do you hear something?”
“Just rats,” he said after listening. “One tried to bite my hand earlier. Probably carrying the damn plague.”
No, it wasn’t rats. It was more like . . . music.
He wasn’t interested. “We’ll worry about it later. Here, empress. Try it through these two bars on the door over here. They’re farther apart, I think.”
I did my best to ignore the niggling sound while trying the bars he suggested. They were far enough apart. But it didn’t matter. The moment I slipped the flashlight into his waiting fingers, the barred cell door creaked and swung inward.
“What the . . . ?”
“It’s open!” I said, joy rushing through me. I pushed it further while he moved out of the way.
“That’s impossible,” he said, squinting at the door. “I’ve been beating on it for hours.”
“Don’t kick a gift horse.”
He started to argue with me. But before he could get a word out, he dropped the flashlight and jerked me toward him, into the cell. As he backed up, he shouted over my head, “You stay away from my daughter, you sick bastard!”
I twisted out of his grip and swung around, heart racing. A bearded man in a black suit stepped into the candlelight. And as he did, the music grew louder.
THUMP-THUMP.
THUMP-THUMP.
The bone ring!
In two quick movements, he strode to the cell and grabbed the door to swing it shut. And as he turned a key, locking me in with Father, my eyes went straight to the man’s hand: Two ivory bands were linked together on his forefinger. The only band that was missing was the one that fit in the middle.
The one inside my coat pocket.
THUMP-THUMP, THUMP-THUMP.
My vision swam. I gripped my father’s arm to stay upright.
“Miss Fox,” the man said with no emotion through the bars of the locked cell. “I see you received my message.”
“Hello, Mr. Sarkany,” I gritted out over the thumping noise.
“Sarkany?” my father growled. “This is George Rothwild.”