“Why didn’t they take them when they killed your mother?” Sandu asked.
She could tell he wasn’t ready to accept everything at face value, not with the blood of his family on her cards. She couldn’t blame him. She hadn’t looked forward to explaining. She hadn’t wanted to get to this point with him. There were things she might be able to tell him when they were alone if she ever came to trust him, but the others? She kept her hands steady with great effort. The familiar feel of the cards helped.
“They can’t wield them. Only my family can. Mother to daughter. That’s how it works. The cards will only talk to a member of our family.” She shuffled again. “The cards are capable of hiding themselves. It is possible they did.” She had taken them off her mother’s body before the police had arrived.
There was silence throughout the chamber as she laid out the cards on the small table and studied them. Only the steady drip of water could be heard—that and the sound of Adalasia’s heartbeat. If she could hear it, they all could. There were gaps in her story, too many, and she knew it. Sandu knew it. He was allowing her to get away with it for now. She knew he wouldn’t forever. His black eyes held those fiery red flames. The flames burned low, but she could see they leapt every now and then when he turned his gaze fully on her. A little shiver went through her body. She didn’t want to ever get on the wrong side of him.
She let her gaze slide over the other four. They watched her with the same unblinking, very focused eyes of predators, like Sandu, but they didn’t have access to her mind in the way he did. He could share with them, even connect her mind with theirs, but there was an intimacy Sandu had created between them when he had bound them together with his ritual words. Just the thought of him doing so without any discussion stirred her temper. She tried to push it down hastily. There was too much at stake to allow him to see too much of her.
She should have known there was no hiding anything from him. Those black, merciless eyes found her, the red flames burning over her skin like a physical touch.
“Why do these people want the cards?” Petru asked.
“My guess would be to open the gates. I don’t have those answers. I know only the bare minimum. Four decks that were to be protected. The cards guard the gates, and we’re the gatekeepers, mother to daughter for centuries. As I mentioned, at one time, we had others guarding us, but they were killed or corrupted, leaving us on our own.”
“You keep talking about the gates,” the Carpathian called Nicu said. “What gates are you guarding?”
Adalasia sighed. “Everything I say is going to sound as if I’m making things up.”
“Like our ability to fly?” Sandu suggested. “I think if you can believe that of us, we can believe what you tell us.”
She had to give them something, so she took a deep breath and let it out. “According to everything I was told as a child, there is a wild creature in hell, which can’t be let loose on the world, trapped behind four gates. Each of those gates can only be opened by a specific alignment of the tarot cards. Only one of the ancient decks can make that alignment. I have one of the decks, and these people that were watching me are after the deck.”
Sandu looked at her sharply. She was telling the truth, yet she wasn’t.
“They had a chance to take the deck along with your mother, but they didn’t. They murdered her and left the deck with you,” Sandu said. “Why?”
There was no emotion in his voice. She knew if she touched his mind, there would be none there, either. He could close off his feelings when he wanted, but she couldn’t. The moment he said “murder,” she was thrown back to that evening, opening the door to their home, tired after working but looking forward to seeing her mother. The entire living room was wrecked, furniture overturned and broken, blood pooled on the floor and splattered on one wall and across her mother’s favorite antique gold brocade chair. Her mother lay like a broken doll, small in her death when she’d been so vibrant in life.
Adalasia’s fingers stroked the cards, needing the comfort of them. Her mother’s hands had been on these cards long before she’d ever touched them. Willing herself not to let the burn behind her eyes give way to tears, she lifted her chin at Sandu and his brethren. Men so like him. Men without emotion.
“How could I possibly have the answer to what the murderers were thinking when they killed my mother?”
Sandu’s eyes leapt and burned with fiery flames. “You cannot lie to a lifemate. You know the reason. What is it?” he challenged.