Page 188 of Blue Moon

“Miles Bradley. Ryder and I have spoken before.” His face creased into a puzzled frown. “The hot chicken?”

“Huh?”

“The shirt. It says ‘I am hot chicken, I sleep with donkeys’ or something along those lines. I can translate hieroglyphs reasonably well, but I’m not fluent.”

“Shit,” Ryder muttered under his breath as I started laughing. He peeled off the shirt, balled it up, and tossed it over his shoulder, where it hit a pretty brunette in a dress that was a longer version of mine. She was heading in our direction with Emmy. Ryder upgraded the “shit” to “fuck,” and I laughed harder.

“Bradley, leave Luna alone. Ryder, meet your new colleague. Brontë, this is Ryder Metcalfe and his lovely new wife. He’s been on secondment with the Vegas office for a few months.”

Brontë held out the shirt. “You dropped this.”

“Uh, thanks.”

Emmy was dressed in the most risqué costume of all, a beaded dress that was mostly see-through. I’d worn a lot of stupid outfits, but I wasn’t sure I’d have dared to venture out in public like that, even in my crazy days.

“Did Egyptian women really wear that stuff?” I asked.

I didn’t miss the glare she cast in Bradley’s direction. “Apparently so.”

The biggest man I’d ever seen glided up to her. Black, her husband. I’d met him in San Gallicano. “Just don’t bend over, Diamond, or I might have to kill somebody.”

I was only half-sure he was joking.

The group moved on, leaving Ryder and me with Miles, and I took a moment to savour the silence.

“I just wanted to say thanks for helping with…you know. The Mark Antony situation.”

“You’re welcome. From what I hear, it was a tragedy all around. You never met Julia Strand, but she was quite a woman, and to die the way she did… I wouldn’t be surprised if her passing upset Mr. Hebert deeply.”

“He talked about her often while we were in Utah. Did you know her well?”

“Not well enough to call her a friend, but we enjoyed several fascinating conversations over the years. I specialise in the New Kingdom, while she focused on more recent times.”

“So the New Kingdom wasn’t recent?”

“It was relatively new. We’re talking over a thousand years BC.”

“And Cleopatra died in thirty BC?”

“Someone’s been studying.” Miles looked pleased. “Yes, in terms of timeline, we’re closer to the Founding Fathers than Cleopatra was to the New Kingdom. I think you would have found Julia an interesting woman to talk with, at least in her heyday. She withdrew from public life in recent years.”

“Right, the whole tomb curse thing.”

“Tomb curse?”

“Mark Antony said she freaked out when she found it.”

“And this tomb belonged to…?”

“To Antony and Cleopatra.”

“Let me get this straight… The man who kidnapped you, he claimed that Julia found Antony and Cleopatra’s final resting place?” Miles shook his head. “Impossible. She would have told the world.”

“No, someone died there, so she just sealed everything up and left. I mean, I guess he could have been lying, but he had a photo on his phone.”

“A photo?”

“Gold busts on stone pillars and a bunch of hieroglyphics.” Now Miles had the strangest look in his eyes. “What?”

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