Page 65 of Us in Ruins

“Oh, god,” Margot said. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I never would have brought him up.”

“I know.” Something crossed his face—a flurry of emotions, faint as fresh snow—and then he said, “He underestimated me, Atlas did. Loved to remind me that I was a grifter he picked up off Fifty-Eighth. But I was a quick learner, and even if I had to work twice as hard to convince him I was worth my salt, I wasn’t going back empty-handed.”

Margot’s ribs squeezed too tightly around her chest. She knew the feeling. Knew what it was like to have people peer down their noses at her, scrutinizing her every move. Every snide remark Astrid made had wormed under Margot’s skin, eating her away like dry rot. It found the weak joists and threatened to tear down the very foundations of Margot.

And now she was here, in a mess of her own creation, about to lose the one person who finally seemed to understand her to some dumb freaking Roman curse. Thanks a lot, Venus.

“Van, I—” The words clogged her throat. How was she supposed to say sorry for something this big? It was her fault he was here in the first place, and her job to save him.

But her engines were running low on coal. She hated to admit that all her false bravado had lost its shine. She wanted to believe she could pass some silly test. That whatever it took to heal Van, she’d do it, even if she had to do it alone.

Could she? Or had everyone been right to underestimate her?

Van slowed to a stop in front of a stone staircase mostly overgrown with weeds. Above, carved into the cliffside, a doorway watched like an open eye. It reminded Margot of a cartoon supervillain’s lair, which wasn’t exactly the place she wanted to parade inside unprepared.

She could be brave for him. She had to be.

“Ladies first,” she insisted as she took the first step up the staircase.

“Margot, wait,” Van said, struggling to catch up with her. “I’ll find this one. It’s a bit tricky.”

“Tricky,” she echoed with a laugh that didn’t quite land. “After the week we’ve had, I think I can handle tricky.”

If anything, her pace accelerated. She’d been prodded forward with a hot iron of fear. Frankly, she wasn’t sure if it was her own, or if she’d borrowed Van’s and carried it like it was hers. The more he slowed, the faster she ran.

At the top, Margot could see the white-painted houses dotting the Naples hillsides. The roads were veins, connected to the heart of the vibrant city. A short metal fence encircled the historic area, as if to protect it from overly curious onlookers or amateur gravediggers. It was going to take a lot more than that to deter her.

Shirking off the strap of her tote bag, Margot planted her hands on the fence. She kicked a leg up, hooking it around the top, and then launched herself over. This time, she landed on her feet.

Ahead, a statue wept over a stone bench, carved in swaths of pleated drapery, and beyond that, the mouth of the cave opened wide. The statue shifted her head and batted open milk-white eyes. A jolt of energy surged through Margot. Living marble meant the shard had to be close.

“It’s here,” Van said. He snatched Margot’s bag off the ground as he reached the landing. “I can feel it.”

Still, he struggled to heave himself over the fence. His hands clawed through the grates, but his feet kept slipping off, heavy as boulders.

“What do I do?” Margot asked, gravitating forward.

“Wait for me,” Van grunted. He tumbled over the top of the fence and landed hard against the earth. As he tried to lift himself upright, his limbs creaked and moaned, the magic not yet seeping through his bones.

The statue watched their every move. Her ivy-wreathed plaque read The Mourning of Virgil, and when she raised her hand, the movement lifted a pedestal out of the earth at the back of the tomb.

Margot squinted. Was she imagining it, or was the shard just... sitting there? Could it really be that easy? So much for being tricky.

A magnetic pull dragged her toward the tomb despite the well of emotion already bubbling up. She wouldn’t cry. She would not cry. Not now. Now, all she needed to do was grab the Vase shard and turn Van back to normal.

An eerie chill lingered inside the cave’s walls, and the whole thing smelled like sage smoke and ash. Thankfully, Van had been right about the whole cremation thing. The tomb was blessedly devoid of ivory bones.

It didn’t stop another shiver from slithering across her skin. For all her phases, grave robber never really made the list. She just needed to think happy thoughts. Like the silver glisten of pride she’d see in her dad’s eyes when she FaceTimed him with the Vase—whole and real and not some foolish girl’s daydream.

Margot paced along the wide perimeter of the room. Something had been written on the walls, singed into the stone in a way that left a permanent soot stain. Her fingers trailed the shape of the letters, familiar enough to be recognizable but not forming any words she knew.

“Whatever you do, don’t go—”

Van’s sentence was cut off with a deafening crash.

“—inside.”

All the light in the tomb vanished in a single instant, plunging Margot into a pool of black. Panic zipped up her throat, tightening until she could barely inhale.

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