Page 101 of Beloved Sacrifice

Chapter Seventeen

“I think it’s time,” Marek said, “that you tell me what’s really going on.”

Marek didn’t dare move too much—Rose was still asleep on his shoulder—but Weston had slid out of bed several moments ago, disappearing into the bathroom.

Now that he’d come out, Marek wanted him to start talking.

Weston nodded once, then started pulling on his pants and shirt. Rose, warm and soft at Marek’s side, shifted a little, her dark raven’s wing brows drawing together. He hadn’t planned to wake her, but Weston grabbed her foot and gave it a little jiggle.

“Wake up, Brown Eyes.”

Rose must not have been deeply asleep because she opened her eyes and sat up. She raised her arms, stretching them above her head. The blankets fell, and her particularly lovely breasts were on display. He hadn’t gotten to taste those pink nipples, and that was something he hoped to rectify.

Marek waited for Rose to rise, then he slid off the bed. He spent a few minutes converting the bed back into divans. He took his turn in the bathroom, emerging to see Rose and Weston standing in the space between the couches.

“Hungry?” he asked.

They both nodded. He slid between them, his skin reacting to the heat from their bodies. He opened the door and led them out into the main cabin. The flight attendant’s expression was perfectly neutral and pleasant. He advised them that they had about two hours of flight time left, then took their dinner order.

Tristan was less reserved, and rolled his eyes. “If you three are done, I’m going to lie down for a few hours.”

“Put a sheet down first.” Weston grinned.

Knight made a gagging noise but plodded into the back.

They took their seats, Marek and Weston across from one another, Rose across the aisle, leaning on the armrest so she’d be closer to them.

Weston took a minute, apparently to gather his thoughts. “We told you about the purists.”

It wasn’t a question, but Marek replied. “Yes.”

“The purists aren’t just ideologues. In fact, I don’t think that my parents care at all about that aspect of it. The purists may have started out as Nazi sympathizers. But now there’s something else going on.”

Rose took up the story when Weston stopped speaking. “They’ve been protecting something. A secret. Actually, many secrets. Caden…” Her voice trembled a little when she said the dead man’s name. “Caden and I kept trying to find the big secret. Something that, if we knew it, would give us leverage. We’d be able to leave.”

“And you didn’t dare leave unless you had it because of Tabitha,” Marek said, hoping to push the conversation forward faster. He felt a flash of annoyance but tempered it with patience. This wasn’t just a story to them. It was memories, each of which might come with an ache of remembered pain.

“For a while, we thought the secret was these tunnels that connected with the Trinity Masters headquarters. Then we thought it was what was in the tunnels.”

Marek kept his gaze steady on Rose, but then switched it to Weston when he took over.

“Art, particularly paintings. Once I’d recovered from this,” Weston motioned to the right side of his body, “I started sneaking back to Boston and cataloguing what they had in there. Every time I went, there was less of it.”

“All this hidden art became their piggy bank.” Rose’s lips twisted. “My job was to keep the map of the tunnels. Give it out to people who were loyal to the purists. I tried to stop them by editing the map, but they still got in. Members of the purists would go in, grab a painting or sculpture, and sell it. Instant money. And the Andersons were the worst. At one point, they cleared out most of it…” The end of her sentence trailed off, and she frowned as if remembering something.

“The art was all pieces that disappeared during WWII.”

“Nazi art?” Marek asked. That was quite the secret.

“That’s what I thought originally,” Weston said.

“And that’s what we thought, but when we approached them about it, they laughed us off,” Rose said.

“And I identified some pieces that the Nazis could have never gotten their hands on.”

Marek thought back to the tape. “The boxes the woman remembered being loaded onto a Spanish boat…those were the art.”

Weston nodded. “That’s what I think. I’d found some diaries belonging to U.S. seamen who served on the USS Bluebird. The ship that sank the Esperanza. They were hidden away in the office of the Grand Master.”

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