Page 117 of Crown of the Fae King

My heart skipped a beat. “You’re not going to tell me you’re working for Orion.” I’d told him about theThirds. I’d told him what we were trying to do. The Hunter could eliminate the threat easily by just eliminating us. It would be game over!

“I’m not. I swear it.”

“But you hope we don’t find him?”

“I’m saying…it’s too late. He’s dead. I’m guessing five years dead. I just didn’t want you wasting your time when you have others to find.”

“How…how did he die?”

“Murdered. The only possibility. I suspect the same man who may be behind the disappearance of my brother and sister.”

I tried to sound innocent. “And who’s that?”

“The other name on The Covenant. Afi Cean More. If I can find him, I should know immediately. I expect he’ll have the king’s…beauty.”

I tried to see Wickham’s face in my head, but my emotions made me blind to everything. “Griffon! How…how do you know all this?”

“That, I can’t say.”

“Why?”

“I suppose I’ll have to keep my secrets…for as long as you keep yours.”

“Griffon…”

I listened to him breathe, unwilling to end the call.

He sighed.“Goodbye, my love. Remember your promise.”

I called the front desk,told them it was urgent, that I needed to know the number of the last incoming call. In the middle of the night, there couldn’t have been others in the last few minutes.

No red tape or anything. They just gave it to me. I wrote it on the Maldron Hotel notepad.

“Ye mean to call him back?”

I shook my head. “Gonna have Kitch track him. That way…that way we’ll see him coming.”

Urban snorted. “Unless he comes from the sky.”

48

Defcon Five

We didn’t bother spending the night. As soon as Wickham heard my voice, he popped in to take us home. While I studied his handsome face, he looked me over like he was searching for a tracking device—or for signs I’d been abused. I finally told him to knock it off. I was fine.

He stared me down, trying to read something in my eyes. So I crossed them, worried he’d see into my imagination where he was cutting off the head of the Grandfather, over and over again.

He wasn’t amused. “Glad ye’re takin’ this so lightly.”

“Griffon could have dropped me out of the sky. Believe me, I’m not taking anything lightly.” I made a face. “Glad you’re back, Lennon.”

He forced the barest of smiles. “Glad you’re back, Lennon. And just in time, too.”

“Why?”

“I thought…I feared our professor would have been informed, while he had ye… Lennon, video has been found…of ye getting into Asher Carew’s taxi. His last fare. The reporters have connected his disappearance to that of his sister’s, so…ye’re a person of interest here in Ireland, as well as Scotland. But if Griffon had been alerted, he might have returned ye in pieces.”

I shook my head slowly because my body was going numb. “We were…off the grid.” That hammer was about to strike again, and Griffon’s heart had just started mending from the first. “It’s just a matter of time, then.”

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