Page 22 of Control's Undoing

Xavier sat back, enjoying Colum’s narrow-eyed glare.“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I won’t be having that, I know what I’m about,” Colum shot back, looking genuinely insulted by the idea that he’d missed something.

“Apparently not.”Xavier was getting irritated.He could have already explained what he’d found if only the two of them would shut up.

“Xavier, enough,” Annie said, still touching Colum’s shoulder protectively.

Xavier’s irritation blossomed.Snatching up his bag, he pulled out a tablet with the scanned images of each page of the partial manuscript.

“In the manuscript, Wilde talks about secrets, yes?”Xavier tapped his tablet, bringing up the images he’d annotated of key pages in the manuscript.“Here, he says that in a letter to his ‘American friend’—”

“Marie Prescott?”Annie asked.

“—he wrote to her and said, ‘A fool keeps secrets in their head, while a wise man has no secrets to keep.’”Xavier pointed at the image.Wilde had emphasized the supposed quote from his own letter with an underline.

“I remember that part,” Colum interrupted.“Clearly Wilde’s using that to explain or justify why he’s writing down all these secrets.”

“So Wilde’s calling himself a fool?”Annie asked.“Or a wise man, because he’s not going to keep the secrets?”

“Not unprecedented that he called himself a fool,” Xavier said with a shrug, then quoted Wilde.“‘The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself.I was such a one too long.You have been such a one too long.Be so no more.’”

“So he told Marie Prescott in a letter that he was a fool if he kept his secrets in his head,” Annie summarized.“Add that to the clues about the play that was produced in New York, and our plan to head there tomorrow sounds better and better.”

“Yes, butwhatare we looking for?Wilde told us.”Xavier arched a brow, looking between them and tipping his head toward the tablet he held up, inviting them to answer.

Colum’s gaze flicked over the tablet, then Xavier’s face.He slumped a little, and Xavier hated that he looked so defeated.Merde, he should have approached this differently.

Then Colum looked up, calm and focused.The intense, sharp intelligence in the other man’s eyes was incredibly attractive.

“What did I miss?”Colum asked in a low voice.

“He never wrote that to Marie Prescott,” Xavier said.“The quote about the wise man and the fool.”

“That we know of,” Annie countered.“Is every letter they ever sent to one another published?”

“According to her estate, yes,” Xavier said.“I searched every library to check.And even if it was written in some long-lost letter, why would he repeat that particular line?Why is this line the only time he underlines a quote?”Xavier tapped the image of the page again.“There are plenty of quotes in the manuscript, but he underlinedthisone.”

Annie sighed.“You could have started with that.”

“The underline only confirms what I already thought,” Xavier snapped, annoyed once again.

“Xavier, get to the point.”

He carefully set down the tablet.“My apologies, why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned instead.How areyouhelping?”

Annie didn’t stop smiling, but there was a glint in her eyes.

“Why are you here?What do you do?”Xavier demanded.

“I’m an art expert.”

Xavier felt his lips quiver in a sneer, but he held it back.“You work in a museum?”

“No, I work for an auction house as an?—”

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