Page 48 of Crying Wolfe
“We were supposed to have come looking for the chalice together, Caleb, Beau, and I. But before we could look into it, something happened.”
“Oh no.” She held him tighter, pressing a kiss to his knuckles, correctly guessing the reveal of a corpse.
“There was a cave-in at one of the mines. A new acquisition, one I bought despite my reservations, on account of Caleb’s nagging.” The metallic tinge of that night’s panic again threatened to choke him. The memory of digging until his hands bled. Of screaming Caleb’s name. Of pulling his crushed body from the rubble.
And finding the bullet wound.
“Come to find out, Beau had been falsifying expense reports and buying cheap tools and safety gear. The beams were rotten. The chains bad. The working conditions…inhumane. He pocketed the savings.” He’d realized that to ask why, was an exercise in futility. Greed was more powerful than just about anything, but… “How Beau could do that to other men, other miners, after throwing a pickaxe right next to me for almost fifteen years. And just as he was about to be caught, he took my brother with one well-placed bullet.”
“My stars,” Rosaline blinked, and a tear fell over the curve of her cheek and disappeared in the crease of her mouth. “Was this Beau found in the rubble, as well?”
“He’d swiped the Anatolian Sapphire and taken off. I hunted him all the way to San Francisco.” Eli’s heart hardened to that cold shard of granite it had been the day he confronted Caleb’s murderer. The man he’d also called brother. “Know what his last words were to me before he was sentenced to hang?”
Rosaline shook her head.
“He told me Caleb had planned the entire thing. That my brother was sore at me over some woman from three years prior who’d thrown him over for a shot with me.”
Rosaline gasped, pressing her fingers to her lips. “And he never told you of his feelings for her?”
“Only after she and I—” He glanced up, realizing she’d gotten the gist. “But Caleb and I…we had it out about her. She wasn’t someone I kept around, and I thought we’d buried the entire damned affair when I apologized. I told him a woman like that, who would pit brothers against one another and leave a good man like him for my fortune wasn’t worth his time.”
“And you’d be right,” she granted.
“I guess he hated that he’d worked so hard to become an accomplished man, with an education and refinement, and I still was more successful than him. Five hundred thousand dollars was taken, and because I trusted both Beau and my brother, I didn’t realize the extent of it until after they were both gone.”
“Such an inconceivable amount of money,” she breathed. “Did you recover it?”
“Yeah.” Eli shrugged, his heart galloping after the same hot fury he’d felt at the betrayal. The same guilt. The same anguish. “It wasn’t about the money, though. I’d have given it to Caleb if he’d asked. I’d given him every other damn thing. Worked my hands until they bled. I starved. Suffocated. Suffered beneath the ground…and he would plot against me…over a woman? I still don’t believe it most days.”
“He must have really loved her,” she murmured. “I’m told love makes people do things that defy logic.”
He snorted, bitterness still threatening to choke him. “Not me.”
Her hands fell away from his as she reached for one of the kittens who’d toddled over, loudly demanding affection, her hair a curtain over her face when she said. “I suppose that made it difficult to trust people.”
“It did,” he said, curling his now empty fingers into a fist. “And everyone else made it impossible.”
“Impossible?” she echoed. “How?”
“What do you imagine people wanted from King Midas?” he asked, no longer trying to keep the wrath from his voice.
She took longer than he expected to answer in a small voice. “Gold?”
Damn right. “I learned that family was most often the cause of violence. That the person you trusted the most had the easiest way to get to you. And my betrayal didn’t end with family,” he revealed, watching faces from his past float by with his lips lifted in a silent snarl.
“Lawyers embezzled from our trusts. Brokers undercut properties. Hell, I even found a couple of my lovers with a hand in my safe, or emptying my money clip when they thought I wasn’t looking. The most recent was a bout with a woman I’d grown…fond of. I woke to an empty bed one night and found her in my office stealing plans and paperwork. She confessed a rival was paying her top dollar for something to sabotage me with. And I was the dupe who fell for it. For her.”
“Everyone…takes from you.” Her shoulders curled into themselves, as if she could somehow make herself smaller. “Steals from you.”
He nodded. “I suppose it’s why family has not been much of a happy ideal in my world. Why I made it to this age without a wife or children. Why I convinced myself that when a man has the kind of money I do, children will only wait for you to die to inherit it, anyhow. So why bother trying to have any?”
She nodded, and he wished he could see her face. That he could read what she was thinking. “Why do you continue to look for the Midas Tomb, when the search holds such bitterness for you?”
Eli puffed out his cheeks, tilting his heavy head back to gaze up at the gilded darkness. “Because I finish what I start. I always have. And, I guess a part of me wants to hold that chalice. To get the Anatolian Sapphire back from whoever Beau sold it to. To have it as a reminder of something I’d lost sight of until now.”
Reaching through the curtain of her hair, he cupped her chin and lifted it, ready to drown in the azure depths of her liquid eyes. “What’s that?” she whispered through her tender tears.
“That Midas was able to break his curse. He got his daughter back before it was too late.” Drawing her close, he kissed the salt of her grief from her cheeks. His sweet wife. Shedding tears for a loss that was not her own. Something soft bloomed inside of him, something as fragile as the first snowdrop peeking through the last of the winter freeze. Tendrils of hope, maybe. The beginning of a dream he’d abandoned long ago.
