THE SECRET ON ORCHARD STREET
1902—New York
James Lorcan had a feeling that things would become more interesting not long after he’d watched Logan Sullivan enter the apartment building and heard the hoot of something that wasn’t an owl nearby. He sent the others back to the Strega, except for Mooch, whom he kept nearby. He didn’t need the muscle; whatever was about to happen, tonight wasn’t the place for a fight. That would come later.
He kept to the shadows and watched the entrance of the building, until he saw the group of people appear. A sturdy-looking man with deep brown skin had Logan looped over his shoulder, and a girl James didn’t recognize kept close by Jianyu. An unexpected development, to be sure, but it answered one question. And at least his companions were Sundren. Uninteresting, except for the way they now had two people who should have been his prisoners.
Mooch took a step toward the group of them already scurrying down the sidewalk, putting distance between themselves and the building, but James caught his arm.
“Just follow them. Find out where they’re going, but don’t do anything else. Then come back to the Strega.”
Mooch looked like he wanted to argue, but James narrowed his eyes at the boy, and he seemed to decide against it.
Jianyu had Logan, but really, it didn’t matter. The boy was as much a liability as he was an asset. Besides, James still had all the secrets he needed on the shelves of Dolph’s bookcases, and now in the notebook tucked into his coat.
Jianyu’s appearance here, at this apartment where he had no real cause to be, told James one very important thing—Logan hadn’t been lying about who he was or what he could do. Which meant that the notebook he’d delivered wasn’t a trap or a trick. It was nothing more or less than the truth.
It was late—nearly midnight—but there was another stop James needed to make now that he knew he could trust the words tucked near his chest, the words he would himself someday write.
The lights in the building on Orchard Street were out when he finally arrived, but that didn’t concern him. He paid the woman on the third floor more than enough for the inconvenience of waking her.
She wasn’t happy, but she didn’t complain as she let James in and led the way down the narrow hall to the small room where the girl slept. He dismissed the woman and went to the girl’s bedside, kneeling beside it so that he could wake her. The small face scrunched at the interruption, but eventually she reluctantly opened her sleep-crusted eyes to squint at him.
It used to be hard to look at the girl without seeing Leena looking back at him, judging him for the choices he’d made and the path he’d chosen. It had gotten easier, in time, to see past Leena’s features—the golden eyes, the wide mouth that the girl would someday grow into—to the child beneath them. The promise in her.
Once he had thought that he could save her from Leena’s faults. Dolph’s partner, his wife, really, in everything but name, had been too soft when she should have been steel, too generous when she should have kept her cards close to her chest. It had been a surprise—a delightful one, but a surprise nonetheless—when Leena had decided to hide the child from Dolph. But in the end it had been her undoing.
He had hoped to mold the girl, to use her for his own bidding. Now James knew that in the end it would never work. He was raising a viper who would one day threaten everything he’d built, everything he was destined to become.
He could kill the girl now, but time was a funny thing, tangled as a knot and woven into a pattern that even he could not yet see. If he killed her, what might that change? What might he lose that her appearance had helped him to gain?
He couldn’t kill her. Not yet. But he could use her to send a message.
He took Viola’s blade from his jacket.
“Come, Carina, we’re going to play a little game.” He would send Esta a message through time and space and the impossible world. He would tell her he was waiting.
Using the blade named for the goddess of funerals, he began to cut.