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“So he didn’t want anyone to know he was visiting the Codex.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied grimly.
He wouldn’t stand a chance against Bella if he attempted something, but a man like Timothy Walters was capable of anything. Keeping Bellerose alive is the most important piece in this war, and I wasn’t letting a man like Timothy Walters take her away from me.
BELLE
Now
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” I said sharply to Arkane just as Timothy Walters left. “Our association is now exposed.”
“I didn’t realize it was a secret,” Arkane replied in his cunningly cool voice, crowding me against the bookshelf, his palms splayed over either side of my head. The act made my blood turn into molten flame. “What you did today was dangerous, Bella. What use would you be to me if you’re dead?” The glare in his eyes and the unfeeling tone in his voice hurt my chest. It wasn’t because he was worried about my life. I was merely a disposable tool in his grand scheme.
“If I die, I die, Stormhold. Not even you can stop it if God has decided it.”
“Is it?” He smiled coldly, looping a strand of my hair around his finger. “You die when I say you die, Bella,” he husked, his eyes holding me prisoner. “Until then, your life belongs to me and only me.” He was so close to me that I could hear our hearts beating as one.
“I didn’t know my life was the wager of our association,” I whispered.
He didn’t say a word, as his intense gaze bore down on me for a long minute before he let go and strode to the farthest end of the room. “Just don’t do it again,” he muttered.
“Fine,” I mumbled, still feeling the effects of his nearness lingering on my skin. “How did you get here so fast?”
He shrugged.
“Want to tell me what that was all about?”
He shrugged once again.
I sighed, folding my arms across my chest. “You trust Timothy Walters’s words?”
“I’d be a fool to, but I can’t let our resources get into the wrong hands. It would have dangerous outcomes. It wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”
“By yourself?”
“I can’t risk flagging the insider.”
“I’ll come too.”
Arkane shook his head. “It’s dangerous. It could be a trap for my head, for all I know.”
“All the more reason to bring me along.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
“What’s the Sanctum Sollus?”
A slow smile tugged at Arkane’s lips. “Nothing slips by you, does it?”
I shrugged this time.
“It’s a painting, or was. It means sacred knowledge,” Arkane said, propping his elbow on the window railing as the sunset lights leaked through the stained glass and danced on his skin. “My grandfather had two brothers, and the three of them were big on hunting trips. On one such trip to the Colorado mountains, the youngest, Theodore, took a fall. Some said he died, while others said he never came back from the forest. But a few said the fall cracked his skull so hard that it damaged his brain, and he was never the same again. And our family sent him to an asylum, and he spent the rest of his life there. They said his delirium was through the roof, and he’d scream all night, so they put him in the lone room on the west wing so the other patients couldn’t hear him. In there, he painted the Sanctum Sollus, which he was adamant contained the secrets of the world, and he kept it by his bedside till the day he died. Rumors say his soul is trapped in there, and that the once sacred art was now cursed.”
My brows furrowed. “And then what happened?”
Arkane smiled as he eyed me. “Only my grandfather never had a brother named Theodore. In fact, he only had one brother and two sisters.”
I leaned closer, intrigued. “So what, it’s like a family ghost story?”
