“Okay. Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it was a taboo subject.”
“It isn’t really,” Drake replied, turning to look at her. “Just something I don’t enjoy talking about. You know what a ronin is?”
“Something Japanese, right?”
“A masterless samurai,” he said. “One who has left his master’s house and cut off all connections to his past, gone into the world, and made his own path. I know it sounds ridiculously geeky and self-important-”
“Actually, it sounds like something that takes a lot of courage. Having no one.”
“Sully was around when I needed someone there,” Drake said, voice low. He wasn’t used to opening up, to letting the court jester that seemed to rule his tongue half the time go silent.
“He’s always been like that,” Jada agreed. “He plays it like he’s a rogue, like he doesn’t care. He vanishes for months at a time, makes out like he’s only out for himself, pretends that the money is his top priority-and maybe most of the time it is. But my dad used to say that with his back against the wall, when it counts, there wasn’t anybody he’d rather have in his corner than Victor Sullivan.”
“Yeah,” Drake agreed, and they walked on a couple of minutes longer before he spoke again. “Listen, I wish none of this had ever happened, but if it had to happen, I’m glad I’m here with you both. You’ve got me in your corner, too.”
“I know,” she said. “And it’s appreciated.”
They fell silent again, but this time the quiet between them had a breathless quality, as if each of them feared the next words that might be spoken. A burst of song, Greek voices raised in alcohol-fueled camaraderie, caught on the breeze and swept by them. It came from the nearest bar and was followed by a round of laughter. A man jogged by, intent on the effort of his athletic self-discipline. Two stylishly dressed young women came up the walkway, exuding sexy confidence. But for those few seconds, Drake and Jada couldn’t take their eyes off each other.
Blinking, taking a quick breath, Jada forced a nervous smile. “It’s beautiful here. Romantic. Gives you all kinds of crazy thoughts.”
Drake felt grateful. If she’d kissed him, he might have kissed her back, and that wasn’t the way any of this was meant to go. For just a moment, the dynamic between them had been on the verge of drastic changes. He smiled, waiting a few seconds before speaking, wanting to be certain the moment truly had passed them by.
“I haven’t had a lot of luck in that department,” Drake said.
“Yeah. Me, either. Maybe I should come back here afterward, meet some handsome fisherman, and open a dress shop.”
Drake laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.”
When Jada punched him in the arm, back to her usual abuse, he knew that the moment was officially over. They were allies. In a strange way, they were almost siblings. And nothing else. Drake knew that that was for the best, that anything else would be far too complicated, but he knew he would always be curious about the road not traveled. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d felt that way in his life, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last.
“Look,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, pushing magenta bangs away from her eyes as she huddled into the leather jacket as if the night was colder than it felt. “There’s something we’ve been avoiding talking about, and I don’t think we can go any further without at least addressing it.”
Aw, no, Drake thought. We had the perfect moment, the silent acknowledgment. Talking about it is only going to lead to crippling awkwardness and me babbling like a fool.
“The hooded guys,” Jada went on.
Drake arched an eyebrow, his mind shifting gears. “Yeah. Of course. Them.”
“I mean, yeah, we talked about them in the sense of ‘those guys are creepy, who the hell are they and why are they trying to kill us and why did they try to warn us to go home before they tried to kill us…’ And I’m babbling.”
“Yes.” Drake leaned against the railing over the cliff. “Yes, you are.”
Jada smiled. He thought she might punch him again, but apparently she was too tired from all the other times she had punched him.
“We haven’t really talked about what I think is the big question.”
“Which is?”
“Those doors in the labyrinth of Sobek,” Jada said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve kind of been avoiding it because I’m trying not to think about Welch being taken. His sister’s boyfriend was murdered because he tried to help my father solve this puzzle, and now Ian’s missing, maybe dead, because he did the same for us. It’s weighing on me. I can’t help feeling responsible.”
Drake nodded grimly. “It goes away, that feeling. Not as quick as you’d like, but it does. The thing to remember is that we didn’t force him to help us. He knew there was danger, and he wanted to help anyway. That won’t make you feel less guilty, but it’s a good thing to remind yourself that you can’t control other people. Not the ones who want to help you and not the ones who want to kill you.”
“They dragged him through the door at the back of that worship chamber. And the rest of the hooded guys had to have come through the sealed doors in the other rooms. Even if we assume there’s a simple way to open those-triggers, something to make them swing easily, that we just hadn’t found yet-how did they get down there?”
“They could’ve gone down the night before and been waiting for us,” Drake said. “They told us to go home, but they figured either we were going to find those rooms or Henriksen would.”
“Uh-uh, no,” Jada said, shaking her head. “The skeleton, the Minotaur or whatever-his fingers broke off when we slid the altar back. If anyone else had gone down that way before us, that would’ve happened then, not now.”
Drake pondered that, running a finger inside the collar of his new sweater. The tag was bugging him, distracting him, but there was no arguing with Jada’s point. Not that he had actually believed the hooded killers had slipped past the dig workers or security and gone down through the upper-level worship chamber. Sure, he’d seen the way they seemed able to melt silently in and out of shadows like some kind of crazy ninja assassins, but if they wanted to, he would have bet they could have killed every person working on the dig team.
So why hadn’t they? They had rules, he thought. They weren’t going to kill people who didn’t break them.
Had they been giving Drake, Sully, and Jada the benefit of the doubt? The hooded men had told them to go home; had they been waiting for the three of them to cross some invisible line? To trespass?
“We already talked about there being another way in,” he reminded her. “We felt the air moving. By now, Hilary Russo and her people-and probably the antiquities minister or whoever-have already found the other entry point.”
“Agreed,” Jada said. When she nodded, her hair veiled her face again. “But the labyrinth was buried for, like, thousands of years. If the archaeologists unearthing the site didn’t know there was another way in, how did they?”
“Now you’re just creeping me out,” Drake said.
“I’m creeping myself out!” Jada said. “ ’Cause the next question is, if they knew the bat cave entrance to that labyrinth, do they know about this one?”
Drake caught another whiff of the pipe smoke he’d smelled before. Mixed in with that odor were delicious aromas of frying onions and spices. From another bar, a ways back along the walk, loud music had begun to play, the kind of thumping dance noise that roared in the sort of nightclub he had always avoided. But earlier they had passed a young bearded guy playing a bouzouki, and Drake had allowed himself a moment to wish they were here on some less troubling errand and without the specter of Luka’s death looming over them.
“I don’t think I want the answer to that,” he admitted. “But I figure we’ll find out when we find the labyrinth on Therasia.”
“Can’t wait,” Jada muttered.
They turned together, in silent agreement that they were moving on from both the topic and the location. Something caught Drake’s attention, a shifting of the night shadows on top of the darkened jewelry store to their left. He glanced up and froze, staring.