HAVEN FOUND A glass in the bathroom and placed the daffodils inside. The flowers’ heavy heads hung over the side of the cup. During the single spring she and Iain had spent in Rome, Haven’s apartment had been filled with yellow blooms. Every time Iain ran an errand, he’d come back clutching a fistful of daffodils. By April, all the apartment’s vases were in use, and flowers spilled out of tumblers, pencil holders, and empty cans, brightening every room like patches of sunlight.
Haven placed the daffodils beside her bed and prayed that Iain really had everything fixed. She was more desperate now than she’d ever been. She wanted Iain to be the hero, but if he couldn’t come through, Haven would no longer hesitate to turn to Adam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“We brought him to Florence! You swore you would help!” the little girl snarled. She had come to Beatrice as she had in the past, disguised as a daughter of one of the servants. At first Beatrice had been shocked to hear a child speak as she did. But Beatrice had seen things since that very first meeting that made the girl seem quite ordinary now.
“I had nothing to live for when I agreed to assist you,” Beatrice told her. “This house was a cage. I’ve been set free.”
“And you don’t care what will happen to the people here?”
“Why should I sacrifice my freedom for them when they’ve never lifted a finger to help me? I’ve seen no proof of the claims that you make. My fiancé does whatever I ask. Even if he is everything that you say, I can ensure that your prophecy never comes to pass.”
The girl regarded her with sheer disgust. “You have sold your soul, Beatrice Vettori. Whatever happens now will be on your head.”
“HELLO?” HAVEN MUMBLED into the telephone.
“I’m here with Calum.” It was Alex Harbridge. “We’re in the lobby. You have exactly ten minutes to brush your hair and get your ass down here.”
“Don’t tell her to brush her hair,” Haven heard Calum moan in the background. “That could take hours.”
“I can’t hang out right now,” Haven said. “I just got up from a nap, and I have a million things to do.”
“What ‘things’?” Alex asked. “I know for a fact that you don’t have any more dress orders to fill at the moment. I got a call from Lucy Fredericks this morning saying how thrilled she was with your work. I just hope her dress isn’t nicer than mine. So you’re done. Enjoy it. Now let’s spend some of the points you’ve made.”
Haven frowned. She had twenty points sitting in the Ouroboros Society account that Lucy Fredericks had opened without her permission.
“I told you I’m not a member, Alex,” Haven said. “And I never will be.”
“Fine with me,” Alex said. “But that doesn’t mean the points you have should go to waste. Come on. You can find some way to thank me for turning you into a rock-star fashion designer.”
“I really can’t.”
“Yes, you can, Haven,” Alex chided her. “Lucy told me that when she picked up her dress this morning, you were wearing the exact same thing you had on yesterday. She said you looked like you were starting to go all bag lady on us. I had to assure her that you bathe regularly.”
Haven glanced around at the room she had barely left in two days. Lucy was right. She hadn’t bathed in a while. She hadn’t wanted to risk missing a call. But the phone hadn’t rung. Beau was still missing. Neither Adam nor Iain had made good on their promises, and Haven was starting to wonder if she’d made a terrible mistake by breaking off contact with the Horae.
“You’re down to eight minutes,” Alex informed her. “You don’t want to see what kind of scene I’m capable of making.”
“All right,” Haven said with a huff. “But give me twenty. I need to take a shower.”
SHE FOUND ALEX and Calum huddled together on one of the love seats in the hotel lobby. They made such a beautiful pair that it was hard to imagine they were real. Perfect, porcelain features, and hair that gleamed like copper and gold. Alex wore a coat in a deep shade of purple that perfectly complemented the lavender scarf tucked into the collar of Calum’s jacket. They looked like they’d stepped out of a Fitzgerald book or off the cover of some vintage fashion magazine. Haven wondered if their matching ensembles could have been a coincidence.
“Oh baby, you are looking a little rough,” Calum announced as soon as he saw Haven. “Maybe you should have brushed your hair after all.”
“I gotta go with Calum on this one,” Alex agreed. “What do you say we dump our male escort and pamper ourselves a little? I know this spa on Morton Street—”
“No!” Haven blurted out with a little too much force.
“See? She can’t bear to be away from me.” Calum stood and flung an arm around Haven’s shoulders. He gave Alex a smug little grin. “It’s not just the gentlemen. All the ladies love me too.”
“If not the spa, then how about a little culture?” Alex asked.
“That sounds splendid,” Calum replied in a perfectly posh English accent. “I believe some culture may be just what this young lady needs.” It was clear they had a plan. They both linked arms with Haven and virtually dragged her through the lobby to the sidewalk. A black SUV was waiting for the trio.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Alex told the driver.
“It’s Monday,” Haven said. “Aren’t most museums in New York closed on Mondays?”
Calum and Alex both laughed. “Not for us they’re not,” Calum said.
A WOMAN MET them inside the front doors of the museum. Dressed in a white shirt and a shapeless gray suit, she was clearly a Society drone. They had even infiltrated the venerable Met.
“Everything has been arranged as usual, Miss Harbridge,” the woman informed them. “Do you remember how to get to the gallery?”
“Of course!” Alex swept past the woman with barely a second glance. Calum and Haven trailed behind her as she made her way through the vacant maze of the museum’s first floor and down a set of stairs. At last Alex arrived at her destination. Outside a gallery stood a small table. On top of the table sat three crystal glasses and a bottle of champagne. Alex popped the cork and poured.
“Thank you,” Haven said, accepting a glass, though it was barely noon and a little too early for underage drinking.
“Here’s to Haven.” Alex lifted her champagne flute. “May her designs be displayed in this museum one day.” She drained her wine and poured herself another glass. “Let’s go explore.”
Haven stepped into the gallery and found herself surrounded by pale, thin mannequins whose soulless eyes peered out from glass cages. Each wore the costume of a distant era. There were Spanish court dresses embroidered with gold looted from Aztec temples, and nineteenth-century gowns with bustles that would have rendered a lady unable to sit. A few of the mannequins posed for invisible cameras while others hid their faces behind hand-painted fans. Haven found the effect unnerving. The museum’s perfect white wraiths had no business impersonating the flesh-and-blood women who’d died and left their belongings behind.
“What is this place?” Haven asked.
“It’s the Costume Institute,” Alex explained. “I come here all the time. I try to imagine myself in other lives, wearing something like that.” She stopped in front of a scarlet dress adorned with pearls and garnets. “I wonder what it was like,” she said wistfully before moving on.
“Alex doesn’t remember much about her past lives,” Calum confided in a whisper. “Her parents never kept track of the things she said when she was little. They thought she was bonkers, and I have a hunch they still do. I met Ma and Pa Harbridge over Christmas. Don’t tell Alex I said so, but they’re the dullest people on earth. They get fidgety if you talk about anything other than football or the weather. But sweet little Alex thinks they’re fabulous.”
“Alex must remember a few things,” Haven said. “She told me she’s been an actress for her last seven lives.”
“All she knows is what the Pythia has told her. By the way, did Alex
happen to mention she was Marilyn Monroe?”
“You really believe that?” It had to be one of Phoebe’s lies. “Alex seems smart. Wasn’t Marilyn Monroe a bit dim?”
“Not in the slightest. She had a wicked sense of humor. The critics might have noticed she was a pretty good actress too, if they hadn’t been so focused on her ta-tas.”
“And you?” Haven asked. “How much do you remember?”
“Me? Not much anymore. I’m lucky my mother brought me to the OS when I was still very young. Back then, I used to talk about three different lives. I claimed I was a famous thespian in the seventeenth century. In fact, Shakespeare may have written the role of Hamlet for me. A century or two later I was a well-known child actor, but I died of some horrible wasting disease. And in my last life I was Wallace Reid.”
“Who?” Haven asked.
Calum frowned. “Wallace Reid was a silent film star. ‘The screen’s most perfect lover.’ Anyway, it all goes to show that my mother was convinced I was bound for great things.”
“She must be very proud,” Haven said. “You’ve done so well for yourself.”
“Everything’s relative,” Calum replied with none of his usual snarkiness. “We don’t talk much anymore.”
“Hey, you two. Want to see something amazing?” Alex called back to them. “Let me show you what I spotted a couple of weeks ago. It must be new, ’cause I’m sure I’d have noticed it before.” She was standing in front of a shimmering flapper dress covered in thousands and thousands of golden beads. There were 10,725 beads to be exact, and each was pure twenty-four-carat gold. Haven knew this for a fact because the dress had been hers when her name was Constance Whitman. Feeling light-headed, she used the plaque placed near the mannequin’s toe as an excuse to crouch down for a moment and catch her breath.
EVENING DRESS, SILK WITH GOLD BEADING, CA. 1924.
GIFT OF A WHITMAN FAMILY FRIEND.
“What are you doing down there?” Alex asked.
“Reading the description,” Haven answered.
“Well, stand up and take a look at the mannequin’s arm.”
Haven still felt a little dizzy when she pulled herself up, and her knees nearly gave when she spied the golden band on the ghost-white arm. It was a snake with two ruby eyes, its tail clamped inside its jaws. An ouroboros.
“Do you think it belonged to one of us?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know,” Calum said. “When was the Society founded?”
“Nineteen twenty-three,” Haven answered, and they both swiveled to stare at her.
“How do you know?” Calum inquired. “You’re not even a member.”
“I was back then,” Haven said. “I made this dress, and that was my jewelry.”
“No shit!” Alex exclaimed. “I knew there was a reason I was supposed to bring you here. Do you think I might be psychic or something?”
“Stop congratulating yourself and let the girl talk!” Calum demanded. “I’m dying here.”
“No, no, wait!” Alex insisted. “This is too good to discuss standing up. Let’s go have lunch and Haven can tell us all about it.”
“Excellent suggestion,” Calum trilled as they both set off up the stairs to the first floor.
“Hey,” Haven called when they headed into the Egyptian art gallery. “I don’t think the exit’s that way.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Alex said. “We just got here. Why would we want to leave?”
Together they drifted by the ancient stone Temple of Dendur, past gleaming suits of medieval armor, and around a statue of Andromeda chained to a seaside cliff. Inside one of the French period rooms, Alex and Calum hopped over a velvet rope and made themselves at home on a pair of plush chairs with gilded legs. The three walls of the room featured white paneling trimmed in gold. The atmosphere was refined and opulent, despite the unmistakable smell of sausage in the air.
“Help yourself,” Alex said. An eighteenth-century French console held several covered silver platters. Calum jumped up and lifted one of the lids.
“Hot dogs?” he groaned. “We’re sitting in a room taken from the home of the Marquis de Cabris, and we’re going to eat hot dogs?”
“I like hot dogs,” Alex said. “And so do French people. Don’t be such a snoot, Calum. It’s not very attractive. Besides, the people who built this room weren’t as fancy as you’d think. They used to pee in the corners.”
“You remember that?” Calum squealed with laughter.
“No, I read it in a book,” Alex said.
Haven passed on the hot dogs, but she did pour herself a cup of coffee from a silver pot that looked as if it had been snatched from another part of the museum.
“Crap!” Calum yelped. He’d accidentally smeared some carnival mustard on the three-hundred-year-old upholstery and was dabbing at it with a white cotton napkin.
“All right,” Alex said, ignoring Calum’s cursing. “Spill it, Haven. Who was the girl with the golden dress?”
“What do you know about the history of the OS?” Haven asked.
“Not much,” Calum said, looking up from his chore. “The only history that fascinates me is my own.”
“You’re stalling.” Alex huffed comically.
Haven hesitated, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to tell them. “In the 1920s, I was a girl named Constance. She was one of the original members of the Ouroboros Society. I started having visions of her life when I was just a little kid. She and her boyfriend died in a fire in 1925. I knew the fire hadn’t been an accident, so I came to New York about a year and a half ago to find out what had really happened.”
“What had happened?” Alex moved to the edge of her seat.
“They were both murdered by a girl who was in love with Constance’s boyfriend.” Haven neglected to add that the murderess had since been reborn as Padma Singh.
“Oh my God!” Alex said. “That’s horrible! So did Constance really love this guy—the one she died with?”
“Yes.”
“So maybe you’ll find each other again. You know that sort of thing happens all the time. There are lots of people at the OS who think they’ve discovered ‘the one.’”
Haven resisted the urge to share too much. She still didn’t know Alex and Calum that well, but she knew better than to trust them with secrets.
“We did find each other.”
“And?!” Calum prodded.
“What happened?” Alex asked.
“First he disappointed me. Then he died. In another fire.”
“You’re talking about Iain Morrow, aren’t you?” Alex asked.
“How do you know?”
“Oh, come on, Haven, you think we don’t read the gossip pages? You’re the heir to the Morrow fortune. To be honest, we’re a little hurt that you didn’t tell us yourself. I thought maybe Iain had said terrible things about us or something.”
“You knew Iain?” Now Haven was surprised.
“Sure,” Alex said. “We met at the Society. We were friends for a while. I even went out with him a few times. It was only for show, of course. We both needed the publicity.”
“Iain’s a jerk,” Calum blurted out. “Hot as hell, but still a jerk.”
“Yeah,” Alex agreed sadly.
“Why do you say that?” Haven asked. “What did he do?”
“We used to be close,” Alex said, “and then one day he just decided that he didn’t want to be my friend anymore.”
“For no reason?”
“Well . . .” Alex looked to Calum.
“Go ahead and tell her,” he urged.
“So a couple of years ago, I let my OS account get low. I’d just used a bunch of points for a little nip and tuck here and there. And I was busy with my Oscars campaign. You have no idea how expensive those things can get. I felt like I was transferring points to every person I met. Anyway, the old president of the Society—that bitch Padma Singh—was really tough about making people keep points in their accounts. I dropped under the
fifteen-point minimum, and I was informed that I’d have to earn more immediately if I wanted to stay in the club.
“Iain promised to loan me the points, but then Padma called and offered me a job. She needed someone young and innocent looking to deliver some drugs to a Society bigwig on vacation in Paris. It would take less than a day, I’d get a free trip to France, and I’d make enough points to drag myself out of debt. The offer was too good to refuse, and I was pretty naive back then. I told her I’d take the job.”
“You delivered drugs?” Haven asked.
“No. I decided against it in the end. I found another way to refill my account.”
“Alex won’t even tell me what she had to do,” Calum said, and the girl glared at him.
“I tried to talk to Iain, but he was so pissed that I’d even considered helping one of the drug dealers that he refused to speak to me.”
“He always looked down on us,” Calum sniffed. “Like we were tainted.”
“Yeah,” Alex agreed, “and I never understood why. He wasn’t exactly a model citizen himself. He’d gone through every pretty girl at the OS by the time he turned eighteen.”
“So I’ve heard,” Haven said. A few years earlier, Iain had infiltrated the Society disguised as a womanizing playboy to hide his true identity from Adam. Apparently, his disguise had fooled Alex and Calum as well.
“Is that why you were curious about Mia Michalski?” Alex asked.
“Iain and Mia?” Haven remembered the kiss Iain had planted on Mia’s cheek. She’d convinced herself it was innocent. It probably had been. But why hadn’t Iain mentioned that Mia was one of the girls he’d “dated”?
“Yeah, they tried to keep it hush-hush, but everyone knew they were together. And then Mia disappeared, and Iain decided he preferred old ladies and started sniffing around Padma Singh’s wrinkled old carcass. But”—Alex bit into a hot dog—“that was back in the dark days of the Society. It isn’t one big orgy anymore.”
“No, everyone’s a model citizen now,” Calum complained. “If you ask me, Iain was always more like one of the creepy robot kids than one of us.”