Cards of Love: The Emperor: A Dark Romance Page 3

  For the longest time after she left me, I stayed celibate. It was six years before I'd slept with someone else. Only when Astor came around did I cave, perhaps because something about the pretty black-haired vixen reminded me of the one that got away.

  But even now, as I held her in my embrace night after night, I wondered whether this thing with Astor would ever last. I didn't see it going on for much longer. I just hoped she'd understand when our flame went out; our spark was struggling already, though she stubbornly chose to deny it.

  I woke up bright and early that morning, Astor's slow breathing signaling she was still asleep. She slept like the dead, not tossing and turning, but lost in a dreamless land of her mind.

  Staring at her naked body, I couldn't deny her beauty. She was slender, with perky tits and a tight little ass I'd had my fun using. As I looked at her, I realized just how much she really reminded me of Ginger. She could have been her doppelganger if it weren't for the dark hair. I knew I must've picked her subconsciously, and I felt bad for stringing her along for so long. I swore to myself I'd break things off soon; it wasn't fair to her to keep her on the hook like this.

  While Astor slept, I made my way into my office. There, I found the safe behind a Degas on the wall, typed in the code and scanned my card, waiting for the safe to open.

  A single velvet pouch awaited me inside and I took it out, not even putting on the white gloves the men who'd sold me the diamond wore the other day.

  This was becoming a habit of mine, and it was strange because I didn't tend to get attached to the jewels or artwork we sold. But the Cursed Beauty was something else, and ever since the men had warned about its alleged curse, I couldn't get the thought out of my head.

  I don't believe in curses, I reminded myself sharply. But the thought lingered anyway, making me recall the words they'd said over and over again, mulling over them in my head and wondering whether there was any truth to their claims.

  They said two of their brothers had died because of the stone.

  As I turned it over in my hands, I wondered how anyone could attribute so much power to a simple carbon form. It was nothing but stone—albeit a very valuable one. But it wasn't cursed. I didn't believe in such nonsense.

  Yet at the same time, it almost felt as if I'd been cursed my entire life.

  After everything I'd been through, everyone I'd lost, I wore the memories of the blows life had dealt me. My gray hair and beard, the worry lines etched into my face. I wasn't the young, arrogant and careless young man I used to be. The world had chewed me up and spat me back out, and I had the scars to show for it.

  Somehow though, I'd walked away stronger than I had been at the beginning, and I was proud of myself for it.

  I let the stone slip between my fingers and back into the velvet pouch. With a sigh, I closed the safe.

  "What are you doing?"

  I turned in the direction of the voice. Astor stood by the wall, wearing the crisp shirt I'd discarded the night before. It was too big for her, but short enough to expose her tanned, long legs.

  "Just looking at the stone," I replied. "Making sure it's still here."

  "Where else could it go?" she asked with the faint hint of a smile.

  She walked closer to me, and I stiffened when her dainty fingers wrapped around my forearm. She had her charms, and she knew how to use them, but I didn't want to fall for her games again. I always had a feeling Astor had an ulterior motive with every little thing she did. It was just a question of time before the truth came out.

  I knew she was hiding something.

  It was in the sly smile permanently etched onto her features, in the way she averted her gaze when I asked about her past. At first, it had been an intriguing mystery, one that had filled me with longing for the raven-haired girl. Now it was just a little bit annoying, because I still hadn't gotten to the bottom of the mystery. I wanted to know all her secrets.

  "Why are you so fascinated by it, anyway?" I asked her, closing the safe and locking it with the combination, then my key card like usual.

  Astor's eyes closely followed every movement I made, but she appeared nonchalant as she sat in my office chair, putting her slender legs on my desk and grinning wide at me.

  "Why are you?" she fired back.

  "It's worth millions," I stated the obvious. "It's intriguing. You didn't think the men's story was interesting?"

  "The curse?" she asked, and I nodded, walking over to the bar in the room, pouring myself a glass of Scotch, neat.

  "They seemed to believe in it," I reminded her. "They said two of their brothers had died because of the diamond."

  "Did you believe them? I thought you were too rational to believe in a silly thing like curses, Ryker."

  It was a rare opportunity that she spoke my name, and I didn't like hearing it from her lips.

  I was a different man here in Venice. Everyone called me The Emperor. I didn't like hearing my real name, especially from Astor. It was such a fucking painful reminder that I had the wrong woman by my side.

  "I didn't believe them, no," I replied firmly, and she smirked at my response as if she'd expected it all along. "But I know they believed it. And for them, it must have held some significance. Otherwise, they wouldn't have let go of the stone with no money crossing hands."

  "They seemed pretty intent on getting rid of it," she agreed before pulling open a desk drawer and taking out a deck of cards. "Shall we?"

  I didn't like her familiarity when she was dealing with my things. Whatever this was between us was definitely nearing its—potentially explosive—ending.

  "You want to do that now?" I asked her with raised eyebrows.

  She shrugged, smiling wickedly as she said, "I bet you have a question to ask."

  I sat in front of her, our positions reversed as she was in my seat. She shuffled the cards, and we went through the process of placing them on the table with the backs turned up. Astor kept looking into my eyes with that sly grin until I finally prompted her to read the cards for me.

  She was big into tarot, claiming her love for it came from her family, which she never mentioned otherwise. I never could manage to get more details out of her.

  Now, as she glanced down at the cards lying on the table, she paled for a split second, then smiled to herself.

  "What?" I asked, a hint of worry etched in my voice and in the lines on my face. "Something bad?"

  "No." She shook her head, but I could tell she was lying.

  It was in the shakiness of her voice, the slight tremble of her fingers as she picked up the cards, shuffling them again.

  "I must have mixed them wrong," she said, muttering more to herself than to me. "I wasn't paying attention."

  "Why? It seemed all right to me."

  She set the cards down and looked into my eyes, her bottom lip trembling lightly.

  "It said you would end a relationship very soon," she said shakily. "The Ten of Swords."

  A long pause followed, loaded with questions I didn't want to answer just yet.

  If I was being honest with myself, I was going to miss Astor. She was a special kind of crazy that suited me just fine, and her interest in everything occult proved to be amusing for a long time. But I knew the cards hadn't lied. I'd thought about breaking things off with her increasingly more often; the cards only made me realize it needed to happen sooner rather than later.

  She gasped when I stayed stubbornly quiet, averting my eyes from hers. I knew the truth had hit her as if she'd run into a brick wall.

  But it was strange that she hadn't been anticipating this. It was bound to happen.

  "Astor—" I started, but she raised a hand in front of my face, willing me to shut up.

  "Don't say anything," she half barked, half begged me. "I don't want to know."

  She picked up her cards hurriedly, but when she stood, she tripped over the rug. The cards went flying, landing all over the floor.

  She leaned down and so did I. We started picking up
the cards without saying a single word, until we finally met in the middle, over the once again laid out card of the Ten of Swords.

  We exchanged glances over it.

  "Don't do this now," she started, her voice tinged with that whining note that annoyed me so much.

  But that morning, I couldn't muster any annoyance. I felt for Astor, and I vowed to help her. She'd been a vital help in my business, and she knew her stuff. I wanted to keep her on as long as she could remain professional.

  "This doesn't have to change everything," I told her softly. "Things can stay pretty much the way they are, Astor. You can still work for me. We'll get you an apartment in the city. We'll take care of you."

  "We," she repeated sarcastically. "Not you, Ryker?"

  My mouth set in a thin line at another mention of my name. She knew I didn't like it. Probably just pushing my buttons to see how far she could go, if I was really serious about this breakup.

  "Actually, don't answer that," she said stiffly.

  We both stood, and I handed her the cards I had gathered. Before I did, I'd managed to hastily turn around the Ten of Swords so she wouldn't have to look at it again.

  "Look," I said placatingly, "I'll probably see you tomorrow for the meeting with the buyer for the Caravaggio."

  She nodded, refusing to meet my eyes, and I patted her shoulder awkwardly.

  "I'm sorry, Astor. I shouldn't have dragged this out as much as I have. You deserve so much better than me. A man who will love you for who you are."

  Now she turned her eyes to mine, and a numbness filled my chest at the sight of tears in her eyes. Why couldn't I care more about her? She was perfect, fucking perfect, yet I struggled to see her as anything other than a friend, and it had been that way for a few months. I'd tried to fight it, but the fact of the matter remained that I needed to end this now.

  "Let me get Carlo to drive you to a hotel," I said. "I'll find a place for you tomorrow, but you can stay as long as you like. Maybe the Palazzo?"

  "You better get me a big suite," she mumbled, and I laughed out loud, pleased to see that side of her coming out again.

  "I will, Astor," I told her as I led her out of the house. "Are you going to be all right?"

  "Yes." She nodded solemnly. "I'll be just fine. In fact, I'm going to be much better very soon."

  "How come?" I asked curiously. She didn't speak of her personal life much, aside from what we did together.

  "I'm expecting a visitor." She smiled.

  "Oh, how lovely. An old friend?"

  "No." Her smile widened. "My sister."

  5

  Ginger

  Mr. Smith took me home and insisted I call him Jonathan. At first I struggled, feeling like an embarrassed child trying to play grown-up, but after a few botched attempts, I finally became more familiar with the word, the way it sounded when I said it. By the time we sat down in his cozy living room, I was calling him Jonathan a little more comfortably.

  He'd made us two cups of black tea with plenty of milk and sugar, just the way I had it when he'd known me all those years ago. I shifted in my seat, unsure of how to steer the conversation to what interested me the most: what happened to Astor.

  "Do you ever come up to visit the graves?" Jonathan asked me in his soft, calm voice. "I've never seen flowers, but there are always plenty of candles. I thought maybe one of them was from you."

  I looked at my lap again, unwilling to admit my own wrongdoings. The truth was I hadn't come to visit my sister's and parents' graves ever since it happened. Ever since I escaped Hollyhock and all it had done to me, leaving it in the dust as Kain's men drove me off to take care of Ophelia.

  "I don't," I finally admitted, the guilt lying heavily upon my shoulders.

  "I suppose that's why you didn't know about the asylum."

  Jonathan's words were meant to soothe me, but I felt the silent pressure of them weighing on me.

  I should have come sooner. I should have known what happened to her, to my own sister. I was a bad person for staying away for so long.

  My shoulders hunched and I felt the embarrassing, familiar sting of tears in my eyes. I crumpled in on myself, covering my face with my hands as I sobbed quietly, my shame seeping out through every pore in my body.

  "I'm sorry, Jonathan. I've let everyone down."

  "Oh, Miss Adley," he said, soothingly touching my back. "You haven't. It was a hard time for everyone. You just dealt with it in your own way. You had to mourn, to process what happened."

  I raised my eyes to him, wiping my face. I was probably a mess by now. The long train journey and the trip to the asylum surely hadn't helped, and the crying fest probably smudged my makeup considerably.

  "I need to find her," I told him. "Astor."

  "Why? Why now?"

  I sized him up, wondering whether he knew more about my sister than he let on. I couldn't ask him outright, so I just chose to tell him the truth. Mr. Smith was a nice man, and despite not being his favorite of the three Adley girls, I trusted him. Still, after all these years, he was the man who consoled me when I cried, even when my father wasn't there to do it.

  "I received a p-package," I admitted, my voice shakier than I would have liked. "It had a blank tarot card."

  "A tarot card?" He raised his brows. "Like the ones you girls used to play with?"

  I nodded wordlessly, remembering those carefree days. I'd had no idea then that evil lurked right underneath the shadows. That my own sister would cause the downfall of an entire family.

  "Which card?"

  "It was blank," I replied. "Tabula rasa."

  He paled at the words, the ones that had been mentioned countless times after the fire, after the police were done digging up their dirt, pinning it all on my sister. After the horrible, shameful day when they made me accuse her of burning down our house, our parents and sister still inside. The day I'd stared into Astor's tear-filled eyes and condemned her to spend the rest of her life in an asylum.

  I couldn't stay behind after that. But I needn't have worried. With our case making headlines, I received a lot of strange mail and phone calls. One of them changed my life.

  When Kain made an appearance in Hollyhock, I thought him too big, too grand for the small town. But there he was, offering me an amount of money I could've only dreamed about before when I didn't know how I'd make it after I turned eighteen. I followed him, took care of his girlfriend, the beautiful, elusive Ophelia who didn't speak when I met her. Through them, I'd met Ryker Marino, the man who shaped my life forever. The man I'd been running from since the day he told me he loved me.

  It occurred to me that I'd spent a lot of my time running. It seemed like it was my knee-jerk reaction when I was in a difficult situation: turn the other way and run in the opposite direction as fast as I possibly could. I'd done it one too many times to keep denying the truth to myself. It was painfully obvious, and as I looked into Jonathan's eyes, I saw he'd had the same realization.

  He gave me a sympathetic smile.

  "The card could have been from anyone," he tried to console me. "Someone trying to play nasty tricks on you."

  "I recognized the handwriting," I told him brokenly. "Do you remember the little hearts our sister used to dot her i's with?"

  His eyebrows knitted together, and he said the name I hadn't thought of, or uttered, in eight years.

  "Allegra?"

  "Don't say her name," I begged him hurriedly, shame burning my cheeks a bright red as I tried to avoid his gaze.

  "All right," he agreed, seeming a bit confused.

  "She even did that," I said shakily. "She even dotted her i's just like Allegra used to. That was the one way I used to be able to tell them apart, those silly hearts."

  I chuckled out something resembling a sob, and he offered me a tissue. Blowing my nose, I refused to meet his eyes, overtaken by a bone-deep betrayal because he was so obviously still on Astor's side. She was always his favorite, and I had a sudden urge to call him out for it.
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br />   "You really have nothing to say about that?" I asked. "Isn't that sick, Jonathan? Just as sick as the rest of the things she did. Why am I still surprised? She was—is a monster."

  "Calm down, Ginger," he begged me. "I know you're angry, but maybe I can help you find your sister. I might have an idea where Astor went."

  I turned my eyes to his sharply, demanding answers.

  "Where did she go? Please, you need to tell me. I'm afraid… I'm afraid she's dangerous. That she's going to hurt somebody else."

  "She wouldn't," he stated matter-of-factly, still stubbornly convinced that the idea of my sister he held in memory was true.

  I bit my tongue before I called him out for his utter ridiculousness. Of course she would have. Astor stopped at nothing to get her way. She'd proved it when she killed our family.

  I blinked away the tears threatening to drip from my eyes yet again.

  "Where did she go?" I repeated. "I need to know, Jonathan. I need to find her before something bad happens."

  "I used to talk to her a lot." He leaned closer to me. "You know we were close. Remember all the books I brought her?" I nodded.

  "Eventually she'd read every book I had at home. I started bringing her more: books with art, books about traveling. Books from… a long time ago."

  I briefly recalled Jonathan had been married for ten years until his wife passed away in a tragic car accident. They used to travel a lot, Dad used to tell us. That's why Jonathan knew so much about the world.

  "There was a tourist guide to Italy," he went on. "She loved that one so much, I even bought her a special book one day as a present for her birthday."

  "Yes, I remember," I cut in, earning a smile from him. "The book about Venice. I remember how angry our sister was because you'd only given her candy. She thought it was unfair that Astor got a book and she didn't."

  I let out a strained chuckle, and he patted my shoulder again.

  "She loved that book," I remembered.

  "She did. And she told me one day she would live there."