“How can it be gone?
We’re still inside the space!”
Margaret was already patting down her granddaughter’s pockets, her sleeves, and the folds of her stained pajamas.
A treasure like that couldn’t simply vanish.
Neve searched too, turning in a circle and scanning the black soil at their feet.
Nothing.
Panic rose in her throat.
She was about to pull them both out and tear her bedroom apart when she happened to glance down at her chest.
Where the knife wound had been, there was now a tiny mark.
It was pale green, no bigger than her smallest fingernail, and it lay just under the skin like a birthmark.
It had the same padlock shape, the same flat face, and even a faint thread of gold along its edge.
It was the pendant.
“Nana, stop looking.” Neve pulled her collar aside to show her.
“It’s here.
It went inside me.”
Margaret leaned in, and her eyes widened.
“It fused with my body.” Neve’s voice was bright with relief.
“No one can take it away from me now!”
“Silly girl, don’t celebrate so fast.” Margaret straightened, and her face was grave.
“What if someone kills you?
Who knows whether it would come loose then.
A person who wants it badly enough won’t be stopped by a little thing like your skin.”
Neve’s smile faltered.
“Oh.”
Nana was right, as usual.
She was always thinking three steps further ahead.
Neve took her grandmother’s hand, and they left the space.
The moment her feet touched her bedroom carpet, the world tilted.
A wave of dizziness rolled through her, and she had to grab the bedpost to stay upright.
“Neve!”
“I’m okay.” She pressed her fingers to her temples.
“I think I just overdid it.
It’s the first time I’ve used the space this much, and I brought you in and out with me over and over.” It had taken something out of her, something in her head rather than her body, like a muscle she had never used before.
“You go start getting things ready, Nana.
I’ll lie down for a bit.”
But Margaret didn’t let go of her hand.
“Not here.
We’re going back to the estate.
This house isn’t safe enough anymore.”
The house near campus had only ever been for convenience.
Margaret had bought it so Neve wouldn’t have to commute during term, and Neve usually stayed there on class days.
It had a butler and a cleaning staff, but no real security.
The Sinclair estate was different.
It had walls, gates, and the guards Margaret had spent years raising.
Neve didn’t argue.
Her head was still swimming, but she could walk.
She changed quickly out of her bloody pajamas, and then followed her grandmother out of the bedroom.
On the way down the stairs, Margaret was already on her phone.
Her voice was clipped and calm.
She called her brother-in-law’s family first.
Robert Hughes, Walter’s younger brother, was at the office.
Then she called his nephew Declan, who was also there, and Silas, and Eli, the eldest of the orphans she had raised.
To each of them she said the same thing: come back to the estate, now.
To Silas and Eli, she added one more instruction.
“Bring everyone.
Every guard, including the ones still in training.
I want them all at the estate today.”
Walter was waiting at the foot of the stairs.
“Walter,” Margaret said, “let the cleaning staff go.
All of them.
Pay them through the end of the month and send them home.
Once everything here is taken care of, lock up and come back to the estate as fast as you can.”
“Yes, madam.”
Walter didn’t ask a single question.
He had seen the young miss’s face this morning, and now he saw the madam’s.
Something serious had happened.
Whatever it was, he would find out when he was meant to.
The Hughes family had served the Sinclairs for three generations.
Walter’s father had been a boy during a time of war and famine, starving and alone, when Neve’s great-grandfather found him and took him in.
He had been raised in the Sinclair house, educated alongside the Sinclair children, and treated like one of the family.
He never forgot it.
Before he died, he gathered his two sons, Walter and Robert, and made them promise.
Never forget what this family did for us.
Never betray them.
They never had.
Walter became the Sinclair butler, and his wife Helen managed the household alongside him.
Robert and his wife Amy helped Margaret run Sinclair Holdings.
After Neve’s father died, it was Walter who looked after her at home.
He sat with her through the nightmares and walked her to school, and he was the one who taught her to ride a bike.
Walter’s elder son, Declan, was twenty-six and already working at the company.
He was sharp, blunt, and still unmarried, much to his mother’s despair.
His younger son, Callum, was in his third year of university across town.
Robert and Amy had twins, Lana and Shane, twenty-two years old and in their third year at Neve’s university.
Every one of them was loyal to Margaret and Neve down to the bone.
When the Sinclair women spoke, the Hughes family didn’t hesitate.
And in Neve’s past life, every one of them had died for her.
By the time the car pulled through the estate gates, Neve could barely keep her eyes open.
She went straight up to her old bedroom, the one she’d grown up in, and lay down without even taking off her shoes.
She didn’t want to be one more thing for Nana to worry about.
Margaret went to her study.
She sat behind her desk and thought for a long time while the house slowly filled with footsteps and voices below.
Neve had told her everything.
The people Margaret had raised and trusted had never betrayed the Sinclairs.
Not one of them.
They had followed her granddaughter into hell and died there, one by one, still loyal.
So there was nothing she needed to hide from them.
Nothing except the jade.
When they had all gathered in the study, Robert and Amy, Declan, Silas, Eli, and the senior guards, Margaret closed the door and told them.
She told them about the gray rain that would fall in a little over three months.
She described the dead that would rise from it, the fevers, and the strange powers some people would wake with.
She told them about the three years without rain and the floods that would follow.
Then she told them about the Ashfords.
She told them how the Ashfords would take them in and use them, sending Sinclair people out on the most dangerous missions to gather supplies and territory for the Ashford name.
And she told them how, once the Sinclairs had nothing left to give and the truth began to come out, the Ashfords would simply decide to kill every last one of them.
When she finished, the study was completely silent.
Robert’s face had gone gray.
Amy had one hand pressed over her mouth.
Declan stared at Margaret as if she had started speaking another language.
Several of the guards exchanged glances.
One of the younger ones shifted his weight and looked at the floor.
Margaret could read it on their faces.
Some of them were shocked, and some of them simply didn’t believe her.
How could they?
The end of the world, dead people walking, and powers out of a comic book, all in three months?
It was too absurd to believe.