The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

They were the right words. The Princept’s eyes glimmered with satisfaction.

By the time the three old goats finally dismissed him, the morphine had all but worn off. Jack could feel the ache building behind his eyes again, but he barely noticed. When he’d entered his uncle’s mansion, he’d worried he might never find the ring, but he’d left with the Order’s hopes—perhaps its very future—sitting in the palm of his hand. And if all went well, soon the artifact would be his.

BLOOD WILL TELL

1904—San Francisco

Maybe Harte Darrigan should have felt some satisfaction as he watched Samuel Lowe’s expression shift from anger to confusion and then to disbelief. Instead, he felt nothing at all.

“Benedict?” the older man said, lowering his gun.

Harte had imagined this moment often enough—when he was a homeless urchin, struggling to survive alone in the New York streets, and later when he was a successful headliner on one of the biggest stages in the city. Even with the guilt he’d carried, Harte had wondered what it would be like to look his father in the eye and force the man to acknowledge him. He had imagined his old man discovering that Harte had survived—had thrived—without him. In spite of him.

“I don’t go by that name anymore.” Harte continued to glare at the man who had fathered him, but he felt only a dull emptiness where triumph should have been.

Samuel Lowe never should have been able to make it back to California, but he had. Worse, the years seemed to have been kind to him. True, his father had more gray at his temples, and lines now carved deep valleys across his forehead, but he looked healthier than Harte had ever seen him. From the clothes his father wore, he certainly wasn’t destitute. On the smallest finger of his right hand, a gold ring glinted in the streetlight, yet another testament to his father’s elevated station in life. While Harte had lived with the ever-present guilt of what he’d done to his mother, he’d never spared a second thought for his father. He’d assumed that Samuel Lowe would die drunk in a ditch somewhere. Harte had never considered that his father might have gone on to live his life without consequences.

The woman still standing in the doorway said something in a language that Harte could not understand—German, perhaps—but she no longer interested him. He took a step toward his father. He didn’t care what Seshat might do to this man. Harte would finish what he’d started years before. But the movement of a small boy peeking out from behind his father’s coat stopped him dead.

The child was dressed neatly in short pants with a well-fitting brown jacket over a clean white shirt. His dark-blond hair framed a round face, and there was a small scar that cut across the corner of his upper lip, but he had the same gray eyes Harte saw every time he looked in the mirror. Eyes he’d inherited from his father.

Harte wasn’t sure how old the boy was—maybe seven? Perhaps a little younger?

His father—their father—stepped in front of the child, blocking him from Harte’s view before he could decide. He bent down and said something close to the child’s ear that Harte couldn’t hear, then lifted his hand. Harte instinctively tensed, his muscles ready to protect the child—to protect his brother. But before Harte could take a step, his father’s palm simply patted the boy on the back and pushed him along.

The child darted past Harte, toward the woman still waiting at the door behind him, but he pulled up short before he reached her. He turned back to Harte and examined him once more with a serious look on his face.

“Sammie,” Harte’s father warned. He said something in German—a language that Harte had never before heard his father use—that made the boy frown.

The sternness in Samuel Lowe’s voice was like a slap to the face, bringing Harte back to himself, and the boy’s eyes widened before he finally disappeared into the warmly lit interior of the home. The woman stared at Harte a beat longer with suspicion—and a warning—in her eyes. A mother’s eyes. She likely wasn’t Maria Lowe, then.

Whoever she was, the woman knew something about the Dragon’s Eye, which meant that Harte’s father probably also knew about the artifact. If that was the case—especially if Samuel Lowe had the Dragon’s Eye—it would be much more difficult to get it back than Harte had anticipated.

Harte felt Seshat’s pleasure at this discovery. You could have your victory, and instead you hold back, she whispered. You could have everything you desire, but you will never defeat me. Your softness will be your undoing. In the distant recesses of his mind, he sensed her satisfied amusement, but Harte shoved Seshat’s taunting aside.

His father was saying something to the woman in short, clipped tones, and her mouth curved downward as she continued to examine Harte. She clearly wasn’t happy, but eventually she pulled the door shut, closing off the light that had been spilling into the alley and leaving Harte alone with a ghost from his past.

“How are you even here?” his father demanded, turning on him. The gun wasn’t raised, but it was still in his hand.

Harte didn’t answer, and he refused to let any emotion show.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” his father said.

“I’d hoped the same about you,” Harte said, keeping his tone bland.

His father’s face creased with irritation, and Harte didn’t miss the way his fist clenched. “You dare come here to my home and disrespect me after what you—” The sound of shouting nearby had Samuel Lowe pausing. His gaze slid beyond Harte, to the mouth of the alley. “It’s the Committee’s watchman. I won’t let you ruin me again. You will go,” his father ordered, a command that brought Harte back to his childhood.

“I’m afraid you lost the right to make demands