Page 58 of The Diamond in the Rough

“Um. Probably. Why?”

“Because it doesn’t exist,” I replied. “So I want to know who’s pretending it still does.”

She blinked. “Oh, holy shit.”

After Violette had left—throwingher arms around me in a hug that had startled me, although I’d hugged her back after a few seconds, grateful I was wearing gloves—Ward had immediately dragged me into the conference room, where Mason and Sylvia were already waiting.

“Hart’s on the way,” Ward told me. “Because this isnotokay.”

I assumed he meant the fact that someone was pretending that Tranquil Brook was still in operation. Violette had promised to send me whatever she had from the lawyers that was supposedly about me—including the contact information they had used to communicate with ‘Tranquil Brook.’

I wondered if they’d somehow revived it. Moved back in after everyone had been evacuated and started up the facility again in the same place. “You don’t think they reopened it?” I asked him, voicing my worry.

“Absolutely not,” Ward replied immediately, his brow furrowed. “That’s…” He trailed off, then ran a hand over his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. “I don’t know, Rayn,” he said, then. “I can’t imagine theywould, or that it would belegal, but I don’t know how any of this could make any sense.”

I shivered, not really cold, wrapping my arms around my middle. “I hate this,” I blurted.

“Me, too,” he agreed. “Although I bet not as much as you do.”

“We don’tknowmuch of anything,” Mason said softly. “But,” he added, turning his laptop around so that we couldsee it. “It does seem from the website that they’re still in operation.” He frowned. “Or in operation again.”

I’m going to check, Sylvia announced suddenly, then disappeared.

“Shit,” Ward said out loud. “Goddammit, Sylvia.”

Mason raised his eyebrows.

“I think she just… went there,” I told him.

“Which is incredibly stupid,” Ward grumbled. “Because she has no idea what she’s getting into?—”

And then she returned just as abruptly as she’d left, this time making herself fully substantial.“They are not there,”she announced to the whole room, Mason included.“And the state of the place suggests that they have not been there since we last were.”

Mason’s frown deepened. “Which leaves us with several very obvious questions,” he said.

“Who the fuck are they?” Ward began, ticking them off on his fingers. “Where the fuck are they? Why the fuck are they doing this? And what the fuck are they actually doing?”

“That would be the essence of it, yes,” Mason confirmed.

“But they are notatTranquil Brook,”Sylvia put in.“That is a positive, at least.”

Mason grunted. “Is it?” he asked. “If they were there we would at least know how to find them, whoever they are.”

They kept talking, but I’d lost the ability to focus on the conversation, staring down at my gloved hands, fingers pressed together, studying the weave of the fabric, the stitching along the side of the fingers, the place where the seam was starting to wear through, one tiny thread dangling like a fallen eyelash.

“Rayn, are you alright?”

I started at the sound of his voice, low and soft andutterly unexpected. “Raj?” I’d known Hart was coming, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Raj might come with him.

“Jesus fuck, Tony, don’t scare the kid.”

Raj glared up over his shoulder at Hart. “I’m not scaring him,” he grumbled.

“He jumped like three inches,” the elf argued.

“Because he’s shutting down,” Raj snapped back. “Not that I blame him, given what’s happened.”

“Rayn.” This time the voice was Ward’s. “Areyou okay?”