Chapter 102 - The Collector's Ghost

The letter with its pressed flower lay on Alaric's desk, trapped beneath a paperweight as if containing it physically might somehow contain the threat it represented. I couldn't stop staring at it from across the room.

"The collection is eternal. New acquisitions will be made."

Those words had haunted me for three days now. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw that elegant script, the dried cereus flower—Lord Malachi's calling card. The man was dead. I had killed him with my own hands. Yet his ghost seemed to linger, taunting us.

"Isabella?" Alaric's voice pulled me from my thoughts. He stood in the doorway of his study, concern etching lines across his forehead. "You've been staring at that letter for nearly an hour."

I straightened in my chair. "I keep thinking if I look at it long enough, I'll see something we missed."