Page 99 of The Diamond in the Rough

When I finished—having put the gloves on about a third of the way through, which I decided I was still going to accept as what Hart would call ‘a win’—I came back to my desk and re-ran through the inventory spreadsheets, unbolding everything I’d just put back. Then I tallied up our needs and placed the orders, then updated the spreadsheet by italicizing everything on order so that anyone who checked would know that we had those things coming in.

While I’d been in the back, sorting and organizing, a fewemails had come in, and I forwarded two of them to Mason—both requests for genealogy assistance—and the other three to Ward, as they were all requests for séances. One looked like some sort of party, the other two were both business of some sort. Wills or inheritances or something along those lines.

Then I shot an email to Beck, asking her if she wanted me to log her receipts for her, since I wasn’t doing anything else.

A few minutes later, she came out of her office, then set a handful of semi-crumpled receipts on my desk. “You’re the best, Rayn,” she said, her expression what I’d come to recognize as a little guilty. Before she’d come to work at Beyond the Veil, I knew she’d done her own paperwork, so we both knew shecould, but I didn’t mind doing them. Especially when I had nothing else going on.

I was just finishing them up with the bell rang over the door. I looked up and saw Violette’s dark brown locks framing her fair face and grey-green eyes, an electric green mask covering her nose and mouth. She waved as she came over.

“Hey, big bro!” I could see the lines made by her smile deepening around her eyes.

I got a funny feeling in my stomach at being called ‘big bro.’ I rather liked it. “Hi, little sister,” I replied, feeling my mouth getting pulled into a smile.

She half-bounced over, then threw her arms around my shoulders without letting me get up out of my chair. I used an arm to hug her back.

“How are you?” she asked me. “How’re things? Have you been working on that case still?”

I smiled at her. “Let me just finish this, and then we can go to lunch and I’ll answer all of those questions.”

It hadn’t takenme long to finish up the receipt reports, maybe a minute or two, and then I’d grabbed my gloves and the fleece I was using as a spring jacket—just in case—and we headed outside and down the street as I led the way. As soon as we were outside, Violette pulled off her mask and bounced up on her toes, hugging me again and planting a kiss on my cheek.

I smiled at her again, feeling my face flush a little. It was nice, having someone care about you enough to give you a kiss on the cheek.

I knew we didn’t actually look much alike, Violette and I. Her hair was dark, mine that kind of dishwater blond that was really kind of a brownish-tan. Her eyes were grey-green, mine so dark that most people probably thought of them as black, but you could see a faint distinction between iris and pupil if you looked close enough—grey, not black. We were both fair-skinned, both fairly thin, although I never quite looked like I fit into my clothes, and Violette clearly had both the fashion sense and the muscle to fit into hers correctly.

She was a competitive archer, and lifted weights and jogged to keep fit. The difference between her physique and mine—despite having a similar build—was a good reminder that I should probably dosomethingto maintain a level of cardiovascular fitness that was more than just walking to and from work. It wasn’t that far of a walk, so even though I did it regularly, it didn’t really count as exercise.

As we walked to the restaurant, Violette told me about the last few things she had to finish up for the semester—she was finishing a few classes late, with permission,because of our parents’ deaths—and how excited she was about the flight she had leaving next week for Kiev. She was going to do a European tour, using some of the money our parents had left her, starting in Ukraine, and working her way back across several different countries, including Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Nordic countries, the UK, and then ending in Iceland before flying over to Kyoto, then traveling through Japan and finishing her tour in Thailand, then flying back through LA. It would take her up to the start of the new semester, and she was nearly vibrating with excitement.

“Are you traveling with friends?” I asked her, holding the door of Kuba Kuba open so she could go in first.

“Nah,” came the reply. “I don’t have any.”

I felt my eyebrows go up. “You don’t have any friends?” Even I had friends.

She laughed. “Of course I havefriends,” she replied. “Just none that I want to spendthatmuch time with.” She cocked her head to the side. “Unlessyouwant to come with me?”

Part of me did. The idea of just leaving behind the whole mess of my life here in Richmond—the case, what I’d done to Raj, the fact that I was going to have to reconcile those two things—and traveling the world with my sister sounded… romantic. Adventurous.

“I don’t think I can,” I replied softly. “Although it does sound incredible.”

“If it’s money?—”

I smiled. “I don’t have that, either,” I replied. “But it’s more that I need to finish out this case, and I can’t exactly put that on hold while I disappear to Europe and Asia for three months.”

“Two and a half,” she corrected, following the host, who had gestured for us to go with her to the back of the restaurantinto a private booth. “But I suppose murder waits for no one, huh?”

“Unfortunately, no,” I agreed, slipping into the booth and thanking the host.

“How is the case going?” Violette asked, picking up the complementary glass of water and sipping it. “Can you talk about it?”

There were things I knew I wasn’t supposed to share, but I figured I could tell her a little. The parts that were bothering me, rather than the parts that were central to the murder itself. “Some,” I answered her last question first. “General things, I suppose. No names. No details.”

She nodded. “It’s probably not anything like it is on TV, but they keep stuff to themselves. You know, like something the killer did or said that they won’t tell the press, so that they know if someone actually knows something for real. Right?”

I felt my lips twitch with something that might have been fondness or amusement. Or maybe both. “I—I’m pretty sure it doesn’t quite work the same way it does on TV,” I replied. “There are a lot of things I’m not supposed to talk about, not just one special detail.” Although, to be fair, most of what I knew were extremely specific details about the inner thoughts of people who were willing to kill others and strip them of magic. Those weren’t the things I was going to share with her, anyway.

Violette shrugged. “Nothing ever works the way it does on TV,” she remarked. “Don’t know why they bother pretending half the time.”