1
Charlotte, North Carolina
Zeke Blackwell shiftedhis attention from the antiquities dealer’s hopeful face to the incredible array of weapons splayed out before him—an Italian stiletto dagger, an English mortuary sword, a Polish rapier, and a longsword of indeterminate origin.
It’s not here.
The stab of disappointment cut deeper this time, and the hope he’d been holding on to for the past year took a severe nosedive. He couldn’t keep this up. Couldn’t continue staving off the inevitable collapse of all he held dear while searching for an artifact he would never find.
Even so, he went through the motions of examining the sword on the off-chance that someone over the past one hundred years had replaced the longsword’s distinctive wooden grip and twisted quillons.
He indicated the sword. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. Please.” The antiquities dealer made an encouraging motion.
With gloved hands, Zeke lifted the longsword from its black velvet bed. No four-headed wolf on the pommel or ancient Latin etched on the cross guard.
An extraordinary piece, but not the one he was searching for. A familiar, yet efficient numbness slid through his mind and loosened his taut muscles. He returned the artifact and picked up the other pieces, appreciating their craftsmanship and excellent condition. He saw no telltale signs of modern construction or technology, but, as much as he’d like to think otherwise, he was no expert.
But Lan Sardoff could identify a reproduction in a single glance, so Zeke didn’t question their authenticity.
“The pieces are not to your liking?” his friend asked, a note of concern in his voice.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Lan.”
“But none are the one you seek.”
He shook his head. “You have provenance for each?”
“Do not say after all of these years you doubt me now?”
“I would be a fool to overlook the fact that yours is a for-profit business.”
A slow smile etched tiny lines in Sardoff’s perfectly tanned face as if he intended to deliver one of his oily salesman quips. Then the curve of his lips straightened and an uncharacteristic seriousness took hold of his features. “Anyone else would need to be concerned about my profit margin. If not for you,” he waved a ringed hand around his expansive shop, “my business empire would have crumbled before it ever had a chance to rise.”
Zeke’s friendship with the dealer stretched back to their days at UNC, when Sardoff had helped him join the fencing team. Sardoff, two years older, had been fencing since grade school. He was a master. The best on UNC’s team, and he’d taken the raw promise in Zeke’s technique and molded it over the course of many private lessons.
A few years later, Zeke had been presented with an opportunity to pay his friend back when Sardoff told him about suspecting a potential buyer of stealing a vintage comic book, worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, from the shop after Sardoff refused to negotiate the price.
Zeke had broken into the thief’s home and taken back the stolen comic book, and Sardoff had thanked him by recommending his “services” to trusted clients.
His occasional recoveries—or what his brothers referred to as shadow operations—became the precursor to what would eventually become a lucrative family business. But Zeke’s first recovery hadn’t been smooth. In fact, Zeke’s ass hadn’t even cleared the thief’s office window sill before the guy entered and caught him in the act.
Even now, reliving how his surprised expression had turned into a furious, you’ll-pay outburst, as Zeke slipped, er, fell out of the window, still made him smile.
Zeke waved off his friend’s words. “Sardoff’s Antiques and Uncommon Treasures would have survived the loss of the comic book. Its owner is too stubborn, and too smart, to fail.”
The dealer bowed his head in amused acknowledgment, then studied him with a salesman’s intensity. “I’ve heard whispers about an early sixteenth-century British longsword with a four-headed wolf carved on the pommel and familia primum inscribed on the guard,” Lan said. “Is this something you would be interested in?”
Familia primum. Family first.
Shock turned Zeke’s muscles to glass. One wrong move, and his world could shatter into a million fragments. Had Sardoff found Lupos, the sword that had defended the Blackwell family for generations until it was stolen from his great-great-grandfather a century ago?
“An antique longsword,” Zeke said, infusing amused disbelief into his voice. “Do you really have to ask?”
“No, I suppose not. But I cannot obtain something the possessor has no desire to sell.”
Disappointment coiled in his gut. “Can you get me a name?”
Sardoff lifted a brow. “Do you really have to ask?”
Zeke grinned, despite the tension still gripping his insides. “I suppose not.”
Always the businessman, his friend swept his hand over the antique arsenal displayed on the table. “Which one should I wrap up for you?”
Zeke snapped off his Nitrile gloves and stuffed them into the front pocket of his jeans. “All of them.”
“All?"
Lifting a duffel bag from the floor, Zeke dumped out two stacks of Ben Franklins onto the table. “All.”