“What are they going to do about the dig?” Leila asked. The show must go on with or without him. She cast him a sideways glance. His eyes remained closed, his head resting on a thin pillow.
“They’ll probably send somebody else from the university to oversee things,” Soliman answered, eyes still closed.
They fell silent. Leila wandered away from the window and studied a beach landscape painting hanging on the wall. Her confidence ebbing and flowing, a small voice whispered it was okay to tell him everything. Another voice screamed at her not to.
“Thank you for stopping by to visit,” Soliman went on with his scratchy voice. “I did want to speak to you about something.”
She tore her gaze from the beach and turned to him.
“What did you find?”
A cold wave of shock crashed over her. How did he know?
“You did find something, didn’t you?”
Her mouth opened and closed.
“When the tunnel collapsed, was there any damage in the burial chamber? Anything at all?”
A lucky guess. It had to be. He was passionate about his work. He’d studied tombs longer than she’d been alive. Glimpsing him in the hospital bed, gray-skinned with dark rings under his eyes, she couldn’t imagine he would murder someone to find a tomb.
Her decision made, she took a deep breath. Hopefully this wasn’t a mistake.
She shuffled toward his bed, twisting her hands in front of her. “Last night while I was trapped in the burial chamber…” She described the opening, the staircase, the ornately decorated corridor, and the door.
Soliman’s eyes grew wider the more she explained. As she described to him the cartouche over the door and the clay seal, he struggled to sit up on the bed.
Leila stopped mid-sentence. The beeping of the heart monitor picked up speed. She glanced at the screen and then back to the professor to find him sitting on the edge of the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to get out of here.” Soliman wrenched the oxygen tube from his nose.
“That is not a good idea.” Leila rushed over to him and tried to push his shoulders down. “You just had a heart attack!”
“I’ve been searching for this for eight years. I have to see it myself!” He ripped out his IV and tossed it aside, the fluid dripping from the tip. The heart monitor went berserk. Blood squirted from his arm where the IV had pierced him.
“Stop it!” Leila screeched as he began to peel off the round patches from the electrode wires on his chest. “I haven’t told anyone—nobody knows about it but you and me. It can wait a few weeks.”
A nurse burst into the room and knocked her aside.
“You need to leave,” she said over her shoulder to Leila.
Leila backed out of the room, and two more nurses rushed in. Her heart raced as she stood alone in the hallway. She shouldn’t have told him. Why couldn’t she listen to her gut?
An elevator dinged at the end of the hallway and the double doors slid open to reveal Emma and Karl. A small bouquet rested in the crook of Emma’s arm. They joined Leila a moment later, exchanging confused glances at the sound of nurses wrestling Soliman back onto the bed.
“What happened?” Emma asked, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open.
Leila lifted her shoulders, unsure how to explain. “I guess he doesn’t like hospitals.”
• • •
After Leila made it back to the dorm that afternoon, she collapsed in bed. She had no intention of getting back up for another twenty-four hours.
But just after midnight, her eyes snapped open.
She jolted upright, bumping her head against the top bunk. Her camera. Her toolkit. She’d left everything in the tomb.
Taking deep breaths through her nose, she laid back down. There was nothing she could do about it at the moment. Her eyes slid shut, but her brain refused to go back to sleep. All she could think about was the tomb. For another twenty minutes, she tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable.
What if Soliman told a grave robber to go to the tomb for him? It could be in ruins. No, that was crazy. Soliman was a good Egyptologist. He was simply out of sorts earlier.
The image of him ripping out the IV replayed in her mind. Passionate. Or something else?
Realizing any further attempt to sleep was futile, she quietly slipped out of the bed and shimmied into a sweater. If she was going to be awake all night, she might as well go. At least she could reassure herself nothing happened to the tomb.
• • •
Except for the occasional passing car, Leila was the only one on the street. She hiked toward the edge of town, even though she’d yet to go by foot to the Saqqara necropolis. But it should only be a thirty-minute walk. Nothing she couldn’t handle.
Once she left the warm glow of the street lamps on the main road, a chill prickled at the back of her neck. Resisting the urge to cross her arms, she shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and her fingers clutched the knife she’d borrowed from the kitchen.
She picked up her pace. Going alone wasn’t a good idea, but who could she ask? Neal would have a heart attack too if she’d told him what she’d been up to. And Xander… there was no way she’d go there alone with him.
The sound of footsteps came from behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to see a dark figure several yards back, emerging from behind a row of dusty cars parked on the side of the road.
She swallowed. Just a dude out for a walk. Nothing to worry about. She wasn’t being followed. Why would someone do that?
