Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(35)

"Cristina, please." She whirled. Diego was there, apparently having decided to ignore Manuel. He really did look awful. The shadows under his eyes looked as if they had been cut there.

He had carried her across this grass, she remembered, only two weeks ago, when she had been injured. He had held her tightly, whispering her name over and over. And all the time, he'd been engaged to someone else.

She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. "You really don't understand why I don't want to see you?"

"Of course I understand it," he said. "But it's not what you think."

"Really? You're not engaged? You're not supposed to marry Zara?"

"She is my fiancée," he said. "But-Cristina-it's more complicated than it looks."

"I really don't see how it could be."

"I wrote to her," he said. "After you and I got back together. I told her it was over."

"I don't think she got your letter," Cristina said.

Diego shoved his hands into his hair. "No, she did. She told me she read it, and that's why she came here. Honestly, I never thought she would. I thought it was over when I didn't hear from her. I thought-I really thought I was free."

"So you broke up with her last night?"

He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, any thought that Cristina had been harboring in the deepest recesses of her heart, any fleeting hope that this was all a mistake, vanished like mist burned away by the sun. "I didn't," he said. "I can't."

"But you just said you did, in your letter-"

"Things are different now," he said. "Cristina, you'll have to trust me."

"No," she said. "No, I won't. I already trusted you, despite the evidence of my own ears. I don't know if anything you said before was true. I don't know if the things you've said about Jaime are true. Where is he?"

Diego dropped his hands to his sides. He looked defeated. "There are things I cannot tell you. I wish you could believe me."

"What's going on?" Zara's high, clear voice cut across the dry air; she was walking toward them, her Centurion pin gleaming in the sun.

Diego glanced at her, a look of pain on his face. "I was talking to Cristina."

"I see that." Zara's mouth was set into a little smile, a look that never seemed to leave her face. She swept a glance over Cristina and put her hand on Diego's shoulder. "Come back inside," she said. "We're figuring out what grids we're going to search today. You know this area well. Time to help out. Tick, tick." She tapped her watch.

Diego looked once at Cristina, then turned back to his fiancée. "All right."

With a last superior glance, Zara slipped her hand into Diego's and half-dragged him back toward the Institute. Cristina watched them go, the coffee she had drunk roiling in her stomach like acid.

* * *

To Emma's disappointment, the Centurions refused to allow any of the Blackthorns to accompany them on the search for Malcolm's body. "No, thanks," said Zara, who appeared to have appointed herself unofficial head of the Centurions. "We've trained for this, and dealing with less experienced Shadowhunters on this kind of mission is just distracting."

Emma glared at Diego, who was standing next to Zara. He looked away.

They were gone almost all day, returning in time for dinner, which the Blackthorns wound up making. It was spaghetti-lots of spaghetti. "I miss the vampire pizza," Emma muttered, glaring at an enormous bowl of red sauce.



       
         
       
        

Julian snorted. He was standing over a pot of boiling water; the steam rose and curled his hair into damp ringlets. "Maybe they'll at least tell us if they found anything."

"I doubt it," said Ty, who was preparing to set the table. It was an activity he'd enjoyed since he was little; he loved setting up each utensil in precise and even repeated order. Livvy was helping him; Kit had skulked off and was nowhere to be found. He seemed to resent the intrusion of the Centurions more than anyone else. Emma couldn't really blame him-he'd barely been adjusting to the Institute as it was, when in swept these people whose needs he was expected to cater to.

Ty was mostly right. Dinner was a large, lively affair; Zara had somehow managed to wedge herself in at the head of the table, ousting Diana, and gave them an abbreviated account of the day-sections of ocean had been searched, nothing significant found, though trace elements of dark magic indicated a point farther out in the ocean where sea demons clustered. "We'll approach it tomorrow," she said, elegantly forking up spaghetti.