Free Abandon by Meg Cabot Page B

things seemed to happen all at once.
    Something went cold in the jeweler’s gaze when it fastened on the stone. The closer he bent to look at it, the more nervous I got…and the darker the diamond seemed to turn at its heart. My own heart began to beat very hard.
    And though I couldn’t turn my head all the way to look because the jeweler had me almost literally by the neck, I could have sworn I saw, out of the corner of my eye,
him
standing outside the store, looking at us through the window.
    “Do you have any idea what this is that you’re wearing, young lady?” the jeweler demanded. And then he launched into some kind of bizarre diamond speak. “This is a fancy deep gray blue. IfI’m not wrong, it’s probably worth anywhere from fifty to seventy-five million dollars. Maybe more if its provenance can be proven, because it looks uncannily like one I’ve seen somewhere before.”
    What could I say? The stone had turned ebony. I tugged gently on the chain, hoping he’d let go.
    Except of course he only held on more tightly, keeping me a prisoner in his store.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really do have to —”
    “You shouldn’t be walking around the streets wearing this,” the jeweler interrupted. “It belongs in a safe-deposit box. By rights I should confiscate it, if only for your own safety. Where did you even get it? Do your parents know you have this?”
    It had been only a month since the accident. Everyone at school was already beginning to treat me differently because I’d been acting so weird since coming back from the dead. I’d lost all interest in going to the mall and working with the animal rescue groups I used to love. I’d said that odd thing to Hannah about how I’d always protect her from “the evil” (I’d been referring to my necklace, of course, but she hadn’t known that). Soon I would lose the part of Snow White in the school play.
    I was already slipping into a glass coffin of my very own.
    But somehow I still found a way to assure the jeweler, in a stammering voice, that the necklace was a family heirloom, thank you very much. And that my mother was, in fact, waiting for me in the car outside and that I needed to go meet her right now. Though I was actually more frightened at the idea of walking outside that store and possibly running into
him
than I was at staying inside with the extremely irritable jeweler.
    That’s when I heard the bells on the shop door tinkle behind me, indicating that someone was coming in.
    My heart sank. No. Please,
no.
    “I don’t believe you,” the jeweler said flatly. “In fact, just so you know, my assistant is on the phone in the back with the police right now. They’re on the way. So your mother — if she
is
waiting outside, which I sincerely doubt, since you’ve clearly stolen this — can come inside and join us, if she cares to, and watch you being arrested for grand theft.”
    Except that my mother was never given the opportunity to do so. Because John stepped forward.
    And the walls of the shop seemed to turn the color of blood before my eyes.
    “Excuse me,” John said in his deep voice, which sounded completely out of place in such a small, upscale boutique. He
looked
completely out of place in it, already so menacing because of his size but even more so now because of the black leather jacket and jeans he was wearing.
    I thought I was going to pass out. What was he doing there? Had he come to take me back because I’d broken the rules? Was that why the stone in my necklace had turned black, to warn me?
    The jeweler glanced over at him, annoyed. “My assistant will be with you in a moment, sir,” he said.
    “No, thank you,” John said, as if he were refusing an offer of peanuts on a plane. “Let go of her.”
    The jeweler’s eyes widened slightly. But he didn’t let go of me.
    “Excuse
me,”
the jeweler said, looking indignant. “But are you acquainted with this young lady? Because she —”
    That’s when John —