Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last (11 page)

And this…further alteration of the way things were done? In the current political environment,

where Wrath’s leadership was already being challenged—

“You’re deep in thought.”

At the sound of Blay’s voice, Saxton jumped and nearly lost his Montblanc over his shoulder.

Immediately, Blay reached forward as if to calm what had been ruffled. “Oh, I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s all right, I—” Saxton frowned as he regarded the soldier’s wet and bloodied clothing.

“Dearest Virgin Scribe…what happened tonight?”

Evidently in lieu of answering, Blay headed over for the bar on the antique bombé chest in the

corner. As he took his time choosing between the sherry and a Dubonnet, it was rather clear he was

preparing a sequence of words in his head.

Which meant it had to do with Qhuinn.

In fact, Blay cared for neither sherry nor Dubonnet. And sure enough, he helped himself to a port.

Saxton eased back in his chair and looked upward at the chandelier that hung so far above the

floor. The fixture was a stunning specimen from Baccarat, made in the middle nineteenth century, with all of the leaded-glass crystals and careful workmanship one would expect.

He recalled it swinging from side to side subtly, the rainbow refractions of light twinkling all

around the room.

How many nights ago had that been? How long since Qhuinn had serviced that Chosen directly

above this room?

Nothing had been the same since.

“A broken-down car.” Blay took a long swallow. “Just mechanical issues.”

Is that why your leathers are wet, and there is blood down the front of your shirt? Saxton

wondered.

And yet he kept the demand to himself.

He had become used to keeping things to himself.

Silence.

Blay finished his port and poured another with the kind of alacrity typically reserved for

drunkards. Which he was not. “And…you?” the male said. “How’s your work?”

“I’m finished. Well, nearly so.”

Blay’s blue eyes shot over. “Really? I thought you were going to be at this forever.”

Saxton traced that face he knew so well. That stare he’d looked into for what seemed like a

lifetime. Those lips he had spent hours locked onto.

The crushing sense of sadness he felt was as undeniable as the attraction that had brought him to

this house, his job, his new life.

“So did I,” he said after a moment. “I, too…thought it would last far longer than it did.”

Blay stared down into his glass. “It’s been how long since you started?”

“I don’t…I can’t remember.” Saxton put a hand up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It does not

matter.”

More silence. In which Saxton was willing to bet the very breath in his lungs that Blaylock’s mind

had retreated to the other male, the one he loved like nobody else, his other half.

“So what was it?” Blay asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your project. All of this work.” Blay motioned his glass around elegantly. “These books you’ve

been poring over. If you’re finished, you can tell me what it was all about now, right?”

Saxton briefly considered telling the truth…that there had been other, equally pressing and

important things that he had been quiet on. Things that he had thought he could live with, but which, over time, had proven too heavy a burden to carry.

“You shall find out soon enough.”

Blay nodded, but it was with that vital distraction that he had had since the very beginning. Except then he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Saxton’s brows rose. “Indeed…?”

“Wrath should have a really good lawyer at his side.”

Ah.

Saxton pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Yes. How true.”

It was with a strange feeling of fragility that he gathered his reams of papers. It certainly seemed, in this tense, sad moment, as though they were all that sustained him, these flimsy, yet powerful sheets with their countless words, each handwritten and crafted with care, contained neatly in their lines of text.

He did not know what he would do without them on a night like this.

He cleared his throat. “What plans have you for what little remains of the eve?”

As he waited for the reply, his heart pounded within his rib cage, because he, and he alone,

seemed to realize that the assignment from the king wasn’t the only thing that was ending tonight.

Indeed, the baseless optimism that had sustained him in the initial stages of this love affair had

decayed into a kind of desperation that had had him grasping at straws in an uncharacteristic way…

but now, even that was gone.

It was ironic, really. Sex was but a transient physical connection—and there were many times in

his life when that had been all he’d been looking for. Even with Blaylock, in the beginning, such had been the case. Over time, however, the heart had gotten involved, and that had left him where he was tonight.

At the end of the road.

“…work out.”

Saxton shook himself. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m going to work out for a while.”

After you’ve had a decanter of port?
Saxton thought.

For a moment, he was tempted to push for precise details on the night, the minute whos and whats

and wheres—as if they might unlock some sort of relief. But he knew better. Blay was a

compassionate, kind soul, and torture was something he did only as part of his job when it was

necessary.

There would be no relief coming, not from any combination of sex, conversing, or silence.

Feeling as though he were bracing himself, Saxton buttoned his double-breasted blazer up and

checked that his cravat was in place. A passby of his pectoral revealed his pocket square was

precisely arranged, but the French cuffs of his shirt need a sharp tug, and he took care of that

promptly.

“I must needs take a break before I prepare to speak with the king. My shoulders are killing me

from having been at that desk all night.”

“Have a bath. It might loosen things up?”

“Yes. A bath.”

“I’ll see you later, then,” Blay said as he poured himself another and came over.

Their mouths met in a brief kiss, after which Blay turned and strode out into the foyer,

disappearing up the stairs to go change.

Saxton watched him depart. Even moved forward a couple of steps so that he could see those

shitkickers, as the Brothers called them, ascend the grand staircase one step at a time.

Part of him was screaming to follow the male up into their bedroom and help him out of those

clothes. Emotions aside, the physical sizzle between the two of them had always been strong, and he felt like he wanted to exploit that now.

Except even that Band-Aid was fraying.

Going over and pouring himself a sherry, he sipped it and went to sit before the fire. Fritz had

refreshed the wood not long ago, and the flames were bright and active over the stack of logs.

This was going to hurt, Saxton thought. But it wasn’t going to break him.

He would eventually get over this. Heal. Move on.

Hearts were broken all the time….

Wasn’t there a song about that?

The question was, of course, when did he talk to Blaylock about it.

NINE

The sound of cross-country skis traveling over snow was a rhythmic rush, repeated at a quick

clip.

The storm that had drifted down from the north had cleared after dawn, and the rising sun

that shone beneath the lip of the departing cloud cover sliced through the forest to the sparkling

ground.

To Sola Morte, the shafts of gold looked like blades.

Up ahead, her target presented itself like a Fabergé egg sitting on a stand: The house on the

Hudson River was an architectural showpiece, a cage of seemingly fragile girders holding stack upon stack of countless panels of glass. On all sides, reflections of the water and the nascent sun were like photographs captured by a true artist, the images frozen in the very construction of the home itself.

You couldn’t pay me to live like that,
Sola thought.

Unless it was all bulletproof? But who had the money for that.

According to the Caldwell public records department, the land had been purchased by a Vincent

DiPietro two years before, and developed by the man’s real estate company. No expense had been

spared on the construction—at least, given the valuation on the tax rolls, which was north of eight million dollars. Just after building was completed, the property changed hands, but not to a person: to a real estate trust—with only a lawyer in London listed as trustee.

She knew who lived here, however.

He was the reason she’d come.

He was also the reason she had armed herself so thoroughly. Sola had lots of weapons in easy-to-

reach places: a knife in a holster at the small of her back, a gun on her right hip, a switch hidden in the collar of her white-on-white camo parka.

Men like her target did not appreciate being spied on—even though she came only in search of

information, and not to kill him, she had no doubt that if she were found on the property, things would get tense. Quick.

As she took her binocs out of an inside pocket, she kept still and listened hard. No sounds of

anything approaching from the back or the sides, and in front, she had a clear visual shot at the rear of the house.

Ordinarily, when she was hired for one of these kinds of assignments, she operated at night. Not

with this target.

Masters of the drug trade conducted their business from nine to five, but that would be p.m. to

a.m., not the other way around. Daytime was when they slept and fucked, so that was when you

wanted to case their houses, learn their habits, get a read on their staff and how they protected

themselves during their downtime.

Bringing the house into close focus, she made her assessment. Garage doors. Back door. Half

windows that she guessed looked out of the kitchen. And then the full floor-to-ceiling glass sliders started up, running down the rear flank and around the corner that turned to the river’s shoreline.

Three stories up.

Nothing moving inside that she could see.

Man, that was a lot of glass. And depending on the angle of the light, she could actually see into

some of the rooms, especially the big open space that appeared to take up at least half of the first floor. Furniture was sparse and modern, as if the owner didn’t welcome people loitering.

Bet the view was unbelievable. Especially now, with the partial cloud cover and the sun.

Training the binocs on the eaves under the roofline, she looked for security cameras, expecting

one every twenty feet.

Yup.

Okay, that made sense. From what she’d been told, the homeowner was cagey as hell—and that

kind of relentless mistrust tended to be accessorized with a good dose of security-conscious

behavior, including but not limited to personal guards, bulletproof cars, and most certainly, constant monitoring of any environment the individual spent any amount of time in.

The man who’d hired her had all those and more, for example.

“What the…” she whispered, refocusing the binoculars.

She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.

This was…all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she

could see was subtly undulating.

Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the

problem.

Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches

unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the

house and the contours of the stone chimneys.

All were utterly inanimate.

Back to the glass.

Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.

Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated

somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…

and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to

a soft current of air.

This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of

this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much

preferred greater challenges.

But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.

After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking

things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.

The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked

house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.

She was a hunter.

And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.

TEN

Blay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in

the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy

and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag

his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and

starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.

Probably with a lot more port added in.

Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door

open.