Page 11 of You Only Love Twice
Her lips pressed together.
Dmitri was more than that to me.
But it was all a lie.
And so, she didn't argue.
"Malloryn had one shot at him, but he couldn't pull the trigger because I was between them. You say I let love ruin me, but you used to have a heart too, Auvry. It was the only weakness you potentially had. Now? I think you'd take that shot." She'd seen the darkness stirring in him throughout the revolution, and the lengths he'd gone to in order to defeat Lord Balfour and ruin the prince consort. The man that came out on the other side wasn't the same one who'd gone into that fight. "So if it comes down to Malloryn and me? King takes queen," she conceded.
"You might be surprised," Malloryn replied tautly, the pinched expression about his nose showing how closely her arrow had struck.
"It's a good thing we'll never have to find out," she replied, gracing the room with a false smile. "Problem solved?"
"Well, I'm convinced," Byrnes replied, scratching his jaw. "As cold as my blood runs at times, it's a little unnerving to watch the pair of you debate murder over a flask of blood as if you're discussing the weather."
Kincaid scowled. "Agreed."
Charlie shrugged.
"It's the important questions in life," she replied, and finally gave in to the urge to roll her eyes.
"Now... do you think we can discuss actual business?" Malloryn demanded. "As enlightening as this little discussion was, the Company of Rogues has a new problem. Someone has just murdered the most dangerous assassin that's ever graced the Echelon in the exact same way he used to murder others. We know how he was killed. We don't know how his killer got in. Or who it is."
He slapped the file against his thigh.
"And... I have a credible report stating his next target is the queen."
Gemma looked at him sharply. Playing his cards close to his chest, indeed. "It is?"
No wonder he'd been out of sorts.
Chapter 4
"They called him the Chameleon," Malloryn explained, once all the Rogues—besides Ava and Jack—had assembled in his study. "A master of disguise who could kill any target, no matter how high profile or guarded. He was an assassin who plagued the Echelon in the years before the revolution, and he was caught the day the prince consort was overthrown. Or so we thought."
"Intriguing statement," Byrnes mused, his glacial eyes lighting up with glee. "Or so we thought."
Gemma settled into her usual armchair between Baroness Schröder and Charlie. "Of courseyou'dbe interested."
Byrnes smiled a devious smile. He never could resist a challenging case. "It's been a boring month. Malloryn's had me confined to the house while we waited to see how my transformation would affect me."
For years blue bloods had feared the Fade—the end stage of the craving virus, when all the color drained out of their skin and hair and they began to transform into a bloodthirsty vampire that would slaughter anything and everything that moved. However, the Company of Rogues had recently discovered there was one other course of transmutation for a blue blood. Using theelixir vitae, a closely guarded secret serum, blue bloods could becomedhampirinstead. As fast as a vampire, with the same weakness to sunlight, but retaining their mental faculties.
"Tell me more about this Chameleon," Byrnes purred.
"Fifteen assassinations over the course of five years," Malloryn replied, tossing a file across the polished mahogany table toward Byrnes. "Gemma? You know the facts best."
"His most high-profile kill was Lady Harrenhall," Gemma said, pushing to her feet and standing next to Malloryn, "and several of his previous assassinations happened to be the prince consort's enemies. His last kill, Lord Randall, was the one anomaly to the pattern. Randall was a trusted cousin of the prince consort who was working on his behalf to forge an alliance with the blue bloods of the Russian court. They played golf together. He was murdered the same day of the revolution and his killer apprehended on the spot, though he refused to confess and claimed he had no recollection of killing Randall."
"You believe this Chameleon worked for the prince consort?" Ingrid asked.
"We suspect he had to be connected to the prince consort in some way, as there are too many coincidental deaths among the prince consort's enemies."
"He?" Byrnes asked, pouring a brandy for Ingrid. "If you don't know who it is, then how can you presume?"
"Because we have several witnesses and every single one of them describes a different man. Old, young, bearded, clean-shaven, brown hair, blond, tall, short.... He was a master of disguise. There is no distinguishing characteristic beyond his calling cards; the King of Diamonds card is usually planted on the victim's body; a diamond is engraved on the casing of the bullet used to kill; and there's nowhere he can't get into, no one he can't kill."
"He wants to be known," Charlie mused.
