Page 56 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
Go. Now.
I glance over my shoulder. Two beefy olive-skinned men in suits with suspicious bulges in odd places flank the door. They look at me with that flat, killer gaze I’ve seen a thousand times before.
“Thanks, man,” I say cheerfully, turning back to Reynard. “This city’s just so huge, ya know?” I laugh an unselfconscious, touristy laugh. “Way bigger’n my hometown. I keep gettin’ lost! Have yourself a nice day!”
I turn and saunter toward the men, smiling my dumbass backcountry smile again. On them, it works, because they both give me a quick once-over, then dismiss me and turn their attention to Reynard. I walk out the front door, whistling, then stand on the sidewalk and pretend to look for a street sign while I memorize the plates on the stretch limo parked at the curb across the street.
The back window is rolled halfway down. I catch a glimpse of a face in the shadows of the interior. It’s a man, black-haired and unsmiling, with hard, shining eyes swimming in darkness, like coins glinting in the bottom of a wishing well.
Every nerve in my body slams into Defcon One. If I were a fire alarm, I’d have sirens sounding and emergency lights blazing.
“I work for monsters,” Mariana had said.
I damn sure know a monster when I see one.
I turn and casually stroll down the sidewalk, keeping my posture easy, not looking back even though there’s an animal inside me, clawing at my skin, roaring at me to go back and introduce the black-haired man to the barrel of my gun.
When I’m safely around the corner and out of sight, I yank my cell phone from my pocket and dial Connor’s number. “Sorry to bother you on your honeymoon, brother,” I say when his voicemail picks up, “but I’m gonna need to borrow your wife.”
This situation calls for a bigger brain than my own, and if anyone knows how to root a monster from its nest, it’s Tabby.
I hang up and put a pair of earbuds in my ears. From my phone I activate the bug I stuck under Reynard’s counter when I came in. I start to listen as I duck into a pub across the street.
Fifteen
Mariana
“All clear! You can come out now!”
Reynard’s voice is muffled through the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus I’m lying in. I press a button next to my left hand and the lid slides open on pneumatic rollers installed specifically for its current use: hiding people.
I climb out, dust myself off, and look at Reynard. He stands with his arms folded over his chest, staring at me with such disapproval that I wince.
“Don’t say it. I already know.”
“Know what, my darling?” he says acidly. “That you led your inamorato right to me? That you broke every rule we have? That he could single-handedly ruin us both?”
Groaning, I walk past him on my way to the back of the shop and the hidden exits I can access through the warehouse. “I said don’t say it!”
Reynard follows right on my heels. “Not to mention you got another job added to your oath because of a foolish impulse—”
“Trying to help those girls wasn’t foolish!” I whirl around, heat crawling up my neck, and glare at him. “What was I supposed to do, sit there and drink champagne while their throats were slit in a room down the hall? Let them suffer like Nina did? Is that what you would’ve had me do? Not even try to save their lives?”
My shouted words die in lingering echoes in the rafters.
“Capo would’ve savaged you, Mariana, and still would’ve done as he pleased with them,” Reynard says, more gently. “As it is, we’re fortunate he even let you walk out of that room. I told you to be careful. Instead, you took a sharp stick and poked a sleeping bear.”
“Well, he has his necklace now,” I say bitterly. “So he got what he wanted.”
“That’s not what he wants, and you know it.”
I swallow the bile rising in the back of my throat.
“I don’t know why he didn’t take advantage of your offer. Perhaps he still has some small shred of humanity left. But I dare say that kind of luck is once in a lifetime. Poke the bear again, and I have no doubt you’ll be eaten alive.”
I told Reynard everything when I arrived, including what happened with Ryan in the Caribbean, what Capo did to me at the Palace, and how Ryan found me at the Ritz. It was only by chance that I pulled off my sweater and a strand of my hair caught on the small metal tracking device under the collar. I destroyed it immediately, but not before swearing a blue streak mostly directed at myself.
Mostly.
