His face goes through several different expressions before settling on something I can’t quite comprehend. There’s a darkness there, an old memory maybe, something rattling around in a grave.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “Yes, actually, I do.”
I sense an opening and press my advantage. Leaning closer to him, I say, “Let me hel—”
The bell over the door in front of the shop jangles.
Reynard looks over my shoulder. Instantly, his eyes shutter. Something about his posture changes, softens. Even his face somehow becomes more indistinct. Suddenly, I’m looking at Average Joe again, the man you couldn’t pick out of a crowd, who could easily vanish into it instead.
In a voice meant to carry, he says, “You just have to continue east for two more blocks, sir. The entrance to the tube is on Chancery Lane. You can’t miss the signs.”
His eyes convey a warning as real as his words are fake.
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.
“Thank you for the advice. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a plane to Washington, DC, to catch and the world’s largest blue diamond to steal, or the bear is really going to have something to be angry about.”
I turn and continue down the aisle. Again, Reynard follows so closely behind, I’m surprised he doesn’t trip me.
“We need to talk about your American.”
“He isn’t my American.”
“Oh-ho! Really? Perhaps someone should inform him of that fact. The man is completely infatuated with you!”
“He’s probably taken a lot of hard hits to the head. He’s a soldier.”
“Good God!” he scoffs. “If what you know about men was made into a book, it would be filled with blank pages! He was a soldier. Now he’s a hired gun with a hard-on for a woman whose life is beholden to one of the most dangerous criminals who’s ever lived. It’s a Shakespearean tragedy in the making!”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re completely failing.”
“I’m trying to make you have a conversation. Mariana, stop.”
Reynard clasps my shoulder, pulls me up short, and turns me to face him. “Do you know what a hero needs more than anything else?”
“Great hair? A compelling backstory? A cool name and a cape?”
“A villain. And do you know what happens when a hero finds his villain?”
“They live happily ever after in the pages of a comic book?”
Radiating annoyance, Reynard purses his lips and exhales.
I ditch the jokes and answer seriously. “War.”
“Exactly,” he replies softly, nodding. “And if you don’t shake your American, he’s going to start a war with the Devil and drag us all into hell.”
“You’re forgetting that I already shook him.”
“Did you? Because I get the feeling the man is a little more resourceful than you’re giving him credit for.”
Aggravated—because he’s right—I pull Oliver Twist from the bookshelf. It yawns open, revealing the dank tunnel beyond.
Reynard sighs, realizing I’m not going to respond. When he speaks again, he sounds resigned. “He’ll be watching the shop. We have to assume he’ll have video surveillance on us within hours, if he doesn’t already.”
“I know.”
“Which means you can’t come back—”
“I know!”
At my sharp tone, he stiffens. I blow out a hard breath and scrub my hands over my face.
“I’m sorry. I know this is my fault. I know I messed up. He’s just so…he’s so…” I search for the right word, but can only come up with one. “Beautiful. In every way. I’ve never met anyone like him. He makes me feel like I’m worth something.” My voice breaks. “He makes me feel like I could be someone better than I am.”
With infinite gentleness, Reynard strokes a hand over my hair. “We’re creatures of the underworld, my darling. We have no business in the dealings of heroes.”
My throat constricts. “Just once,” I whisper. “I’d like to be a hero, too.”
Reynard watches in astonishment as a tear crests my lower lid and slides down my cheek. Then he surprises me by engulfing me in a hard, heartfelt hug.
“It will all be over soon,” he whispers, an odd vibration in his voice. “You’ll honor the oath and then you’ll be free. Then you can live whatever kind of life you like, anywhere in the world.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, loving the sound of those words, but knowing in a dark part of my soul that they’re untrue.
Capo will find a way to keep me, blood oath or no. All these years and all these jobs to pay off a debt have been more than promises kept. They’ve been a safety net.
Without that safety net, it’s going to be a fast and hard fall straight into the arms of a monster.