by Natalie Grey
Was it a play? No, he did not think so. But he remembered the flat tone Ellian had used in the other room as he summoned his wife to his side. There was a threat there, and there was one here, too. Had he, too, felt the heat arcing between Cade and his wife? Cade knew enough, at least, to lie about that. No amount of honor and promises could convince a man that a Dragon was no rival—and even a Dragon did not have enough confidence to tempt the wrath of an arms trafficker.
Ellian let the silence hang, knowing what Cade was wondering.
“Very well,” Cade said eventually. “Speak plainly, then.” In his pockets, his hands had made fists.
“We are both men of the world, are we not?” Ellian went to a sideboard, almost ostentatiously turning his back on Cade. I do not fear you, the gesture said.
“You might say that.” He watched his host pour two glasses of brandy, every movement studied. The glasses were picked without Ellian looking at them, and he poured from the crystal bottle with practiced elegance. When Ellian returned, Cade took one of the glasses at random and did not drink. He met Ellian’s eyes. “Perhaps you should speak more plainly.”
To his surprise, Ellian smiled at last. It was a bitter smile, but he toasted and downed his brandy in a gulp.
Damn. There was no polite way for Cade to refuse to drink now. He raised his own glass and took a sip, rolling it across his tongue as if savoring. He tasted no bitterness, saw no residue on the top of the liquid, and swallowed reluctantly.
It was good. Of course it was good. From the carpets to the hardwood desk—and the wife, Cade thought bitterly—Ellian clearly bought only the best.
“I like you, Williams.” Ellian settled onto one of the couches and gestured for Cade to join him. When Cade had chosen a seat, Ellian leaned forward, still holding the empty tumbler. “We understand one another, I think. We have both seen all this world has to offer—both in luxury and in pain.”
Cade felt his eyebrows rise before he could stop them.
“And as you said I should speak more plainly, let me say it in the most basic terms.” Ellian smiled. “You and I, Mr. Williams, are both very bad men. We have both done very bad things. I do not think it is presuming too much to say that.”
Cade looked down into his drink. How to respond to that?
“You do not need to say anything,” Ellian assured him, eerily perceptive. “You were a Dragon. Anyone with even the most tangential affiliation to the world of war knows what the Dragons do. I know some of the ones you have destroyed—and I know there is no way you could have done so honorably.”
Cade took a gulp of the brandy.
“I should go.”
“No, I think not. I need you, Mr. Williams, don’t you see? I need a man who understands the worst the world can offer.”
“Why?” Cade asked harshly. “If you have yourself, why do you need another one? As a confidant?” He looked up, knowing his bitterness showed too clearly. “I don’t want to remember,” he said simply.
“Then you are, indeed, exactly what I require.” Ellian settled back. “Why? Yes, always people ask me why. Think, Mr. Williams. You and I have done terrible things. We know what darkness lies in the world. Aryn … does not.”
Cade’s eyebrows shot up, and Ellian laughed.
“You disbelieve me? Perhaps because she’s from Ymir?” He smiled. “Believe me, she was sheltered from the worst of the Warlord’s excesses. You have met her. You have seen her hope, her purity. There are those who call me a fool—yes, to my face—for falling in love with her so quickly. But try to understand. Seeing a woman like that on Ymir, I could no more have left her than I could have snuffed out a star. Leaving such innocence there to be corrupted and destroyed would be a crime.”
The poor bastard even had friends who told him what this temptress was, and he could not see. Cade wanted to sink his face into his hands.
“Mr. Williams.” Ellian’s voice was smooth, deep. “Help me protect my wife. You do not want to use your skills to harm, and I can understand that. It is clear that you are a man of honor. Use your skills, then, to protect. Protect Aryn. She is my everything.”
Cade looked up. Ellian’s dark eyes seemed to draw him in. Was this truly an arms trafficker? A man who dealt with the very worst the world had to offer? A distant voice in Cade’s head told him that Ellian was not trustworthy. Why, after all, had he been on Ymir to begin with?
And something tickled in his mind—a pattern, the remnants of his Dragon training coming to the fore. He ignored it. He was not that man. He would not spend the rest of his life jumping at shadows.
“You hesitate.” The voice was so kind, so understanding. “Perhaps it is me you do not wish to deal with. And you would be right not to—I will not lie. But surely you can see that Aryn is innocent of my business. Sometimes I think she suspects….”
“You do?” Something in the man’s tone caught Cade’s interest.
“She is no fool, my wife. And she is kind at heart.” Ellian’s face was inscrutable. “Sometimes I do not know why she remains.”
Your money.
But it was beyond Cade to say that—and he realized with a sinking feeling that it was beyond him to walk away, either. Ellian Pallas, for all that he was likely a murderer, was in some ways no more than a man who had loved unwisely. And Aryn, even if she was everything Cade feared, still did not deserve to be used as leverage against her husband. With a shiver, Cade remembered the things he had seen as a Dragon. No one deserved that sort of death.
Talon had known that where Cade could walk away from an offer to rejoin the Dragons, he could not walk away from someone who stood before him and begged for his help. This was not the Major asking Cade to kill brutally—it was a man asking to know that his wife was safe.
“All right.”
“What?” Ellian raised an eyebrow, looking over.
“I’ll do it.” Cade finished his brandy in a gulp; he needed it. “I’ll take the job.”
“Excellent.” Ellian smiled. “Mr. Williams, I think you will be exactly what I need.”
The smile did not reach his eyes.
12
After receiving Ellian’s orders about the party, Christian had spent the morning reviewing the resources he had at his disposal and formulating his plan accordingly. Now he looked over the group of soldiers and felt a grim satisfaction. He had observed over the years that many mercenaries were brash—overconfident and unwilling to listen to orders. He had considered trying to avoid using them altogether, and then he’d had a thought.
He had asked Kell Corporation, the only group Ellian ever used for security, for 40 of their oldest mercenaries, and who had also been on the payroll at least ten years.
Now he was staring at a room of men who would blend easily into a party for New Arizona’s elite, with the customary touch of grey in their hair, and a world-weary disposition. They weren’t brash, and they had nothing to prove.
What was more, when Christian had arranged for some of the maids to go serve refreshments, the men had looked over without an urgency. They would take what was offered, the looks said, but wouldn’t go crazy chasing any specific woman—which, in a party full of the richest and most influential people in the city, was absolutely essential.
Moreover, every single one of them had taken the time to read the mission brief, something Christian had never seen in a group of mercenaries before.
He smiled to himself. The mission was going well already. He had a set of experienced soldiers who weren’t going to jump at any little complication—or chase after a pretty face.
When he emerged into the room, they fell silent fairly quickly.
“Good evening.” Christian looked over them. He had met a few of them, leaders for the ten-man squads into which Kell Corporation arranged their soldiers. “I see that all of you have read the mission brief again, and I understand that your squad leaders have briefed you on the details already.”
Heads nodded, including the four squad leaders.
>
“Good.” Christian decided to go for flattery. “As our opponents are unknown to us, I requested the most experienced mercenaries your corporation could provide. We do not need a newsworthy shoot-out—we need you to identify the targets and move on them quietly. Maneuver them into position. Take them out with a minimum of fuss. Bring their bodies here.” In the crowd, he sought out the face of Killian Brooker, the most senior of the squad leaders, and nodded for him to come up. “Sergeant Brooker will brief you on the specifics.”
Killian Brooker had served with the Kell Corporation since he was 16, when he had forged his enlistment papers and joined in with the squad being sent to Osiris. Now he looked back with a mental wince at the boy he’d been: overconfident and severely underprepared. At the time, however, he’d thought of himself as worldly, a real man.
That boy would not recognize the man who stood before the soldiers today. Killian was smarter now. He’d spent years learning when to engage … and when not to. He had learned to arrange fights so that the odds were never fair. He’d seen other soldiers come and go, and he’d learned the hard way that glory was for the brave, and bravery was stupid.
He’d also learned that people who talked about having a good cause not only never had any money, but also never wanted to set up the fight the smart way. They wanted to be ‘honorable.’
And honor, like glory, was for the stupid.
He didn’t like people like this soft man, with their suits and their affectations, but he liked their money and he knew better than to think he could change the world all on his own. He took their money and he did their dirty work, and if it troubled his sleep, he went and found some alcohol and some company to distract him until the guilt faded away.
Now when he stared out over the group of soldiers, he felt only a sense of relief that he wasn’t going to have to corral any of the younger, stupider team members. Maybe this fop in the suit had some good ideas.
“You’ve all read the mission brief,” he said, “so this won’t take long. No weapons are allowed in the building and they have incredibly stringent security protocols for the main room in particular. This means we’ll have to stash weapons at some of the exits and coordinate how to guide our targets there. We’ll model this on Divide and Conquer.” It was one of the first lessons mercenaries at Kell learned, and, simple as it was, it was effective. There was a reason the phrase was a cliche. “Any questions?”
Heads shook, and Killian gave a smile. It was a good squad. No theatrics, no glory-seeking morons.
This was going to be nice and easy.
“All right.” Talon spread out a map on the war table and waited while the team members at the edges weighted it down. He pointed at the left side of the map.“This is the main floor of the building where the party is held. People will enter two floors below—” he tapped at the far right side of the map “—and be herded through these checkpoints.” He tapped three times on the first floor and twice on the second. “Tersi?”
“Four of the checkpoints are effectively silent.” Tersi slid schematics across the table. “No one wants to have a good party ruined by security measures, after all. So no one patting people down or other such ‘indignities,’ just some automated measures with feeds into the security office. These are embedded in the walls and scan for weapons, poisons, and signs of illness.”
“…Illness?” Stabby, one of the younger members of the team, frowned around the table.
Talon saw Loki give him a grateful look. He was learning the ropes impressively fast, and the team was privately taking high bets on how many he’d take out in their first fight—but he was still self-conscious about how inexperienced he was.
Talon knew better than to give him a speech about how everyone started off inexperienced. Being singled out would only make things worse, and in any case, going through a few fights was the only way to get that worry out of someone’s system. He, himself, had no worries about Loki—especially when the kid was so ready to learn.
“Get a sick person in there like a walking bomb, and you could take out half of the elite in the city,” Aegis said gruffly. He considered. “Not a bad idea, really. They’re scum, the lot of them.”
“Biological weapons can be tailored to be highly contagious and, as far as the subject is concerned, symptom free.” Talon grimaced. “It’s been used a few times on Osiris. People here like to think they’re above that sort of thing. They’re lucky their security teams don’t.” He shrugged. “Go on, Tersi.”
“Thanks to one of our latest updates—and Miranda’s help—our weapons should be invisible to this technology.”
“‘Should be?’” Aegis was not convinced.
“The lining in our suits is designed to confuse scanners, Miranda has sewn noise bombs in over the places where weapons will be stowed, and the buttons—and Sphinx’s hairpin—” Tersi studiously did not look at Sphinx in her golden dress “—hold a program that the scanners will recognize so that they won’t set off alarms. In short, the automated systems won’t set anything off and, unless the security guards know to look very closely at us specifically, they aren’t going to see anything out of the ordinary.”
“And if they are looking very closely?” Aegis asked ominously.
“If they are, and the system refreshes at exactly the right time, they will see a momentary, and very faint, distortion caused by the overlay image. Odds are that it won’t even happen once, and they’re vanishingly small that it would happen twice. However, if that happens….” Tersi nodded to Nyx.
“If that happens and you are stopped, normal protocols apply for the rest of team—no acknowledgement, no altered paths, nothing.” Nyx looked at all of them in turn. “Let them be taken away, and if it’s you, go with them without a fight. We all have identification that will trace back to a rather eccentric billionaire who’s known to have some over-the-top security methods.”
“Who?” Loki asked, before he could stop himself.
“James Recardo Arico IV,” Talon said blandly. Snickers sounded from around the table. “Ridiculously wealthy. He’s got a castle out in the mountains, he’s rarely seen in public, and he stockpiles weird stuff.”
Loki looked around at all of the people laughing, and his eyes narrowed in thought. Then he gave Talon a look. “He doesn’t exist, does he?”
Stabby gave a guffaw, and Sphinx clapped Loki on the shoulder. “Hey, he’s learning!”
“He is.” Talon gave a pleased nod. “You are correct. Arico is our front on New Arizona. He sends his security to a lot of parties to scout things out, but rarely decides to go, he gets a lot of raw materials that would be too noteworthy to buy otherwise, and … well, I’ll show you the files later if you want to see them. Suffice to say, he has sufficient pull with the police department and his eccentricity gets us out of a lot of jams. Everyone wants a piece of that fortune, so no one ever calls him on anything.”
Loki gave a snort and shook his head.
“If you get caught,” Nyx continued, “once the police let you out, go wait at one of the black points here.” She indicated four areas around the building. “Pallas’s men have marked these exits as their stash points for weapons. Now, we’ll be doing what we can to get those out of there, but we won’t necessarily be able to.”
“Our intelligence suggests that there will be forty mercenaries on premise, along with this man and his two bodyguards.” Talon put a picture down on the table. “Christian Cordev. He works for Ellian Pallas and he’s been tasked with finding the source of the weapons deal we’re trying to put together tonight. We need him distracted while I speak with our contact. Is that understood?”
Everyone nodded.
“Right.” Talon smiled at them. “You all look very sharp. We’ll be heading out in an hour.”
“Boss, the party has already started.” Nyx looked at her watch.
“You don’t go to parties,” Talon told her with a wicked grin, “so you don’t know this, but no one worth talking to arrives at a
party when it starts. If you were willing to wear dresses, you would know these things.”
The look she gave him promised painful retribution during their next sparring session.
Or possibly now. He should probably go. “I’m going into the city.” Talon buttoned his coat and smiled around the table. “I’ll give Nyx the signal for when you should all follow me.”
He did not look at her as he left, but he knew she was watching, and that Tersi was running routines, as well, to see who tried to follow Talon. Without knowing if someone was reporting to Soras, Talon had not yet told the crew in general about Cade’s involvement.
Layers within layers, and backups for his backups.
Talon had no illusions. The Warlord might not know what he was doing on New Arizona, but he had the resources and intuition to figure it out if he got enough clues to form a picture. He worked in the shadows, and he didn’t fight fair.
Unluckily for him, Talon didn’t fight fair, either.
13
She was clearly going crazy.
Aryn paced around her stateroom, not even sparing a glance for the gorgeous view of the city outside. New Arizona was at its finest in the winter, so cold that it was impossible to get from place to place without shivering violently—and, high society being what it was, winter had thus been designated The Season. While it made no sense to Aryn, she normally appreciated the drifting snow and glittering lights that graced the long nights.
Not now. In the past several hours, she’d picked a fight with Ellian and proceeded to have remarkably inappropriate fantasies about a man she’d just met. Nothing she had done could drive them from her mind. Running, kickboxing, and even archery had failed to soothe her, meditation proceeded to empty everything from her mind except the fantasies themselves, and she’d realized within moments that a bath was a terrible mistake.