Perhaps Hyko had overestimated this girl’s ability to play the naïve who’d stumbled into danger. Criminal organizations like Hyko’s were more vulnerable to incompetence than one might imagine. Indeed, most criminals were mentally defective in some way.
Another possibility was that Hyko had purposely sent somebody inept, armed with just enough information to make her ineffective, simply to confuse him. It made a certain twisted sense: Sir Kendall was a master puzzle solver; what better way to confound him than with nonsense? Only Hyko would think of something like that; he was a great fan of the Surrealists. An entirely decadent and debauched individual.
The third possibility, of course, was that she was a preternaturally clever spy playing the nervous, coquettish lightweight.
He sank back down into the chair. He’d see what was to be seen here, then interrogate her, and kill her, ideally before the weekend was up. Pity. He enjoyed women and truly hated to kill them. He’d only killed three women in his life.
Three that he knew of, anyway.
Not expecting anyone, indeed. Women home alone at night didn’t wear outfits like that. And he’d give a hundred to one that her underwear matched. Probably lace; she didn’t strike him as a satin girl. He heard her turn on the oven, but he hadn’t heard an oven door open. Something waiting, all set to heat. Expecting him. For dinner. Had Hyko’s organization learned of his reassignment even before he had?
This gave him pause. A leak in his organization would be disastrous at a time like this.
She came in with two bottles of beer. No glasses.
“Are you hungry? I’m baking a giant pan of eggplant parmesan.”
“I don’t want to intrude.” He stood, went to her. “Allow me.” He took both bottles from her, brushing her fingers in the process of the exchange; the jolt that went through her was nearly palpable. There were some things women couldn’t fake. Odds on those lace panties being ever so slightly moist. He smiled.
“You like olives?” she asked, apropos of nothing.
“I love them,” he said, twisting off a cap and handing her one of the bottles.
She smiled, ecstatic, it seemed, that he liked olives. “I’ll be right back.”
She jangled out of the room as he opened the other bottle. At least she’d brought the bottles for him to open. It was customary for the guest or captive to open the bottles himself, so that he could feel confident the beverages weren’t drugged. A kind of rule of war their set typically didn’t depart from, and especially handy when the beverage in question was a vintage wine or champagne. One hated to waste those.
Back when Hyko had held him prisoner, Hyko would open the bottles himself, but in front of Sir Kendall. Hyko had done this to demonstrate he wasn’t affected by the loss of his thumbs, which Sir Kendall had severed from Hyko’s hands ten years before. A dramatic, bloody affair. Monstrous, even.
But Sir Kendall was a monster.
One couldn’t be anything but a monster, not in his line of work. It often amused him how so few people truly recognized one when they saw one. It was because they expected a monster to have monstrous qualities, of course, when monstrousness was more about what qualities were missing from a person. Qualities like compassion and compunction. Vulnerabilities. Aversion to pain. One needed to be unbreakable, after all. Immune to torture.
The girl was excited about the olives. They would be drugged, but why be so obvious? No, nothing was certain in this place. Except that he’d bed the girl before the night was through, and kill her before the weekend was up. A master of sex and death. Best for Hyko not to forget it.
She returned with a platter of olives speared with colorful toothpicks.
He held up his beer. “Could I trouble you for a glass?”
She snorted. “Dude, you already have the perfect glass right there. Beer out of the bottle stays colder. And I think it tastes better, don’t you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Far be it from me to impugn a lady’s decorum.”
Dimples.
He settled back down in his chair. “Now, I’m going to tell you about how I’ll extract you from this mess you seem to have got yourself into, but only after you tell me about this meal you have cooking.” He sipped his beer, which tasted quite refreshing, much to his surprise. Delicious, in fact. Was this regular beer?
She was listing the ingredients of her dish. She liked to bake a casserole of some sort on the weekend, she explained, and she’d freeze half and eat the other half over the ensuing days. On and on she went, supplying far too many details for the clearly suspicious timing. A preternaturally clever spy pretending incompetence would hardly make such ham-handed acting choices. Unless she was the clever spy playing the average spy playing the imbecilic spy.
His sipped his beer. How was it possible that it tasted so very delicious? And everything in this place seemed…more intense, somehow.
Focus on what you know, he told himself.
He knew that this imposter Alix surely hadn’t killed the real Alix; she didn’t have the gravitas. She reminded him more of the dissipated snow bunnies who trolled the Swiss chalets than any assassin he’d known.
A cell phone sounded from the direction of the kitchen. She looked at the clock. The clock. Sir Kendall could barely believe it.
“Excuse me,” she said.
He lifted a hand. “Please.”
The girl smiled and walked off.
The fact that she’d looked at the clock when the phone rang told him it was a pre-arranged call. The fact that the call was pre-arranged for 8:00 pm sharp told him it had been pre-arranged by amateurs.
He sipped his beer. Beer with eggplant parmesan. The eight o’clock check-in. Was this Hyko’s idea of a joke?
So be it. He would enjoy this Alix as a sacrificial lamb, extract what she knew, and then he would kill her. He shuffled the olives around on the plate, switching the colored toothpicks so that she wouldn’t be able to recognize the drugged ones.
Tragic, but, a certain percentage of people who joined their game got weeded out. Being killed by him was the best end she could hope for, really. Much better than if she failed her mission and Hyko got hold of her. Hyko punished failure in the most Medieval of ways.
Sir Kendall sipped his beer, assessing the sturdiness of the furniture. None of it was ideal for sex, though the couch was a Mission knock-off. A good piece to tie somebody up on: the wood slats would be weak but the frame would hold just fine.
CHAPTER FOUR
Paul Reinhardt, better known to the mixed martial arts world as “Puma Reinhardt,” one of the most promising fighters in the UFL, stared out the passenger window at the blur of roadside reflectors, wishing he could kill Sir Kendall once and for all.
Except you couldn’t kill somebody who didn’t technically exist.
He shut his eyes, told himself to pull it together, if only because Tonio, who looked up to him as a role model, counted on his guidance. That kind of trust meant a lot to Paul, and he’d worked hard over the last year to help the newbie hone his skills and avoid pro circuit pitfalls: steroids, swagger, trash talk, empty sex, puffed-up ego. “You work hard and be a good man—that’s how you win,” Paul always told Tonio.
Some role model he’d turned out to be. A man who lost his shit over a character from a TV ad wasn’t fit to be a role model for anybody. Hell, you had only to mention the name of Sir Kendall and Paul would lose it.
Just a stupid character!
Yeah. Understatement of the year. Well, Paul had only himself to blame.
Without a word, Tonio headed north on I-25 at Albuquerque. Yes, it was official. He and Tonio “Kid Smash” Reynoso were now taking a massive detour. They’d started in Los Angeles, and instead of driving directly east to their destination in West Virginia, they were heading north to loop through Malcolmsberg, Minnesota, of all places.
Paul stared at the back of the truck in front of them, a mothership of lights and reflectors in the night, feeling adrift in a roiling sea of emotions
.
Why was it so important to get to Malcolmsberg? He’d never even heard of the place until last night. They’d stopped at a roadside place a bit before eight, and Paul had grabbed a map and opened it up. He spotted Malcolmsberg, Minnesota—it was as if he knew it would be there, as if it called to him. It was more than a feeling; it was a compulsion, stronger than any compulsion he’d ever known, almost a force outside of himself. Like gravity. What was Malcolmsberg? A tiny dot on the map. Paul was seized with this need to get there.
Maybe he was going crazy.
Tonio acted enthusiastic about the new plan, joking about the scenic route along the Mississippi, asking Paul if he was sure they let Latinos into Minnesota.
Christ, after all that had happened, the younger fighter still stuck with him. If Paul had suggested a scenic route through Siberia, Tonio would’ve gone for it, found a joke to make about it. Tonio’s sense of fun and lightness was something Paul appreciated to no end. Especially now.
He should find Tonio a new mentor and training partner after this. Tonio was only twenty—a very young twenty, at that—he needed somebody trustworthy to watch out for him.
And Paul…what did he need for himself? To get away. To get away from Sir Kendall.
Maybe he would find some peace in Malcolmsberg. Maybe that’s why he was drawn there.
Twelve hours on the road and Tonio hadn’t mentioned Sir Kendall. And he wouldn’t. The subject of Sir Kendall made all the fighters on the team nervous. They couldn’t understand how the mere mention of a name at the start of a fight could transform Puma Reinhardt from up-and-coming legend to loser.
Paul had overheard one of the fighters describe the name Sir Kendall as Paul’s kryptonite.
Wrong. Kryptonite would be way easier to deal with. Kryptonite sapped your strength, it didn’t twist you up with terror and horror and shame and darkness.
“Twenty hours,” Tonio said, ripping into a bag of red licorice. “Man, if Coach Walton saw us eating this shit—” He stopped. Because Coach Walton was no longer Paul’s coach. Coach Walton had kicked Paul out of the Eagle’s Cove, the most elite training team in the league.
“Don’t worry about it,” Paul said.
“It’s temporary,” Tonio replied.
Paul could hear the lack of conviction in his voice. Tonio was no fool; he’d been around the martial arts scene long enough to know that the best fighters got there through talent, discipline, and a heavy dose of demons, and sometimes those demons brought a fighter down.
“Coach’ll come crawling when you bounce back,” Tonio tried.
Paul nodded. Coach Walton had been right to dump him. Paul was damaged beyond repair.
He stared out the window, wishing he could talk to Master Veecha. Master Veecha would know what to do, what to say. The crazy old Brazilian had saved his life, practically raised him from the age of 11, when Paul had run away from home—raised him in his martial arts school in a seedy section of Oakland. Master Veecha had let him live there, and later, teach classes there. Paul owed Veecha everything. Always just train, Veecha would say. But all the training in the world couldn’t help you in some struggles.
CHAPTER FIVE
The girl returned from the kitchen and her secretive phone call, all sexy smiles. “Silly…” she waved her hand at the kitchen. “Just somebody wanting to talk.”
Sir Kendall settled into his seat. “Ms. Gordon, can you think of any reason you’d be a person of interest to somebody with, shall we say, gray-area international business concerns?”
“No, I can’t think how that could be at all!” A flick of the eyes sideways. “It’s weird.”
Did she have to be so obvious? He couldn’t pretend he didn’t see this. “Something just occurred to you, and you chose not to share it, but I can assure you that it’s in your best interests to disclose everything to me. Like it or not, you’ve caught the attention of somebody dangerous, and if I don’t know why, I can’t protect you.”
“You mean, like a crime figure?” There it was again—that nervous excitement mixed with a curious lack of surprise.
He clenched his teeth. It was as though he were in a play, giving his all to the performance, and she wasn’t bothering to be convincing whatsoever. “Yes. That is precisely what I mean.”
Dimples. “No.”
He stood and went to the window next to the fireplace, inspected the lock. “I don’t like this,” he said. “These windows lock, but the frame seems a tad rotten.” He turned. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but where is your rifle?”
“My rifle?”
He flicked his eyes up to the wall where the Russian SKS had hung—he could tell by the faint outline. Had the real Alix tried to defend herself with a ceremonial rifle?
“God, you are so observant. Everything is like, clues to you. If you read books, I bet you’d be into Sherlock Holmes.”
“If I read books? What do you take me for, Ms. Gordon?”
“Oh! No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.” She laughed. “To insult your intelligence or, you know. I just didn’t realize you read books.”
“One tends to.”
“So what do you like to read? Do you have a favorite author?”
He smiled, thinking furiously. He read books, but he couldn’t recall any titles, or any authors’ names. Odd. It seemed he should be able to recall at least one. He knew he was a learned man. “It’s hard to pick one.”
“Who are your runners-up?”
Heat invaded his face. “Ms. Gordon, we need to talk about your situation.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to try to…really, I’m so sorry.”
Pity now? The hairs on his neck pricked up. “No harm done. You should locate your rifle.”
She snorted. “A lot of good that’ll do.”
What exactly was the girl implying? That it hadn’t served the real Alexis Gordon? Was she trying to play the innocent or not?
He moved to another window, fiddled with the lock. In Sir Kendall’s experience, only two sorts of enemies were this sloppy: the enormously powerful and those with nothing to lose. Both phenomenally dangerous. He’d come into this with the assumption that no female spy could best him.
The assumption had made him stupid.
He turned to her and gave her a long drink of a look from afar, letting her feel his gaze on her.
She struck a contrapuntal stance, hand on hip, head tilted, playing the confident sexpot.
She was anything but.
He strode to her. He didn’t have a plan, but for now he needed to touch her, to know her. She tensed as he neared. Good. He could feel her nerves crank as he took the bottle from her fingers. Good. He placed the bottle on the table. “I don’t think you’re taking this situation very seriously.”
“I do take it seriously.” Her light brown eyes shone feverishly, and in this moment he believed her.
He drew a finger along the most tender inch of her chin, surprised at her responsiveness, the way she drew up for him, a mixture of nerves and arousal. This he could work with. “I don’t think you do,” he whispered. Finally he felt in control.
“No, I do, it’s just…this is slightly weird.” She moved to touch him, bracelets jangling. He closed his hands around her wrists, stilling them.
“Stay just like that. I want you to relax and let me handle everything…” He let the pause spin on. “Everything.”
Her breath shallowed, and she looked up at him. Yes, she responded beautifully when he took control like that. He trailed a finger down her neck, and it was as if he trailed her whole being along with it. Things were complex, and now he would simplify them.
A tentative smile played upon her lips.
He let his finger drop to the skin above the pearl button at the center of her chest, then traced over the button itself, smooth and cool. His cock strained in his pants.
She lowered her eyes to his hand, lashes clumped with too much black mascara, beer breath sweet and soft.
&nb
sp; He pinched the button open and slid down to the next, pinched it open, then another and another. Soon the sheaves of her sweater hung open to reveal the center of a black lace bra. He undid two more buttons, allowing his fingers to graze her belly. He’d never known a woman’s skin to feel like this, so soft and alive. He felt her quiver under his touch. What was it about this place? Even the quality of light seemed unreal. He might have assumed he’d been drugged, except he’d felt like this ever since he stood on the porch.
“Sir Kendall, it really is so excellent that you dropped by.” She moved to kiss him.
He stopped her with two fingers over her lips. “Don’t say anything,” he said. “I want you perfectly still.”
“Not even breathing?”
“You may breathe.”
Stunned smile. Yes, she enjoyed being contained. Handled. And the humorous attitude didn’t fool him. Master spy or amateur, deep down this woman craved respect—he felt sure of it. The insight calmed him. He couldn’t control her as a spy—yet—but he could control her as a woman. He always controlled the woman first.
He flicked open the last button and glided four fingertips from the top of her jeans up, up her bare belly, which undulated slightly, and up to the underwire of her bra. He then coasted back down on fingernail backs.
Goosebumps became visible across her skin as she straightened, tensed, then loosened, a constant flow of movement, even when she was trying to be still. Ever so lightly, he scratched back up.
She shot her gaze up to him.
Pearl buttons on a fuzzy sweater, an exquisitely desperate woman underneath, and a day or two before he’d have to kill her. At moments like these he could almost believe there was a god in heaven.
Mr. Real Page 5