“No, thank you, I’m fine.” Oh, there it was again. The pirate queen would not say “I’m fine” while being forced to walk the plank.
Victor crossed his leg over his knee and swung his foot in front of him. “Forgive me if I startled you. I came here for a reason.”
She stiffened. “And that would be?”
“I am interested in your opinion of Seth Mackey. He is a relative unknown, and personally, I find him rather opaque. I am entrusting him with an extremely sensitive project, you see. I thought perhaps that your, ah, unique point of view might yield some other insights.”
Raine tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry “No,” she croaked. “No insights. Not a one.”
He tapped a long, slim cigarette out of a silver case. “None?”
She shook her head so emphatically that the makeshift knot of hair bobbed and slid down to the nape of her neck. She pulled out the sticks. The bun unraveled down her back. “None,” she repeated.
Victor’s eyes flicked down, observing her white-knuckled hand. He lit his cigarette. “You should be more observant, my dear.”
“Should I?” Her fingers tightened around the stick until the faceted crystal beads dug painfully into her palm.
He blew out a long, thin, stream of smoke, his eyes pale, glittering slits. “The poet William Meredith once said…‘the worst that could be said of any man was that he did not pay attention.’”
An image of her dreamy, inattentive father superimposed itself upon Victor’s face. A buried ember of old anger began to glow inside her. “I can think of worse things that could be said,” she said flatly.
Victor’s eyes flashed. He tapped his cigarette into the heavy crystal ashtray on the telephone table. “Can you?”
Raine struggled to keep her face composed.
He stared straight into her eyes for what seemed like forever. “I expect you to exert yourself a bit more on the next occasion.”
His offhand tone fanned the ember inside her into a white-hot glow. “Are you ordering me to have sex with Seth Mackey, spy on him, and report back to you?” she demanded.
Distaste flitted across Victor’s face. “I detest crass overstatement.”
“I have not even begun the crass overstatements,” she hissed. “You listen carefully, Mr. Lazar. One, there will be no other occasion, because I do not want to see Seth Mackey ever again. And two, I would never spy on a person I was intimate with. Never.”
Victor took a final draw on his cigarette and crushed it out briskly. “I love the conviction with which young people use the word ‘never.’”
Her fists clenched at his patronizing tone. “It’s very late. I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave. Right now.”
Her voice broke, spoiling the effect. She held her breath, half hoping he would fire her. She would be off the hook—at least until the tombstone dream started burning holes in her sanity again.
But this time, when it did, she would be out of ideas.
Victor stood up and pulled his overcoat out of the closet.
It had worked. He was leaving. Giddy triumph emboldened her. She decided to push her luck. “And Mr. Lazar?”
“Yes?” He paused, eyebrows raised.
“I would appreciate it if you would not make yourself at home in my private space. I want to be the only person in possession of a house key.” She held out her hand.
His eyes glittered with fierce amusement. “Let me give you some advice, Raine. Don’t waste your time and energy clinging to an illusion of control. You’ll only exhaust yourself.”
She kept her hand out. “It’s my illusion, and I’m clinging to it.”
Victor chuckled. He pulled a key out of the pocket of his overcoat and held it out on the palm of his hand.
She plucked it off his palm with the tips of her fingers, and yelped as his fingers snapped around her hand, like a sprung trap.
Dream memories of Victor’s heavy arm squeezing the air out of her lungs thundered through her mind. She pulled on her throbbing hand, trying not to panic. Out of nowhere, Seth’s voice echoed in her mind. It’s all about power in the end, angel. And if you don’t know that by now, it’s time you learned. She seized onto those harsh words as if they would save her life. Maybe Seth was right. Those were the rules of this nightmare world. She had to master them. Until she did, all she could do was command her own small, frightened self as well as she was able. The roaring in her ears subsided, and her vision cleared. Her trapped hand still hurt, but it was bearable.
She looked into his eyes without blinking. “Good night, Victor.”
To her surprise, he let her go, and nodded at her with what looked almost like approval. “Excellent,” he said softly. “Good night, Raine.”
The door thudded shut behind him, and she lunged for the door, slamming in the deadbolt. She slid down against the ornately carved mahogany door until she was crumpled on the floor and gave way to deep, wrenching sobs. Seventeen years of saying no-really-I’m-fine until it was automatic, and it took a day like today to show her how foolish and vain all her efforts had been.
Don’t cling to an illusion of control, Victor had said. It’s all about power in the end, angel. Their mocking voices echoed in her head as the pitiless reality bore down on her. She had no power, no control, no illusions. She was over her head in wild white water and sinking fast. She controlled nothing; not her mind, her heart, her dreams, not even her own body. Seth had demonstrated that to her this afternoon, ruthlessly, over and over again.
Her sobs quieted to a numb silence. She pressed her face against her knees, and began to pray; she wasn’t sure to whom. She wasn’t at all positive there was a God, but she definitely believed in the opposing forces of good and evil. She might not have power, or control, or even a plan, but she was here in search of the truth, for her father’s sake.
She was here for love. That had to count for something. In any case, it was all she had, and she was clinging to it with all ten fingernails.
The security on Lazar’s town house was considerably tighter since Seth and the McCloud brothers had burgled it four months before. The increased security wasn’t much of a challenge, though, considering how he and his team had rigged the data retrieval. It was almost too easy.
Seth thought about that first burglary raid as he slid through the bushes like a shadow, far out of range of the infrared motion detectors. He shouldn’t have been thinking at all; he should be in the zone of pure focus, but anything was better than thinking about Raine.
He’d been surprised at how smoothly the four of them had worked together to coordinate the electronic assault upon Victor Lazar; the planting of the vidcams, phone transmitters, laser gulpers, and wall resonator mikes, all while staging a simulated burglary. They’d worked like swift, silent parts of the same machine, no ego in the way, thoughts running on the same groove. Quick learners, too, even though they weren’t trained gearheads like him. A good team. They saved their annoying personality quirks for their leisure time.
He fumbled in the darkness as he set the microwave frequency he needed to activate the resonant bug in Lazar’s office. He tuned the receiver for the return broadcast, cursed behind his teeth when he got it wrong, and entered it again. He was going to have to hurry to finish inside the time frame he had set himself. He hated hurrying.
He’d run through the routine, visualizing every move in advance, but he needn’t have bothered. His concentration was blasted to shards. A nighttime data sweep was a sneaky, ninja-type job that usually chilled him, but it wasn’t working tonight. His brainwaves weren’t smoothing into undulating alpha curves; they were as jagged as the teeth of a broken pocket comb. Every muscle in his body was rigid; his head and neck and balls all ached, and every time he started to calm down another phalanx of sexual images would roll over him, leaving him breathless and flattened.
He had plenty of tactile data on Raine Cameron now, but the joke was on him—he couldn’t control the data flow. It came at him in a torr
ent; her scent, her velvet softness, her smile. This was hell on earth. Worse than before he’d slept with her. Exponentially worse.
The video had done it to him. He’d been on edge already after Raine stormed out of the hotel room; then he got home, logged on and saw Lazar waiting in her house, sipping his drink in fucking real-time. All his instincts screamed at him to get the hell over there and protect her. Then cyborg man had risen up and taken control. That kind of behavior would get him killed prematurely, leaving Jesse unavenged. Besides, what did she have to fear from her own pimp? Fantasy time was over. Time to wake up and face reality.
So he’d clenched his teeth, planted his ass and waited for her to get home. One thing was for sure. If he had to watch Lazar fuck her, then it was a damn good thing he had nothing in his stomach.
The conversation that took place, from 9:35 to 9:47, had astonished him. Raine Cameron was exactly what she appeared to be: a bewildered, overworked new secretary in a big import/export firm.
So why the provocative setup? Why was she ensconced in the ex-mistress’s love nest? Why had she fallen into bed with him, as if she knew that it was expected of her? It didn’t add up. Nothing added up.
He’d monitored Lazar’s Mercedes to the marina, satisfied himself that the boat was bound for Stone Island, and replayed that twelve minutes of footage until it looped endlessly in his mind. He paced around, kicking the cheap furniture, punching the walls.
He had to do something, or he would go nuts. Something sneaky and challenging, preferably dangerous. A data retrieval sweep was pretty tame, but what the hell, it was better than stealing hubcaps.
This was asinine. He had more important things to worry about. So he’d nailed a beautiful woman, hurt her feelings, and then pissed her off. Whatever. That sequence of events was normal for him.
But this was Raine, his red-hot fairy-tale princess.
His ugly final words to her echoed in his mind as he slipped through the bushes and alleys. She’d opened him up and he hadn’t expected it. He couldn’t afford to be naked and vulnerable in front of one of Lazar’s women. His instinct had been to shove her away, as fast and as hard as he could.
He headed back to Oak Terrace and set the audio data to run through the processors. It was going to take the voice recognition filters a while to sift through the massive data load of frequencies that the gulpers had gathered and polish up any matches it found with the frequencies of Lazar’s or Novak’s voices. He and the McClouds had planted virtually undetectable carrier current transmitters in Lazar’s town house phones, neatly circumnavigating the problem of the digitally encrypted phone lines, but he hadn’t yet pulled off the same trick for Stone Island. Phone calls from that location were still an unknown quantity, representing a gaping hole in his surveillance coverage. Which bothered the hell out of him.
Oh, God. He couldn’t sit around in that cramped, suffocating place and watch data crunching. He had to get out into the wide, glittering night. He felt dangerous and wired. Two head-banging, mind-blowing orgasms should’ve chilled him out, but he was more wound up than ever. He bolted for the Chevy and set off, speeding through the streets, mind racing. Incoherent and out of control, streaming with data, images and feelings, fire and smoke.
Connor McCloud’s words echoed through his mind when he saw the exit that would take him to Templeton Street. “They get that look you’ve got on your face, then they fuck up, then they die badly.”
Seth didn’t slow down until he parked half a block from her house. He wondered if the events of this afternoon, plus whatever idiocy he might yet perpetrate tonight, qualified as an official fuck-up.
He slid down on the seat until his face was in full shadow, stared up at her house, and concluded that it did. Look at him, lurking in the dark like a stalker. At least at this hour, nobody was likely to notice him and call the cops. That would be the crowning indignity.
From this vantage point, he could cover both front and back entrances plus monitor the lights in the living room, bedroom and bathroom. From this distance, thanks to Kearn’s evil genius, he could just flip on the receiver he’d built into the Chevy’s dash and watch every move she made on his laptop, without even the benefit of a phone line.
Better yet, he could disable her alarm, pick all three locks, and walk right in. It made him furious, how vulnerable she was. Which made no sense, since her lack of defenses was entirely to his advantage. Nothing made sense tonight.
The hypothetical scene played in his mind. She would be furious at first, but he would plead and grovel until she softened up. He knew exactly how to turn her on. Having once gotten through her barriers, he knew the way now like he was born to it. He knew how to get under her guard just as he knew how to disable her alarm and pick her locks. He had great instincts when it came to sex. They had never failed him—at least not while he was actively engaged in it.
Afterwards, of course, was another story. But he wouldn’t worry about that now. One step at a time, for God’s sake.
First the words and the charm. Then the kissing and cuddling, until Raine calmed down and started to cling to him, sweet and trusting. He would pet her and nuzzle her until she started to secretly wonder if he were ever going to do anything more. And when he felt the subtle signs of that restless energy building inside her, that was his cue.
Then he would lay her out on the bed or couch or carpet, whatever was closest, and pleasure her with his mouth until she had forgotten why she was mad at him. Until she was writhing, slick, wide open. Begging him. Delicious. Easy. Like taking candy from a baby. He had the means, he had the power, but when he reached for the door handle, something strange happened. He just…stopped.
He had no choice. The control tower in his head had been taken over in a surprise coup. An unfamiliar command team was running everything. Strange thoughts took form in his mind, bewildering him. Just because he could pick her locks didn’t mean necessarily that he should. After today, the least he could do was guard her house, ensure her one night of genuine safety. He even felt too inhibited to just flick on the receiver, power up the X-Ray Specs program and watch her, the way he’d been watching her for weeks. It felt all wrong tonight. She’d given him everything she had to give, and he’d taken it all and paid her back with…oh, shit. Whatever. He felt bad, he was sorry. Enough already.
It was stupid. A pointless tribute that she would never appreciate. She would never know what it cost him to leave his magic tricks in the bag and just sit there in the dark, helpless and inert.
It was bizarre. He had never been chivalrous in his entire life. That was Jesse’s department.
Even a fleeting thought of his young brother was a mistake. He was helpless to push away unwanted thoughts tonight. They raced through his mind, tumbling over each other, maddened by their unaccustomed liberty.
Memory triggered memory. Even minor ones made his gut cramp. Jesse’s dirt-colored hair that stuck straight up in a case of perpetual bed head. His green eyes, shining like the headlights of a car. His hundred-mile-an-hour intelligence, his zingy one-liners. His extravagant affection for the whole world, even when it kicked him in the teeth.
Seth’s heart had already been heavily armored by the time his mother DeAnne hooked up with one of her ex-boyfriends, Mitch Cahill, and moved the guy into their apartment. Then DeAnne compounded her mistake by getting the bright idea that now that there was a father figure around, she could go collect Seth’s little five-year-old half-brother from where he’d been living with her mother in San Diego. Seth had only seen the snot-nosed, motormouth little kid a couple of times since he was born. A couple of times had been more than enough for him.
Seth had hated Mitch on sight, and sullenly resented the bug-eyed, scrawny kid who followed his eleven-year-old brother around, getting in the way of business, and in general annoying the shit out of him. But Jesse was like a fly that kept landing on his nose. He couldn’t be chased away. Seth still remembered the horrified alarm he’d felt on the day when he reali
zed that Jesse loved him. Not because he was lovable, because he wasn’t; he’d been out-and-out mean to the clueless little geek. Not because he deserved to be loved, because he didn’t. Seth went out of his way to be obnoxious to everyone.
No, Jesse had loved him because Jesse desperately needed to love someone. It was just the way he was made. He’d loved DeAnne, too. He’d even loved Mitch, his brutal, worthless, stinking-piece-of-offal excuse for a father. Managing to love Mitch was a fucking miracle.
Jesse had needed to love like he needed to breathe, and Seth had just happened to be in the line of fire. After a while, in spite of himself, he started to feel protective and proprietary about the little guy. He would kick the shit out of anybody who messed with him, shoplift clothes and shoes for him when his stuff wore out, make sure he got something to eat when Mitch and DeAnne were too stoned to feed him. Little things like that, but they took on their own momentum, and before he knew it, Jesse was all his. His headache, his responsibility. Nobody else around the place was sober enough to give a rat’s ass about the kid.
His bond with Jesse was not an official one. The liaison between DeAnne Mackey and Mitch Cahill had been a common-law marriage that figured on no public registry. DeAnne stoutly claimed that Jesse was Mitch’s son, and she had nagged until Mitch changed Jesse’s last name to Cahill. Seth remembered those arguments all too clearly. “But I’m not going to give my name to that other thieving, smart-mouthed punk of yours, so don’t even bother asking.”
Hah. As if he had wanted it. Asshole.
After her death, Seth had dodged the help of those public agencies supposedly dedicated to his welfare, but he still hung around the neighborhood, to keep an eye on Jesse and protect him from Mitch.
It hadn’t been easy. Jesse had been hard to protect. He loved stupidly, indiscriminately. He forgave friends after they’d stabbed him in the back, he lent money to thieves and crackheads, he fell in love and got stomped on more times than Seth could count, but he just kept on flinging his heart into harm’s way with a reckless courage that had never failed to stupefy his brother.
Behind Closed Doors (The Mccloud Series Book 1) Page 11