Wilderness of Mirrors (18 page)

Mr. Thayer had regained his composure. He extended a hand. “I will see it is cleaned properly.”

Nigel snatched her hand before she could protest. “Goodnight, Thayer.”

“Yes, sir.”

Up the stairs they went, the click of Tam’s claws an indoor accompaniment to the clatter of rain upon the massive windows.

The hushed hallways were as barren as the streets below, Valentine’s Day and Liberals not mutually exclusive.

If the waiter thought them an odd trio, he refrained from saying so. Tam crashed against the copper fender in front of the fire. Nigel’s shirt lay open at the front, its tails hanging in tatters around his taut abdomen. “Your coat.”

She handed it over and watched his elegant hands arrange it along the edge of a nearby ottoman.

“It should be dry soon. The fire’s hot with oak tonight.” He turned away and made for the imperious two-sided bar. At least, for the moment, his spirits seemed revived.

She felt the heat begin to steam her jeans. But the weight of her wet bra was irksome. So she swung aside her hair and flicked open the clasp. It was strapless and fell heavily to her waist. She pulled it from under her blouse and slipped it into her bag.

She let her eyes revisit the gentlemanly décor. It was fox and hound set. Gilt and green-papered walls and columns that took their cue from exquisite fountain pens. Crimson flecked here and there, like bits of British regimental wear, a reminder of grand men and their grand wars.

A farce.

Then two brandies winked back at her from Nigel’s palms. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She reached for one and brushed his knuckles. “Nostrovia.”

“Gan bei.”

He sat and they both let the drink warm them. At last, he turned. “What you said yesterday…about me being depressed.” He silenced her interruption with a raised hand. “You were right. It’s just a combination of some things: this bloody injury, pressures at work, the loss of someone special. Someone I had,” he paused, then said, “affection for.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, all too aware that Nigel was watching one of her long curls shorten as it dried. He stared at the watermark it left, the pink of her breast highlighted inside its translucence. As if disgusted with himself, he looked away.

There was a sharp burning in his throat. Guilt seeped through the fire’s heat as he remembered Irina.

He’d found her outside of a popular Moscow bar one cold night, offering blowjobs for rubles. She told him he’d never notice the condom. She was
that
good.

He’d taken one look at her, at the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, and mistaken her for a junkie. Two cups of strong coffee and a dinner of uucha soup and black chleb had disabused him of that notion. She had ovarian cancer. Too tired and sick to keep her job as a cleaning woman, she’d been let go. She was homeless to boot. Now, with chemotherapy and radiation so expensive, she’d fallen upon the oldest profession known to womankind.

Nigel had taken her home to his flat, tucked her into his bed, and sat by the window cursing men in general. He’d paid for the rest of her treatment at a private health center instead of her polyclinic and held her the night the doctors told her things weren’t going so well. It was the night before he’d been ‘arrested’ by Ivan’s men.

The next time he saw her was in the shabby hotel room when Ivan had pressed a gun in his hand.

‘Sinu riik tulgu. Sinu tahtmine sündigu, nagu taevas nõnda ka maa peal.’

He felt a crack in his chest. A heaving of quickly bought air filled his lungs.

Sam set her glass down and stood. He thought she was going to fetch a second round, but she dropped between his parted knees and sat with her back to the chair, her feet resting on the hearth. “Here.” She handed him a brush, a beautifully made Mason Pearson. Nylon, not boar bristle.

She expects me to brush her hair?

With tentative fingers he pulled the bulk of it out onto his lap. Tangled and blond, it covered his knees and spilled over the chair arms. Somehow she understood his pain and was well aware he wouldn’t have to explain further if she couldn’t read his lips.

He tucked his knees into her shoulders and cautiously ran the oval-headed brush across the length of hair resting on his open palm. After a few moments, he warmed to his task, having figured out how not to tug too harshly. There was a snap and hiss to the slide of the instrument that reminded him of his old bow upon its violin strings. The heat had dried most of her tresses, and they glowed around him like curled shavings of golden oak.

Finished, he dropped the brush to one side and pulled the mass together as he’d seen his mother do with Kate. He twisted and marveled at the way it tethered his fingers. She reached up, her hand on his, and he saw the tattoo ripple in the firelight.

Sharp emotion ran though him and he slid down behind her. Tam rumbled and shuffled over. The barman, facing the opposite way, squeaked his way through a plateful of wet glasses. Nigel ran his thumb over the symbol, tracing its design without needing to see it.

Her head dropped against his shoulder, and he held her in his arms until the fire blurred.

J
aak stood under an alcove, eradicating cigarette after cigarette.
Eventually they’d come out. Eventually
. He glanced at his watch. Pity he didn’t know what time The Club closed. He moved from foot to foot. It was a miserable night and he swore the tickle in the back of his throat would be a raging case of strep by dawn. He wondered what Ivan would think if he ducked into a nearby chemist for a packet of throat lozenges. Deciding no one else had taken up post on the quiet street, he stuck to the shadows and dashed around the corner.

It had been just what the silent, shapeless figure had been hoping for. Drifting away from the wall, Hawkes made his way to the entrance of The Royal Horseguards Hotel.

By the time Ivan returned, less than a minute later, Hawkes was ensconced in the anonymity of the hotel’s many late-night guests.

Sam felt Nigel’s weight across her shoulders deepen. Bad things had been done to and by this man, and they were devouring his soul like parasites.

He couldn’t sleep at night.

Didn’t take enjoyment from food.

And she’d bet Old MacDonald’s fucking farm that he wasn’t who he said he was.

Yet?

He torched her nerves with his presence.

The slow pump of his heart warmed her back. His arms draped protectively around her shoulders. Her scalp tingled where the brush had touched it.

Talking with him had done the reverse of what she’d hoped. It had distorted the lines of certainty in her carefully defined life. Horribly difficult decisions loomed and panic slid thick and oily through her stomach.

She stared down at her wrist.

Wolf.

Thirteen years later, she realized it had come to define her. A loner. Wily. Misunderstood. Defiant. Enslaved.

Remarkably, Nigel seemed drawn to it.

She stared at the inside of her wrist. His thumb still rested there, against her pulse. She could still feel the mark of his unerring ministrations.

The fire sparked. A log dipped. Nigel shifted and the fire rippled light across their married knees.

He was not so different from her. Clean workspaces and first class flights didn’t do much to erase guilt. Oh, she was good at hiding it, to be sure. Yet, something about Nigel’s wild exasperation spoke eloquently to her hidden side. That little bit of her - hair hidden over its face, crouching in the corner of her very tall, straight-backed self – shivered.

They warned you. You knew it was a possibility. Still, you refused.

Until it was too late for anything except Marc’s body bag and funeral arrangements.

The admission bruised her from the inside out, like a mis-swallowed pill and the resulting esophageal ache.

Suddenly, she wanted to escape the room. To escape London, her job and most especially the bastards at AG.

Tamar shifted, sensing unease, and eyed her over his massive shoulder. He had a way with her. Understood her. Guarded her. Goaded her. At this moment though, his eyes were unreadable. The great brown orbs held no balm. He’d known Marc. Licked his hands. Ruffled his fur under the ruddy knuckles.

She remembered Tam at the wake. He’d scratched his neck with a back foot.
Indifference?
She had taken his cue.

Tonight she knew better.

It might not have been her fault. But she was to blame.

“You miss Marc, Tam?”

The eyes held hers for a moment.

“Me too.”

She couldn’t let it happen again. Not to Nigel, not to anyone. When he awoke, she’d put up the shields and kiss him goodbye – figuratively. Because if he put his mouth to hers, she didn’t think there’d be a chance in hell she could stop herself kissing him back.

Ivan Drasnov drew a chair away from the card game. The head of his sect didn’t play poker, unless he was using one to scramble someone’s eye socket.

“Dobreydin.” Ivan nodded with deference and pushed the chair near enough to the fire.
Privet
would come in time. For now, formal greetings. Later, when he’d earned the right, informality and friendship would come.

Vasiliv pulled at his gloves. “Spasibo.” He adjusted the chair and turned his lip when the worn leather seat groaned in protest. “This chair doesn’t like the cold any more than I.”

The room, cut from unused space in an old Thames-side warehouse, was indeed cold. They’d made a fire from long-forgotten pallets. Pungent smoke hung like fishing nets, but it hadn’t chased away the chill.

For this, there was vodka.

Ivan poured his boss a healthy measure. “Nostrovia.”

Straight, strong fingers took his offering. “Ah, yes. And here? Cheers. Not the same, I think.”

No. Ivan loathed London’s winter. No snow, just damp, frigid and endlessly gray desolation. But he kept that, like many other small and large things, to himself.

Vasiliv cast his gaze over the card game. His hair was mostly dark, but the gray around his temples amplified the eerie golden brown of those molten orbs. Ivan ignored the scars. It was easier that way. “Is Sergei winning again?”

“Da.”
Sergei, the loved one. Vasiliv’s right hand man. The son he’d never had
. And the man Ivan longed to dethrone.

Vasiliv pulled on his torn ear with thumb and forefinger. “Sascha, let someone else win, eh? You’ll make our men angry and then trouble will follow. I’ve too much of it already, spread a little joy. It’s Valentine’s Day after all.”

Sergei leaned back to laugh. His smile was for Vasiliv. But his eyes – puckish - flitted to Ivan. “Would you have me fuck them too?”

It was somehow the wrong thing to say, Ivan considered.

So fast then, like all of Vasiliv’s marksmanship. It happened flawlessly.

Sergei lay on the floor, his cheek and brow bloodied by the force of the thrown glass. The poker game was forgotten.

Vasiliv’s voice chopped the ropy fog like an axe on frozen wood. “Don’t ever speak to me like that. Now get up and put those fucking cards away. We’re here to work.”

Ivan kept his smile, as he would have a hand of cards, to himself.
Best never to speak more than you have too, Serega. You never did learn that
. Ivan’s babushka had taught him that simple rule.

He stooped to retrieve his own glass and refilled it, this time for his new parent.

Vasiliv’s face was placid again. He took the glass. “Tell me, Ivan, did Jaak find Sepp?”

“He’s at The Royal Horseguards Hotel.”

“Alone?”

“No. He’s with a woman.”
A lucky accident me seeing him at Heathrow. In time, I’ll sell this bit of news to Botenke. Then I’ll have double the praise and money.

The vodka went down in one long swallow. “I’m still all surprise that he turned up here. And English aristocracy, you say. Tell Jaak to keep watch. When she leaves, have Sepp brought to me.” Vasiliv glanced around the ghastly room. “And bring the fucking car around. With hope, The Dorchester’s not this cold.”

Ivan nodded. He looked forward to meeting Sepp again. It was a bonus that he hated Estonians. If Ivan’s Russian boss had reason to suspect the supplier of duping them, who was Ivan to relieve him of such a notion? It had been altogether too easy to use Sepp as a scapegoat. Even juggling things, as he was doing more and more these days, seemed simple.

He would connect with Andrus’s contact in Africa and bring in the goods himself. Then Vasiliv would have even more reason to promote him. It was simple, truly.

First came the subtle quiver.
Someone
was out there. The trick was to react without stepping into the ambush.

Predators, particularly human ones, plan according to how their prey will react. Place the pit behind them. That way, when they run, in they go.

Nigel didn’t like falling in pits.

He felt her wrapped up in his limbs. She wasn’t asleep. He could hear the dog breathing evenly. So the beast didn’t sense danger on behalf of his mistress. Useful bit of knowledge. The bartender was done squeaking, but Nigel, if he concentrated very carefully, thought he could still feel his presence. The air felt thicker in that direction.

Nigel opened his eyes, glad her hair wasn’t caught up in his lashes. She’d have felt that. He listened better with his eyes open.

The
thing
, an improper pulse in the otherwise calm night, was in the building. Or maybe just outside.

Who was it looking for?

Nigel didn’t think Ivan’s crew could have followed Andrus Sepp back through a maze of identities, through Asia and Africa. But he’d be a fool to think such things impossible. People were buying up information like the beach was collecting sand.

And Giles Pattinson? A nobody. A pretense.
Let’s hope so
.

Nigel himself was a less likely choice. Kate didn’t stalk. Directness for the Duchess.

Was it something connected with Sam?

Or was it SIS keeping an eye on him?