24. Touch Him and Suffer
TOUCH HIM AND SUFFER
DRACO
Nico was breathing.
I stood in the doorway of the master suite and counted the rhythm of it for longer than I needed to because the alternative was leaving the room and doing what I was about to do, and once I started I was not going to stop until it was finished.
He was on my bed, one hand tucked under the pillow, the other curled loosely against his chest. The silver wound from the rogue's claws had been cleaned and dressed. His face was pale and there were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there before they left Blackthorne.
Mateo stood behind me in the corridor. He had shifted back but the wolf was still close to the surface. He had a gash along his ribs that was closing slowly and blood on his shirt that was not entirely his.
“How many?” I asked.
“Four rogues and I noticed that they were running on corrupted blood.”
I crossed the room and stood beside the bed. Nico's breathing was slow and deep. His body had shut itself down to recover from the power it gave out.
I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his forehead. I felt the warmth of him against my lips and the steady pulse of blood beneath the skin.
“Mateo. Rowan. You will stay and not leave this room. If Nico wakes, you will tell him I am handling it and that I will be back before morning. If anyone approaches this wing of the house, anyone at all, regardless of name or rank or affiliation, you will stop them. If they resist, you will put them down. Questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.”
I found Amara in the study. She was already standing, which meant she had heard me in the corridor, which meant she already knew.
“Who are we collecting?” she asked right away.
“Luca Maren.”
Amara's expression shifted by a fraction. “Sabine's ward.”
“He's currently at a flat on Orchard Street that she maintains under a shell company. Two guards. Neither of them good enough.”
“And once we have him?”
“Then we finish a conversation that should have ended when I found her name on Remy's debt chain.”
Amara pulled her coat from the back of the chair. “I'll drive.”
The flat on Orchard Street was on the fourth floor of a building that had been converted badly from industrial to residential. There were two guards at the stairwell entrance.
I took the first one by the wrist and the second one by the throat. The wrist broke cleanly. The throat I held for three seconds, long enough to feel the pulse slow to the edge of consciousness, and then I set him down against the wall. Amara stepped over both of them and went up the stairs.
Luca Maren was in the kitchen of the flat. He was younger than I'd expected, mid-twenties, with the lean build of someone who had been underfed at a formative age and had never fully recovered from it.
He looked up when we came through the door and I saw fear in his face. I could see him measuring the distance to the window, the fire escape, the back door that led to a service corridor.
“Sit down, Luca,” I said.
“I don't know who you are.”
“You know who I am. Sabine has a file on me that she keeps in the third drawer of her office desk, and you have read it because she trained you to read everything she keeps, and because you are not as stupid as she needs you to be.”
He sat down.
“You're going to make a phone call,” I said.
“You're going to tell Sabine that Draco Reed has you and that she should come to the Crimson Room if she wants you returned in the condition she left you in. You are going to say it calmly and you are going to say it once and then you are going to hang up.”
“She'll come with people.”
“I'm counting on it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Amara, who was standing by the door.
“Will she actually come?”
“She'll come. You're the only thing she can't replace.”
He picked up the phone and called.
We took Luca to the basement of the club. He was sat in a chair in the centre of the room. His wrists were bound to the armrests with cord that was tight enough to hold and loose enough not to cut off circulation, because I was not interested in damaging him.
I'd opened a cut along his cheekbone. The blood ran down his jaw and dripped onto his shirt.
“I'm sorry about this,” I said.
“No you're not.”
“No. I'm not. But I thought it was worth saying.”
Amara positioned herself in the corridor outside the basement entrance.
We waited for twelve minutes.
The basement door came open hard enough to crack the frame. Sabine came through it with three people behind her, all of them armed.
Sabine's face when she saw Luca was the first honest thing I had ever seen on it.
“Get away from him.”
“Close the door, Sabine.”
“I said get away from him.” She was breathing hard. Her hands were at her sides and they were shaking.
“Sit down and we can discuss the terms under which he leaves this room.”
“There are no terms. Give him to me.”
I stepped around the chair and stood between her and Luca. Sabine stood six feet from me with her three contractors fanned behind her and the look of a woman who was rapidly running out of patience.
“You sent four rogues to the home of Nico's parents, aimed at a residential address in Brooklyn where two civilians and a recovering addict were having a conversation with their son. The rogues tore through the front door and attacked everyone in the apartment, including an unarmed woman whose only crime is being the mother of someone you want to use.”
Sabine's jaw tightened.
“One of them held Nico off the floor by his throat,” I said.
“There are bruises on his neck in the shape of a hand. His brother was dragged across the floor by his ankle. His mother was thrown into a wall. Mateo, who is mine and who I am protective of, was pinned by three of them and nearly bled out on the carpet.”
I let that settle.
“I want you to understand what you purchased tonight,” I said. “Because the invoice is going to be specific.”
“You took my ward.”
“You attacked my household.”
“Luca has nothing to do with this.”
“Nico's parents had nothing to do with this. And yet.”
“What do you want, Reed?”
“I want the contract you built around Remy's debt dismantled and the original documentation delivered to my attorney by morning. And I want you to leave New York.”
“That's not an offer. That's exile.”
“It's exile or it's the alternative, and I am giving you the courtesy of choosing.”
“Courtesy.” She laughed. “You kidnapped a twenty-four-year-old boy because you wanted to make me angry enough to make a mistake. Don't dress it up as courtesy.”
“I wanted you here. The method was regrettable. The result is the same.”
“The result is that I'm going to kill you.”
She moved.
I had expected a weapon. She didn't use one. She came at me with her hands, which was an interesting choice for a human facing a vampire, and the strike was aimed at my throat. The form was clean. The intention was lethal. On another target it would have landed.
I let her fist connect with my jaw. The impact registered as pressure, nothing more.
“Again,” I said.
Her eyes went wide. Then they went narrow.
She struck again, harder. I absorbed the blows the way stone absorbs rain.
“Fuck you, Reed.”
“Are you finished?”
She threw a third strike and I caught her wrist. Her bones were small under my fingers. I could feel the pulse hammering through them.
Behind her, the three contractors moved and Amara came through the door.
She took the first one in the throat. The strike was clean and the contractor hit the floor and did not get up. The second one turned toward her and Amara was already inside his guard, her hand at the base of his skull, and the sound his neck made when it broke was quiet and conclusive.
The third one was faster. He got a blade out and cut across Amara's forearm before she could close the distance.
Silver. The wound hissed and Amara pulled back, which she did not do often, and the contractor pressed the advantage with a discipline that told me Sabine had trained him for exactly this encounter.
He knew the range. He knew the timing. He kept the blade moving in short controlled arcs that forced Amara to stay outside her preferred striking distance, and he was backing toward the wall to eliminate the angle she'd used on the first two.
The second contractor got up.
The man had enough left in him to get to his knees and pull a short silver spike from his boot, and now Amara had two armed opponents and a forearm that was still smoking from the first cut.
The one on his knees lunged. Amara sidestepped the spike, caught his wrist, and used his own forward momentum to swing him into the third contractor.
They collided hard enough to stagger both of them and the blade clattered loose for half a second.
Half a second was enough. Amara kicked it across the stone floor and closed the distance on the third contractor before he recovered his footing.
He was good. He blocked her first strike and countered with an elbow that connected with her jaw and snapped her head sideways.
He followed with a knee aimed at her midsection that she absorbed by twisting into it, turning the impact into rotation, and the rotation brought her behind him.
Her arm went around his neck. He dropped his weight and drove backward, slamming her into the wall.
The stone cracked behind her shoulders. She held on.
The one with the dislocated neck was crawling toward the fallen blade.
Amara wrenched the third contractor sideways, putting his body between her and the crawling man, and tightened the hold until the organs in his throat gave way.
She let him fall and crossed the remaining distance to the crawler in two strides.
He got his fingers on the blade handle. Amara stepped on his wrist, picked up the blade, and put it through his chest. He looked down at the handle protruding from his sternum and then his knees gave and he went down beside the other two.
Amara wiped her hand on her coat and stepped back to the door.