Chapter Thirteen
Marcus
What in the fuck just happened? I leave the house at a run, stopping in the middle of the yard. My lips are raw and my dick is damp. Between that and my weak knees, I know there was physical contact.
“He fucking blew me,” I murmur, because saying it out loud makes it more real. The kitchen scene had been both inevitable and crazy wild, like grabbing a tornado by the balls. Hang on for dear life.
And then he stopped. Just—stopped. So quickly my brain hurts from the whiplash.
He’d said something, or at least, made word-shaped noises.
I take a deep breath, tilting my head to face the sky. Calm down, dude. Another inhale. What were the words? Something about loving men and burying them?
Slowly rocking my head from side to side, I try to come down from . . . whatever just happened. My rational mind wants to acknowledge that I have no point of reference for living seven hundred years, so I should cut the guy some slack.
I palm my dick. Yeah, my rational mind is currently getting shouted down by something much more basic.
“Pull it together.” I literally shake my shoulders, like that physical action will get rid of the mother of all head spins, and decide two things.
One, anyone who can give head like that is in no way a virgin.
Two, I’m too riled up to make a reasonable decision. I’m angry and frustrated and not sure I really believe what happened. If John walked out of the house right now, I’d be on my knees before he got halfway across the lawn.
Yeah, take a breather before you do something exponentially dumber.
Inhaling like I can take in common sense with the air, I press my overheated palm to the barn door lock and let myself in.
Thank fuck Sonny’s attention is locked on his screens.
He doesn’t even look over when I close the door.
I went into the house to get something to drink and came out a hot mess.
Still, I don’t blame myself for what happened. Dude looks good at baseline, but half naked and sweaty? Exponentially hotter.
And if I had a do-over, I totally would.
Because I apparently like sex with a side of humiliation.
Secure in the knowledge that I’m an idiot, I grab a chair and pull up to my overpowered dream machine. “Focus, Collins.”
“You smell like sex,” Sonny says, keeping his eyes on his monitors.
Oh yeah. Vampire. Super senses.
I open a new browser page, like it’s somehow going to give me a way to respond to his observation. Since there is no good response, I keep my mouth shut, and after a minute, he makes a noise somewhere between a scoff and a laugh.
“In case you forgot, we’re supposed to be discovering how de Lisle is tracking us.”
“Cool, cool.” I stare blankly at the flashing cursor. “Should have hung out more with the hacker crowd.”
He takes a moment to twist his long hair into a knot, only to have a few strands break free as soon as he’s done. “Not a particular specialty of mine, either.”
“We need to shield our IP address before we start poking around.”
“Should be automatic since the Securitas VPN is pretty heavily encrypted.”
“Huh.” I open my Google drive to get to the spreadsheet I’d started, detailing the public-facing side of de Lisle’s various business interests. “So many independent sites.”
“Gives him layers of protection.”
“I seriously doubt he’s operating these on the same network. He’s into satellites and cars and . . .wtf is that?” I click a link I must have overlooked. It takes me to a site selling fancy skin creams. “Makeup?”
“Makes sense. We’re pretty sure he’s one of the Nephilim, so he’d want to do as much as possible to cover up any signs of aging.”
“What does that mean?” The activities of the Nephilim fall pretty damn far outside my normal experience.
Sonny sits back and stretches his arms overhead, a giant cat in human form.
“Nephilim are what happens when an angel can’t keep his dick in his pants and fathers a child with a human woman.
They’re immortal-adjacent, I guess, and while they live for centuries or even millennia, they eventually die.
” He shrugs, his gaze thoughtful. “Every time we’ve defeated de Lisle, he disappears for a while and we hope that this is the time. He’s always returned.”
There’s a heaviness to that last phrase, as if all those years are weighing down his words. “Has he ever defeated you?” I ask.
Sonny’s eyes go cold. “Not yet.”
I slow blink, grateful that my dick is finally getting the calm the fuck down message, and open another browser window. This time I search Nephilim. “I still don’t get why he’d worry about aging.”
“Because he’s a vain fucker? I don’t know.
” Sonny shrugs, attention still locked on the screen.
“It’s strange. We’ve been fighting him for seven hundred years, give or take.
He’s popped up in many different times and places, and when he amasses too much power, he draws our Lady’s attention.
She calls on Rob, who summons us and we go after him. ”
“Seems like he’d be smarter to be satisfied with less so you and your Lady don’t notice him.”
Sonny laughs at that and I start reading about the Nephilim, how their history is found in early Jewish texts and how they were once thought to be giants.
How, these days, they mostly turn up in computer games and fantasy novels.
“Awesome.” I open another browser window. “What are the odds that Rob and John learn anything new and useful tomorrow when they poke around Prince’s lair?”
He barks a laugh and actually looks at me for the first time since I sat down. “They know what they’re doing.”
“But there is a risk.”
“Of course there’s a risk. Unless we retreat to the Greenwood forever, everything we do is a risk.”
“Could I go to the Greenwood?” It’s a stupid question, and for a second it hangs there. I keep my eye on the computer screen so I don’t have to see whatever’s crossing Sonny’s face.
“Mayhap,” he says softly. “I’m sure John would like to have you there.”
My cheeks get so hot they’re probably shooting sparks, and I let Sonny’s words sink into me, focusing on the risk part rather than .
. . whatever else he said. Risk is what they do, and I’m supposed to be helping them.
And I will. Any minute now. As soon as I resolve this other thing that’s bugging me.
So far, Rob’s stated reason for stealing the diamond is to get to it before de Lisle does, which is fine, if a little vague, especially given everything we do is a risk.
Then why do it? I get that they’ve been playing games with de Lisle since the olden-olden days, but right now the man’s got more money than God himself, and he’s protected by so many layers of businesses and sycophants that it’s virtually impossible to get to him.
There’s even a rumor that one of his businesses is going to offer him a trillion-dollar salary, which will buy a helluva lot of protection. A helluva lot of everything. What does he need another diamond for, and why do they care if he gets it?
I have a brief visual of a giant mouth stuffing everything imaginable into itself. Maybe that’s it. He’s just that greedy, and they have to stop him once they’ve been called. No choice. No alternative.
No way, man. That sounds like a seriously shitty lifestyle.
Tension wraps around my skull. Okay, I can’t fix that particular problem. Let me prioritize. The dude. The diamond. Why?
Maybe there’s something about this specific diamond that would be useful to know. Huh. I rest my fingers on the keyboard. I should google how to crack a computer network. Instead, I do a search for the Belle Etoile.
The first hit is a headline about the break-in at the Louvre, and while we’d talked about that, seeing it in whatever font The New York Times uses makes our whole escapade feel that much more illegal.
Cool, cool, cool.
Further down is an image of a surprisingly elegant piece of jewelry.
There is a double chain of small diamonds, with diamond and sapphire teardrops hanging from the outer chain.
The center teardrop has a stone the size of a walnut, and a helpful little arrow in the photo identifies that as the Belle Etoile.
It’s pretty—that many diamonds would have to be pretty—but I’ve seen fancier stuff on Hollywood red carpets.
Is the effort to acquire a piece like this worth it, simply to have it?
Is it one more thing to stuff into his giant maw or does it have some other purpose?
My brain kicks over another question. Judging from social media reports, de Lisle’s entire lifestyle is built around acquisition.
Rob and the gang could have stepped in at any number of points, like before de Lisle bought and ruined one of the largest social media platforms, or before he purchased any of his numerous private jets or outrageously expensive cars.
Why are they risking themselves over a necklace? Hoping that Sonny’s making progress on the hacking front, I do a more abstract search.
What do diamonds symbolize?
I scroll through a couple pages, basically learning that over the course of human history, people have attributed name-your-magical-powers to diamonds.
The blurb I pay the most attention to talks about how in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, they believed diamonds could somehow heal illnesses.
And okay, if we assume de Lisle was around back then and he’s the type of guy who owns some kind of high-end makeup company to help him conceal evidence of aging, maybe he wants a diamond for similar reasons.
Seems like building a private hyperbaric chamber or having regular exsanguinations to remove toxins from your blood would be less risky. Or maybe this is all just online masturbation and he’s just a rich idiot.
I go back to the browser page on the Belle Etoile, and while it takes me a minute, pretty soon I hit gold.
Or, in this case, diamonds.
Seems Queen Amidala . . . Whoops, wrong queen. Wikipedia tells me that Queen Maria Amalia never wanted to be queen, so her jewelry was mostly acquired when she was an ordinary duchess. Sucks to be you. She lived a fairly long life, in part attributed to the fortifying powers of the Belle Etoile.
Boom. There it is. Rob and his merry dudes want to grab the Belle Etoile before de Lisle does because possessing it can strengthen him in some way. Maybe. If you can believe the crap you read on the internet.
Okay, a lot of that is conjecture. I give the thread of logic another mental poke. Holds up, and since I’m currently living with characters from a damn medieval poem, I’m going with my gut.
That settled, I go back to trying to teach myself how to hack. I know the basics of coding, so it’s just a matter of figuring out how to accomplish our mission.
Our mission? I must be tired, though between being a recent college graduate and living with my cousin who keeps vampire hours, I’m used to all-nighters. Even so, the last couple days have been a lot, and by about three a.m., my eye is scratchy and the words on the screen start to blur.
“I think I need some sleep.” I say it quietly because Sonny’s locked into whatever he’s doing.
“Sure. I’m setting up a dummy account to give us another layer of protection once we start rolling with this.”
Nodding like I know what he’s talking about—our IP addresses are hidden and any worm I make will by definition be secret—I push back from the desk.
“Cool. I’m establishing the parameters of what we need”—because that sounds more professional than making shit up as I go—“and I’ll pick things up in the morning. ”
“I’ll text you a summary of my work before I retire.”
I blink the sand out of my eye and say goodnight.
The wind has picked up, so stepping outside is like getting hit in the face by a very large blow dryer, which discourages me from hanging around to enjoy the moonlight.
I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t race when I put my hand on the knob of the back door.
Cutting through the kitchen makes it worse, twisting my gut and ffs giving me a chubbie.
There’s the counter, the place where it happened.
So much for being calm enough to think things through. Ignoring my body’s reaction, I scuttle upstairs and manage to make it into my room without any commotion. Almost as soon as I get inside, someone knocks on my door.
I know it’s likely John, and while I don’t know if he’s planning on apologizing or picking up where we left off, I don’t have it in me to deal with either option.
Because while fucking him would be amazing, odds are pretty good that he’d freak out again before the spunk dried.
No sex is worth that kind of drama.
On the other hand, whoever he is, he’s standing between me and the bathroom. Damn it.
Given that he’d been shirtless in the kitchen, I pull off my shirt. Fair’s fair, right? Tossing it onto the bed and gathering my stones, I open the door.
Yup, it’s John. The overhead light fixture casts his face in shadow. Even so, his vibe is one of distress. “Hey,” I say eloquently. “What’s up?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. For a moment, neither of us moves, then he cups my cheek, his hand warm and strong. I inhale his scent, pine and sage, and wonder if I’ll ever be this close to him again. He bends over me and presses the softest of kisses on my forehead. “You deserve better than me.”
“Ironically, I was going to tell you the same thing.” I ease away and his hand drops, leaving my cheek cool. “Look,” I say. “We’re both tired. Let’s just keep what happened as a happy memory and move on.”
“Move on?” Under other circumstances, his uncertainty would make me laugh.
“Yeah, dude. Go to bed. You’ve got a diamond to steal.”
He nods once and, moving slowly, disappears down the shadowy hall. I don’t head to the bathroom until I hear the door to his room click shut.