Leverage in Death (In Death 47)

When his fingers speared into her, she came on a cry that held triumph and shock. And wanting both, more of both, he drove her up again.

In that instant, that glorious instant when she went limp, before she could gather and rise again, he shoved her onto her back. Plunged into her.

One instant, one more instant while they both gripped that toothy edge, while they hung together in air too thick to draw in, where their eyes met—flaming blue, molten brown.

They took each other, driving, driven in a fever of need, a mad thirst for more, still more. Lost in the storm, he muttered in Irish, words both incoherent and savage.

When pleasure, building, building, impossibly building, peaked, it slashed like a blade.

She lay under him, weak, dizzy, empty of anger. And somehow tendrils of sorrow trailed in to fill the void.

“It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s never you.”

“It’s never me you want to distrust,” he countered. “But there are still times, just now and then, when those cop’s eyes are on me and say different.”

He rolled off of her. “The heart and the brain don’t always mesh, do they? I know your heart, darling Eve, but your brain still has some mysterious corners.”

They’d scattered clothes over the bed. He considered just kicking them to the floor, but as he needed a minute to settle himself, he rose to dump them in a handy chair.

When he turned back to the bed, she’d rolled onto her stomach, and slept.

Heart, brain, body, he thought, all meshing in this case with pure exhaustion.

He drew the covers over her, slipped in beside her. And waited for sleep to come.

* * *

The air smelled of smoke, blood, burnt flesh. She saw the charred remains, the blackened severed limbs where skin had bubbled off the bone. The blood—black as tar—splashed over the walls like a vicious painting.

One wall, blinding white, held all the names of the dead beneath the spatter.

Eighteen, and room for more.

Two men stood in the room, men dressed in black with white masks. They spoke in whispers, words she couldn’t quite hear. She reached for her weapon, but it wasn’t there. Not her sidearm, not her clutch piece. Prepared to take them on unarmed, she charged.

But what she’d seen as shadows stood as a wall. Impenetrable.

Desperate, she searched for a door, an opening, found none. She moved back through the dead to give herself room, ran full out, throwing her body up at the last minute to strike the wall with a violent kick.

It repelled her like a hand swatting at a fly. She tried again, again, slamming the wall with kicks and punches until her fists left smears of blood.

The men simply watched her from behind their masks.

One laughed, then slapped the second on the shoulder in a gesture of shared humor.

“Well now, how long you figure she’ll keep up with all that?”

She heard Ireland—thicker, deeper than Roarke’s. It made her stomach flutter in a kind of sick dread.

“That one? Always was a stubborn little bitch.”

Now her stomach twisted as dread dropped to fear and resignation. The men pulled off the masks—no need for them, after all.

She stood facing Richard Troy and Patrick Roarke with a shadowy wall between.

“The boy always was a fuckup,” Patrick Roarke claimed. “But still he’s got my looks, so you’d think he could do better than that one. And a cop for all of that as well.”

“She’s a killer.” Troy smiled wide and bright. “I’m dead proof of it.”