Lex charged forward, determined to convince Fabien of his worth. "If you want him dead, I am willing to help get it done." "Unwise" came the hissed reply. "I can snap my fingers and have you held on suspicion of intent to commit murder. I may still, but right now you're going to leave and neither one of us will speak another word of this conversation."
The drawing room door opened and four armed guards filed inside. At Fabien's nod, the group of them surrounded Lex. Given no choice, he started to leave.
"I'll be in touch," he told Edgar Fabien with a light baring of his teeth. "You can count on that."
Fabien said nothing, but his shrewd gaze remained fixed on Lex with grim understanding as he walked to the drawing room doors and gently closed them tight.
Once Lex was out on the street alone, his mind began to churn over his options. Fabien was corrupt. What a surprising, and sure to be useful, bit of information. With any luck, it wouldn't be long before Fabien's connections were Lex's as well. He didn't particularly care how he had to acquire them.
He glanced up at the beautiful Darkhaven mansion and all its pristine luxury. This was what he wanted. This kind of life - lifted high above the filth and degradation he'd known under his father's boot heel. This was what he truly deserved. But first he would need to get his hands dirty, if just one last time.
Lex strolled along the tree-lined, meandering road and headed back down into the city with renewed purpose.
Chapter Ten
Nikolai woke up in total darkness, his head resting against the coffin of an apparently well-to-do Montreal man who'd been dead for sixty-seven years. The private mausoleum's marble floor had made for a hard few hours of rest, but it served Niko well enough. The night had been creeping dangerously close to dawn when he'd left Yakut's place, and he'd sure as hell slept the daylight off in worse places than the cemetery he found at the city's northern edge.
With a groan, he sat up and flipped open his cell phone to check the display for the time. Shit, just after one P.M. He still had about seven or eight hours to wait in here before sundown, when it would be safe for him to be outside. Seven or eight more hours, and he was already feeling itchy from sitting idle for so long.
No doubt Boston was wondering about him by now. Niko hit the speed dial for the Order's headquarters. Halfway through the second ring, Gideon picked up.
"Niko, for fuck's sake. About time you reported in." The warrior's vague English accent sounded a bit rough. Not surprising, considering that Niko was calling in the middle of the day. "Talk to me. You good?"
"Yeah, I'm good. My objective here in Montreal is fucked ten ways to Sunday, but other than that, 'sall good."
"No luck finding Sergei Yakut, I take it?"
Niko chuckled. "Oh, I found the bastard all right. The Gen One is alive and well and living north of the city like some kind of throwback to Ghengis Khan."
He gave Gideon a quick rundown of everything that had happened since his arrival in Montreal - from the ass-kicking welcome he'd gotten from Renata and the other guards, to the strange handful of hours he'd spent at Yakut's lodge, culminating with his discovery of the dead humans discarded out back and his subsequent ejection from the property.
He described the recent failed attempt on the Gen One's life and the incredible role Mira played in thwarting that attack.
Niko left out the part about what he'd personally seen in Mira's eyes. He saw no reason to share the details of a vision, which, despite Renata's insistence that Mira was never wrong, had roughly zero chance - no, scratch that; it had exactly zero chance - of happening now.
It should have come as a relief to him to know that. The last thing he needed was to get mixed up with a female, especially a piece of work like Renata. Yakut's blood-bonded mate. The thought still gnawed at him, far more than it should. And he wasn't feeling particularly chipper about the fact that even the slightest recollection of that kiss with her was enough to render him as hard as the granite tomb that surrounded him.
He wanted her, and there had been a split second as he was leaving the lodge that he thought she might come after him. He had no reason to think it, but it had been a nudge in his gut, a sense that maybe Renata might run up behind him and ask him to get her out of there.
And if she had? Christ, he might have been just stupid enough to consider it.
"So," he told Gideon, mentally steering himself back to reality. "The net of it is, we can't count on any cooperation out of Sergei Yakut. He basically told me to shove it, and that was before I called him a sick fuck in need of a muzzle and choke collar." "Jesus, Niko," Gideon sighed, probably, on the other end of the line, scrubbing his hand through his spiky blond hair in frustration. "You really said that to him - to a Gen One? You're damn lucky he didn't tear your tongue out before he sent you on your way."
Probably true, Nikolai acknowledged to himself. And he'd have lost more than just his tongue if Yakut knew the kind of lust he had been feeling for Renata. "You know I'm allergic to ass-kissing, even if the ass in question happens to be Gen One. If this was a total public relations mission, you picked the wrong guy."
"No shit." Gideon chuckled around another low curse. "You coming back in to Boston, then?"
"I see no reason to linger. Unless you figure Lucan will look the other way if I decide to go back and put a torch to Yakut's house of horrors. Put him out of business, at least for a while."
He was kidding...mostly. But Gideon's answering silence told him that his fellow warrior knew the wheels were turning inside Niko's head.
"You know you can't do anything of the sort, my man. Way out of bounds."
"And doesn't that suck," Nikolai muttered.
"Yeah, it does. But this kind of thing belongs to the Enforcement Agency, not us."
"Tell me how Yakut is any different from the Rogues we take off the streets, Gid. Hell, from what I've seen of him, he's worse. At least the Rogues can blame their savagery on Bloodlust. Yakut can't even cling to blood addiction as his excuse for hunting those humans out there. He's a predator, a killer."