If not? One quick search of his study and then I’d go.
Thanks to my enhanced strength, I hoisted myself up with relatively little difficulty. My right thigh with the years-old injury throbbed in a token protest, but I compensated by relying more on my upper body. Flattening myself against the side of the house I inched along the ledge, impressed at the garden, which shimmered silver with night-blooming plants, and counted off windows until I’d reached the fourth one.
The sash was sticky and the angle from which I attempted to ease it open was awkward, so I took it slow, careful not to make any noise or break the glass.
There was the faintest squeak of the gate hinge and a figure slipped silently into the backyard. Moonlight illuminated Levi’s face as if it were broad daylight.
My chest grew tight. No amount of wishing turned Levi’s eyes from this cold wintry blue, his expression schooled into an unreadable mask, to that mesmerizing deep navy right before he would kiss me, back when I was the center of his universe.
I swayed. My foot slipped and I crashed to the ledge on my knee, clinging to the windowsill by the tips of my fingers.
Levi took a step forward, then stopped. There had been a brief period of time when I could have fallen, secure that he’d catch me.
A muscle twitched in my jaw. I pulled myself up and adjusted my hold on the window frame, sliding it up to allow me entrance. Hauling myself into the bathroom, I admonished myself that I wouldn’t look back. Again.
He was gone.
Chapter 2
Leaving my boots under the clawfoot bathtub, I snuck down the hallway to Isaac’s study, knowing its location from a previous visit here. The night everything had gone to hell.
But I’d climbed out of hell before, hadn’t I? I could do it again. And this time I had a war to win.
Slipping inside his office, I flicked on a penlight, half-covering the beam to mute the light. The room smelled faintly of a peppery spice. Search as I might, there were no architectural oddities concealing a hidden space. I shook out every one of the dozen or so books on the shelves and rummaged through the contents of the unlocked drawers, but failed to find a helpful villainous plan written in the blood of his enemies.
A pair of sharp red daggers had somehow appeared in my hands, despite me having no recollection of making them. I tucked them into my leather belt and sat down in Isaac’s springy desk chair.
The chair didn’t tower over the other seats, which would have created a subtle psychological power dynamic. No awards lauding Isaac’s greatness crowded the walls. Behind his desk was a watercolor of a forest here in the Pacific Northwest that didn’t signify much. Nothing in the space indicated aspirations of godhood.
According to all the digging we’d done on him in the past couple of months, Isaac was a respected member of the business community. Public personas were like curated spaces, and Isaac had perfected his. I admired the intelligence it took to maintain this flawless image, but one’s home was another matter entirely. This study was his inner sanctum, so where were his tells?
A half-smoked cigar had been extinguished in a crystal ashtray on his desk next to an empty tumbler and a couple of newspapers in a neat stack. I sniffed the drink. Bourbon. A glass of expensive alcohol and a cigar before bed while perusing the day’s headlines. Isaac was tech-savvy: he’d have been more than comfortable getting his news online. This smacked of ritual.
He liked his rituals; that much I knew from his habitual care of his wind-up clock engraved with a quote from the Old Testament that was tied to his code name. If he’d gotten it when he became one of the Ten, then he’d hidden his Chariot activities for years. That took an ironclad ruthlessness.
Isaac had played his games for a long time, using and discarding pieces as he saw fit. Outmaneuvering him would be delicious.
I ran the light over the top page of the half-folded international business section, curious about which of the fairly dry articles interested him, when a discolored patch caught my eye. I pulled off my gloves, and touched a finger to the sticky paper, sniffing it to verify that the stain was bourbon.
Why had Isaac spilled his drink? The story was a brief piece on the death of Deepa Anand, a Mundane woman in Bangalore, India, in her fifties, who owned a string of private finance companies, aka money lenders. It briefly discussed her role in the inflated interest rate scandal that had rocked the country a few years back, and that she’d died suffering complications from heart disease while on pilgrimage at a place called Char Dham.
Flicking off the penlight, I leaned back in Isaac’s chair, twirling his cigar butt between my fingers and turning over the potential importance of this article. What if each of the Ten contributed something to Chariot, like how my teammates contributed to our mission? Isaac would be in charge of cybersecurity, just like Priya. Deepa would have been able to provide private funding and easily launder money.
Chariot may have had the power and reach of a global corporation, but it wasn’t actually a single entity. It was more akin to a consortium of interests, some legal, most not, presided over by the Ten. Our side had unearthed only a handful of their ventures, mostly the illegal ones. The few legal companies we suspected were tied to Chariot were mired in confusing paperwork trails and shell companies within shell companies. Even Priya and all her hacking skills found them impossible to untangle.
I stiffened at a creak outside the door, straining to hear footfalls, but it was the house settling. If Deepa was a member of the Ten, my Attendant, Rafael Behar, would be ecstatic at learning her identity. It could prove a valuable new direction to find Chariot’s one piece of the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh.
This mystic text written by the archangel Raziel had broken into five scrolls when it first fell to earth. Should Chariot get their hands on the rest of them and reassemble the book, they’d have the means to attain immortality, reshaping the world as living gods who cared only about themselves.
As I slipped into the darkened hallway, a figure stepped from the shadows. I palmed one of my blades. No one in this house knew I had magic, and I didn’t have a reasonable explanation for being in this room. If this was my coming out party, only one of us was going to be alive at the end to celebrate.
A fragile-looking woman stood there clutching her bathrobe with her mouth hanging open.
Nicola Montefiore was trapped in a marriage with the brute, but I couldn’t allow her to sound the alarm.
There was a loud snore from the bedroom, startling us both. Shaking her head vigorously, Nicola pressed a finger to her lips and motioned for me to go. Could I trust her not to rat me out? Did I have a choice?
I sighed. I wasn’t going to hurt Levi’s mom. Making the daggers vanish, I fled into the bathroom, grabbed my boots, and slipped back into the night, retracing my steps down to the backyard. My footsteps quickened when I came around the front of the house. I had a potential lead and best of all, the Tesla was gone.
I’d reached Moriarty and safety when someone grabbed me from behind.
My body reacted before my brain could, my fingers gripping Levi’s biceps. His suit jacket was soft to the touch, but his muscles were corded steel. In my mind’s eye they rippled, Levi’s naked body poised above mine, and a devilish grin on his face as he thrust into me.
Swallowing, I jerked sideways. Levi had made me believe in a foolish, wonderful future, and then taken it away, leaving this gaping emptiness. Priya was wrong about rage. It wasn’t unhealthy. It was what kept me buoyant when beneath me all was dark and deadly, threatening to pull me under.