so hard to make sure he had a family, “but . . . want to come on a stakeout?” His anger at being helpless in the face of her failing shields threatened to make him bitter, but he fought the ugliness, refusing to taint the beauty of this strange, beautiful joy between a cop and his J.
Sophia’s face lit up with an almost childish pleasure. “Really? Yes!”
And he knew he’d do anything in his power to keep that light in her eyes.
“Okay,” he said once he’d checked in with the manhunt team—no sightings, no information to help him narrow the search grid, his frustration as acute as theirs—and they were on their way through the darkening city, “word is, some Psy are having secretive meetings around town. No one knows why.”
“We’re going to observe one of these covert meetings?”
“Yes. Clay’s informants say it’s pretty certain the place we’re heading to will be the gathering point tonight.” The leopard changeling had sent through the message earlier. “For now—we’re just going to watch, see if we can get an idea of what’s going on, gauge if it might be connected to the Nikita situation.”
Not that long afterward, Max brought the car to a stop in the exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood, parking between two other similar black sedans. This particular street was a historical landmark, maintained much as it had been in the early twentieth century, the trims on the graceful Queen Anne-style homes decorative, the colors distinctive even in the muted light.
“This is exciting,” Sophia said, wide-eyed, just as the streetlights sensed the approaching night and switched themselves on.
Max bit the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, and don’t think I take all my dates on stakeouts. You’re special.” Such an impossibly simple statement to describe the depth of what he felt for her.
“I’m flattered.” A husky chuckle. “Oh—I may have discovered what was bothering you about Quentin Gareth’s file—I meant to tell you after you got off the comm, but we got . . . distracted.”
Max’s body purred at the thought of that distraction. “Still feeling tender?”
Reaching out, he closed his hand over her thigh, gave a little squeeze. “So?”
“Yes.” He could hear the blush. Then she said, “Are you erect?”
“Has a well-hidden discrepancy in his early records. It says he went to an Ivy League college from age eighteen to twenty-three, and he did. However, he wasn’t actually at college for six months of his final year—he enrolled in no classes, took no exams.
“When I dug deeper, I discovered he’d won a place in some kind of work experience program.” She touched her fingers to the hand he had on her thigh, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles. “There’s nothing inherently suspicious in that, but the fact that he hid it instead of putting it on his CV tells me he either did so badly during the program that he wants it gone from his work history—”
“—or,” Max completed, “he’s got a secret he doesn’t want us to uncover. Where was he posted?”
“That’s the thing. There’s no record whatsoever of where he spent those six months.”
Max caught something with his peripheral vision. “Stay relaxed,” he said to Sophia. “It’s dark enough that they won’t be able to see us.” Though the streetlight in front of the target home made their quarry very visible.
Two men and one woman walked up from the other side of the street, entering the house after a quick knock. Two more women, middle-aged this time, followed. The sixth attendee was a much older man, his hair in tight gray curls.
Sophia jerked forward without warning. “Is that who I think it is?”
The individual who’d caught her attention paused on the steps of the house, glancing around as if conscious of being watched.
“Son of a bitch,” Max murmured as Ryan Asquith shifted on his heel and walked inside.
CHAPTER 39
Councilor Kaleb Krychek was just getting into his car for the drive to his office in Moscow when he felt it. A telepathic ricochet. Catching the returning tracker with a psychic hand, he leaned against the vehicle. He had thousands of these invisible psychic constructs scattered throughout the Net, all of them primed to scan through billions upon billions of bytes for data for one name.
This was the first one that had returned since he began his search six years, five months, and three weeks ago.
He was careful with the old and fragile construct, not wanting to lose what it had brought back to him. It took him almost ten minutes to penetrate the layers of his own security—and then, there it was.
Because at last, he had confirmation that his quarry was alive.
CHAPTER 40
I’m writing this as you sleep beside me, your breathing easy, the lines of stress smoothed away—and I don’t know how to describe what I feel for you. I don’t have those words. It hurts, this emotion in my heart, this inexorable ache.
Sophia lay in bed the next morning, her limbs loose and her body utterly sated. So, this was what pleasure felt like, she thought in wonder. This was what poets wrote about and artists painted. This was why humans gave each other secret smiles and changelings murmured in their mates’ ears.
The bathroom door opened to reveal a tiled enclosure full of steam just as Morpheus jumped onto the bed and padded around to sit right up against her abdomen. She took the hint, stroking his solid form. “You shower in water far too hot for you,” she said to the beautifully muscled male who walked out from the heat and headed to where he’d thrown a change of clothes last night.
After they’d seen Ryan enter that stately Queen Anne, she and Max had decided she should return home, tear apart Ryan’s file. Her cop had called up a white-blond changeling male named Dorian to drop her home, while he’d stayed on Ryan until close to three a.m., leaving only when his friend Clay had arrived to take the watch for a few hours. She’d heard him return home, heard him confer with the manhunt team for over half an hour.
“Looks like Bonner’s parents provided him with access to a private jet,” he’d said to her when he stumbled into bed. “Bastard could be anywhere. I’ve alerted the local airports, let the cats know.” He’d gone straight to sleep after that . . . but woken an hour ago with more than enough energy to make her gasp.
“You’ll boil,” she said, as another wave of steam escaped the bathroom.
An unrepentant wink. “Heat is good for you.” Towel hitched around his lean waist and hair damp, he looked young, incredibly approachable.
A rumble against her palm as Morpheus began to purr. “I was thinking about calling Quentin Gareth’s college.” Having discovered nothing incriminating in Asquith’s files, she was staying behind today to sort through the PsyNet data she’d cached—in the hopes of unearthing something that might tie Pure Psy directly to the attacks on Nikita’s people. “But if he has alerts set in place, it could tip him off.”
“Hold off on that,” Max said, throwing the towel on the bed. “I might be able to get the information another way.”
