“Yes, yes,” he said, fluttering over Xander. “He’s had enough of the transfusion. He’s strong enough to move.” His gaze flickered again to Morgan, then he turned away and finished packing his things.
Mateo held a hand out. “Are you ready?”
Morgan took a breath and gazed back at him. “Ready as I’ll ever be.” And she took his hand in hers.
20
Xander woke up laid out flat on his back in a quiet room with his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth and pain throbbing sharp in his abdomen.
He kept still from old habit, his eyes closed, measuring his surroundings with his senses.
Anyone looking at him would have thought him still asleep, but he was on instant alert, primed and ready to fight though he was supine, that pain in his side was substantial, and he could tell by the light-headedness that he’d lost a lot of blood.
No one was in the room with him. He cast out his awareness farther, through the walls, through empty rooms, until he came up against a cold lead wall where his exploration abruptly stopped. Good.
This was good. Lead meant a safe house, which meant they’d come for him.
Which meant Morgan hadn’t left him to die after all.
The thought of her sent a lance of pain through his chest. His eyes blinked open and he lifted his head, looking around. A narrow bed, some plain furniture, a bathroom accessed through a door ajar, surgical instruments and bandages on a rolling silver table nearby. There were no windows, but he sensed it was close to sunrise. How long had he been out?
With an effort that sent pain radiating in wicked lashes up his spine and all the way down to his toes, Xander pushed the sheet aside and sat up.
He was naked, clad in only a large white bandage wrapped tightly around his waist. It was stained rust with blood in erratic circles on the right side. He inhaled, testing the limits of his tolerance, and found he could take a full breath without effort. His ribs weren’t compromised, and since he could move his arms and legs, his spine wasn’t compromised either. That was a relief, because the last thing he remembered before passing out was a terrible deadness in his legs.
He stood carefully, balancing his weight over his bent knees. His back protested with a sharp, stabbing ache, but it was tolerable, less than when he had first sat up. He was alive, if not perfectly well. But no matter the injury, he’d heal quickly. If he wasn’t dead, he’d be fine within days.
He crossed the room, found the black pants and shirt that had been left folded on a chair, and pulled them on carefully with gritted teeth. His weapons were laid out in a neat row on the top of the plain dresser, and he smiled as he donned those as well, strapping the knives around his waist and ankles. He pulled on a pair of new black boots, size fifteen, government issue, and laced up the ties.
Then he walked out the door and went to find her.
The safe house—one of dozens the Syndicate kept in every major city across the globe—was a refurbished villa in the hilly and moderately affluent Aventine section of Rome. It boasted 360-degree views of the city and over ten thousand square feet of living space, the vast majority of it underground. From the street, it was a modest turn-of-the-century affair of brick and mortar surrounded by a tall iron fence, with gardens and trees and a bearded, chubby lawn gnome by the front gate whose pointed red hat had long ago faded to pink, and a security system to rival that of Fort Knox.
The bedrooms and lounging area were on the bottom floor, the kitchen, dining area, and media rooms on the second floor, the gym and training center on the first floor belowground. Aboveground it was simply a house. A beautifully decorated, unoccupied house, because no one ever ate or slept or lived there. Aboveground was all for show. Once you descended beyond the reinforced lead door to the
“basement,” you entered another world.
He walked past six unoccupied bedrooms and found himself alone. A staircase twisted up to the main room, which was a large, open space decorated in dark charcoals and brown and beige without a hint of feminine softness. Beyond it were the dining room and kitchen—modern and masculine as the rest of the belowground areas—and as soon as he reached the top step of the stairs, he heard Mateo’s gravel-rough voice drifting in from that direction.
“I can’t take it much longer, T.”
There came an agitated grunt, then the sound of boots pacing back and forth over tile. “
“If he doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll have to leave Bartleby here with him and come back when it passes.”
Xander froze, listening.
“How much longer we got?”
“Three days minus sixteen hours,” muttered Mateo. “And counting.”
Groans. “Jesus Christ.”
He waited, but they didn’t say more. Curiosity got the better of him, and he made his way silently to the kitchen, where he stood there in the doorway, unnoticed, looking them over.
His boys. His brothers, in heart if not in Blood.
They were assassins like him—collectively referred to as the Syndicate by the rest of their kind —and like him they were disgraced sons of powerful males who’d been handed over as children to the brutal tutelage of the capoeira master Karyo, a human the Manaus colony kept on retainer because he was both a perfect killing machine and perfectly tight-lipped about his “unique” students and their kin, who paid so handsomely for his silence. It was either study under Karyo or be tossed into the Drowning Well; bringing shame to one’s family name was not well tolerated by his kind, and at least the Academy offered a chance to save face.
It offered their
Mateo was the son of a duke, of the
Tomas, eldest son of the colony’s Matchmaker, had burned his family’s home to the ground when he was eight in a fit of rage after his father had spanked his bare ass in the middle of Sunday church services when he wouldn’t stop squirming in the pew. He sat at the big square wood table with one knee jumping up and down beneath it, his head bent over, hands clasped over the back of his neck.
Julian, a giant skull-crusher of a male with shaggy dark hair who always drove the getaway car no matter the job, had stolen apples from a neighbor’s tree. He sat hunched over a bowl of pasta at the table, mechanically shoveling it into his mouth with a blank-eyed stare as if he didn’t even know he was eating.
And he, Xander, had simply been born to the wrong woman.
They had trained together in Brazil since boyhood in the fine arts of murder and mayhem, until his three adopted brothers had gone into the American military as spies of sorts and he had gone slowly insane.
They were the only three souls in the world he trusted with his life. They knew all his secrets and he knew all theirs, and if anything was finer than that, he hadn’t seen it.
“Boys,” he said.
Uncharacteristically, all three of them jumped. They gaped at him as if he were Lazarus, risen from the dead.
His brows arched. “What’s doing, gentlemen?”
And then they were on him like a pack of enormous, rough-and-tumble puppies, hugging him, slapping him on the back, making him see double in pain with arms squeezed around his middle.
“You look like shit,” Tomas said when it was over. He stepped back to peer at him with a critical eye. “You shouldn’t be up yet.”
“How’s the gash, man? Thought we lost you there for a minute, bro. You were pretty chopped up,” said
