Gavin was impossible to pin down, and Ben’s instincts couldn’t decide if he was a friend or a foe yet. Logically, Ben knew that was probably part of what made Gavin so successful in his business. He could set more powerful vampires at ease… but only so much. There was something fundamentally uncertain about Gavin’s amnis.
Yep. Slippery.
Chloe, thank God, was a steadying factor. When the three of them were together, Ben could be at ease.
He punched in the security code with the stylus next to the PIN pad, and the doors unsealed. He walked out to the small living area outside his secure day chamber. Since the bar and the safe house were new, they had the most recent Nocht-compatible technology installed.
Ben woke his tablet. “Good evening, Cara.”
“Good evening, Ben Vecchio. Your voice ID has registered with this device. You have enabled two-factor authentication. Please speak or enter your ID code now.”
Ben spoke his code in an obscure Mongolian dialect Zhang was teaching him.
“Authentication recognized. How can I help you tonight?”
“Do I have any new messages from today?”
“You have… ten new messages.”
“Please display.” He saw a tray with a thermos and several pastries on the coffee table. Nice. That must have been the vanilla and cinnamon he’d been smelling. He walked over and unscrewed the top of the thermos to find dark, steaming coffee.
“Good.” He’d been half expecting blood, and that just didn’t go well with cinnamon cake. He sniffed the coffee. Sweet. More like Turkish coffee than the American variety. He poured a bit into the small mug next to the cake and added cream from the tiny pitcher.
Okay, damn. That was delicious. He could get addicted to Romanian coffee if they stayed here long.
Someone tapped on the door.
“Cara, blank screen.” Ben faced the door, coffee in hand. He could already smell Chloe. “Come in, Chloe.”
She poked her head in. “Still really weird that you always know when it’s me.”
“Well, your…” No, he shouldn’t talk about how she smelled. He’d always hated it when vampires talked about how he smelled as a human. “It’s your steps. Maybe being a dancer, they’re just more distinctive or something.” He pointed to his ears. “You know, my hearing.”
Chloe’s dimples popped out. “It’s okay. I know it’s the smell.”
“Sorry, it really is. I feel like an adolescent again, only this time I’m being led around by my nose.”
“I live with one of you, remember?” She walked in and plopped on his couch. “It’s okay. Let’s go over tonight’s schedule.”
“Did Gavin want you heading to Radu’s with us tonight?”
“Yeah. He said it would be good for me to be identified as” —she used air quotes and rolled eyes— “‘his human.’ And I get it, so it’s fine. This city feels slightly…”
“Wilder?”
Her eyes went wide. “Yes! I was trying to compare it to Paris or Vienna, because the architecture kind of reminds me of both those places, but the vibe is completely different.”
“Paris has really calmed down in the past few years,” Ben said. “And no place feels as orderly as Vienna. I know exactly what you mean.”
“Totally. I want to roam around, but I think I’ll confine my roaming to daylight.”
“And only with Gavin’s security,” Ben said. “I don’t know anything about this place.”
“Do you think that’s why Radu wanted to meet here?” She pulled out her laptop. “Because he knows you don’t have many allies in this part of the world?”
“Maybe.” Ben sat across from her and tried not to think about the inbox he wasn’t tending to. “Chloe, let me just…” He reached for his tablet and used an eye scan to open it. “I really need to read my email.”
“No problem.” She was already in her files. “When you’re done, I have a question about the Corsican lead.”
“Got it.” He skimmed over the two messages from Tai. Nothing new in Penglai. He had one from Fabi, but it just looked like chatting. One from Giovanni with new information about the icon forger he’d found. “I’m forwarding this one to you. You can add it to the file on the forger.”
“Okay.”
He continued down to the bottom of the list to see an email from a BTA Art Recovery account. “Do we know a BTA Art Recovery?”
Chloe frowned. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
Ben clicked on it.
I will not follow you anymore.
Ben dropped his tablet on the table. “Fuck.”
“What is it?” Chloe looked up.
“Tenzin.”
“What?”
Ben turned his tablet and showed it to her. “BTA Art Recovery is Tenzin.”
“Huh. That’s new.” Chloe looked back at her own screen.
“You didn’t know about this?”
“No. And I usually have to help her set electronic stuff up.” Her voice dropped a register. “She’s changing. Evolving. What will she do next?”
“This isn’t funny.” Ben was unaccountably annoyed.
Chloe bit her lips. “Uh, yeah. It kind of is. It’s an email, Ben.”
“An email that proves she was in LA.” And listening to me when I was at the warehouse.
Fuck.
“So? You told me you knew she was there anyway.”
“I thought she was.”
Chloe shrugged. “And now you know. I don’t know why you’re pissed.”
“Because…” He just was. “Forget it.”
“Okaaaay.” She looked up. “Did you want her to keep following you? Just email her back.”
“Can we work please?”
“Sure.” She turned her laptop around. “So here are the three leads we have. Now the Corsicans—”
“I know. It’s slim. But if we follow what the forger said, it makes sense.”
“But if this gang has the icon, why do they want to make forgeries of it?”
Ben thought back to Tenzin, a metalsmith in Venice, and a pile of rare medieval coins. “Just trust me. Sometimes people don’t want to sell the original. And they’re the only criminal organization in the vampire world that’s shown any activity near Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.”
“Okay, so that’s one lead in Corsica, where I have never been—”
“And you will never go.”
“Not even with vampires?”
“Especially not with vampires.” Even Giovanni was cautious about the immortals in Corsica, who were a particularly ruthless fragment of the previous French vampire coalition that had shattered several years before. “You’d probably be fine
