That thought in mind, I stalk out of the bedroom and into the living room, relieved when I don’t see her. I need to figure that part out, but I can’t think about it right now. Can’t think about her right now because all I want to do is think about her. Imagine her like she was last night. Remember it.
No more than that.
I want to fucking relive it.
“Is there coffee?” I ask when I find Matthaeus watching me. Does he know? There’s not much he misses.
“Same place it always is.”
I grumble a curse, pour myself a mug and sit on the armchair in the living room. “Where are the guys?”
“Sleeping.”
“Which bedroom did you give her?” They’re all taken if the men stayed the night.
“Mine. You think I’d put her in with one of the men?”
“She’s sleeping in your bed?” The thought makes some primal, irrational caveman-like part of me furious.
“Not that they’d touch her, because they’re not animals.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Because I’m the only animal here.
“And yes, she’s in my bed. To sleep. Alone.” He picks up his mug of coffee but doesn’t take his eyes off me. “I’m not stupid you know. Or blind.”
I pause at that and take care not to break eye contact. How much does he know?
“So, she just went to sleep in your bed?” I ask as memory returns. How she looked when I first realized what I was doing. Choking her. And then…after.
“Not quite,” Matthaeus says as if he’d given me time to process. He sips his coffee, all seeing eyes on me.
I raise my eyebrows and sip mine. “What does that mean?”
“She got upset. I made her a cup of tea.”
“You…ah fuck.” I know Matthaeus’s tea. It’s not tea at all.
“I had to. She’s…” he shakes his head as he glances away, searching for the words. “She’s very protective of you, Dante.”
Now it’s me who doesn’t have the words. But then my gaze catches on the card on the table. The one that makes my heart stop momentarily.
“Where did you get that?” I’d found a similar one in David’s things when we were looking for Scarlett. Never did learn much about what it was and forgot about it eventually. But seeing it now brings it right back.
“Your pocket,” Matthaeus says.
I pick it up, turn it over. This one has a phone number in the same gold lettering as the front. I put my mug down, pick up my phone which is on the coffee table—I had left it here last night—and dial.
Matthaeus shakes his head but doesn’t interrupt.
“You get home in one piece?” comes the same voice as the man who walked me out of Red’s last night. The man who probably did save my life.
“No thanks to you. What the fuck is going on?”
“All thanks to me, actually. Even if you did fuck me royally.”
“I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m the man who needed Petrov alive.”
“Why?”
“Because you and me, Dante Grigori, we have a common goal. We both want Felix Pérez. And you just killed the man who would draw him out of the hole he’s hiding in.”
18
Dante
Jericho St. James.
The St. James family has their hands in several ventures in the states and northern Europe. Some legal, some not. Jericho has no social media presence. No address on any record. All I know about him is that he’s thirty-one years old. His past is spotty at best. And in the last five years, he has vanished like a fucking ghost. In fact, apart from his birth certificate, high school diploma and a Harvard law degree, he doesn’t exist.
And I’m about to meet him.
Matthaeus and I walk into the large, noisy café of the posh hotel near the public library, and I spot the man immediately. Not that I got a clear look at his face last night. But I know it’s him the instant I see him from the asshole-grin on his face.
And I already don’t like him.
“Dante,” he says when we get to his table at the farthest corner. He rises to his feet.
I recognize the man standing at his back, hands folded in front of him, wearing black from head to toe.
St. James extends his hand to me. I glance at it, note the ink of a tattoo extending over his wrist and onto the back of his hand. He’s wearing a ring on the ring finger of his right hand. Left hand is bare.
I shift my gaze back to his. “Jericho St. James.” I don’t shake his hand. I just take the seat nearest me, and Matthaeus takes the other one. “Who the fuck are you exactly?”
“Something to drink, gentlemen?” he asks as he resumes his seat, and a waitress comes by. He gives her a smile meant to dazzle and it clearly does. The girl flushes, almost trips over herself to take his order for coffee for the table.