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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520

  Macon GA 31201

  Lke a Thief in the Night

  A Strangers in the Night Story

  Copyright © 2008 by Bettie Sharpe

  ISBN: 1-59998-865-8

  Edited by Laurie Rauch

  Edited by Anne Scott

  Cover by Scott Carpenter

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: January 2008

  www.samhainpublishing.com

  Like a Thief in the Night

  Bettie Sharpe

  Dedication

  To my husband: I love you. Infinity! Ha! I win.

  And, to my sister: Sex and violence and assassins. Oh, my.

  Chapter One

  Shanghai

  Two hundred years from tomorrow.

  In another time and place, they would have been lovers. If Arden had seen him on the street or in a smoky bar some Saturday night, she wouldn't have hesitated to lock him in her dark gaze, lick her lips, and move in for the metaphorical kill. She didn’t believe in happily ever after, but they could have had one hell of a night. Too bad that, tonight, the kill was far too literal.

  Sevastien Aniketos was asleep, but his eyes snapped open when Arden tightened her garrote. God and the Devil, what a beautiful man! Coal black hair, ice blue eyes, snarling lips she longed to taste before the life went out of him.

  He even struggled beautifully. His strong, long-fingered hands grasped at her, trying to find purchase on the slick, seamless surface of her stealthsuit. The synthetic black fabric was as slippery as a greased eel and just as hard to hold. Eventually, his hands fell away and his struggles slowed.

  “I'm sorry.” She'd never apologized to a kill before. “I wish things were different.”

  His last breath came with a sputter of blood. His pale eyes went lifeless. The snarl faded from his lips.

  She kissed him. He tasted of coppery cooling blood, of smoke and whiskey. His heart was motionless when she placed her hand over the old white scar on his chest, but Arden imagined she felt it beat.

  Regret was an alien sensation—simultaneously hollow, and heavy as a lead weight in her gut. She was a trained killer, stained to her marrow with a hundred sins more worthy of remorse than this swift, clean kill. But this was the deed she wished she could undo.

  She bowed her head over his and closed her eyes. “I wish things were…”

  “Different.”

  Her nerves sprang to life at the sound of the raw, raspy voice. Regret forgotten, she jumped up, reaching for her weapon, ready to kill him all over again. But his hands were on her, forcing her backward.

  She landed on her back, pinned by the muscled weight of his body, staring up at the white scar on his chest. Watching his pulse beat in the thick column of his throat. The raw slice her garrote had left in his neck was almost healed. The new pink scar curved upward toward his ears, a gruesome parallel of the smile that curved his blood-flecked lips.

  “Hello, Arden. I have been waiting for you.”

  Arden came to herself in a flash of awareness—not for her the long, slow awakening, the muzzy-headed confusion that often accompanied other people’s returns to consciousness. Her eyes opened and she took stock.

  What had changed? Everything. She was naked and tied to a cold metal chair in a windowless room. A bare fluorescent bulb flickered somewhere behind her, casting a wan, wavering shadow of her bound body onto the chipped tile floor in front of her. She looked up. The ceiling was low, dusty, girded with rusty pipes that dripped water and leaked steam at their ill-fitting joints. The walls were brick, covered with cheap plaster that had crumbled like a forgotten ruin and built up little dunes of plaster dust in the corners.

  A basement.

  She leaned forward in the chair. Her body strained against the nylon ropes tied taut around each of her wrists as well as her midsection, thighs and ankles. Her body moved—barely—but the chair stayed in place. It must have been bolted to the floor. Her captor knew how to tie a good knot, and he hadn’t been foolish enough to bind her hands together or to secure her to a free-standing chair.

  “Hello, Arden.”

  For the second time that night, Aniketos’ voice startled her. He was standing in the darkness behind her chair. She liked the way he’d said her name—so much so that it took her a moment to realize he’d used her given name, not her cover. Arden had a passport, a driver’s license, and an entire life’s worth of perfectly forged paperwork to prove she was Chen Jie, a twenty-five year old Shanghai-born photographer. No one but her handlers and her fellow assassins knew the name she’d been given when she became a killer. No one but him.

  “Arden,” he said her name again. His voice was as haunting as the memory of warmth in winter. It was less raw now, but still raspy. He had an odd, halting pattern of speech, as though he’d learned English late in life and still did his thinking in another, more ancient tongue. She couldn’t place his accent, but she’d had only a few sentences to guess by. Best to get him talking—she’d find no answers in silence.

  “Hello, Sevastien.”

  “Call me Aniketos. You did not ask how I knew your name.”

  “You’ll tell me. Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “It is evening, and not a nice one.” He came to stand in front of her. He didn’t make a sound when he moved, not a footstep, not a breath.

  He was dressed now—black pants and a gray, long-sleeved pullover shirt that caressed the muscles of his torso and arms. His face was as beautiful as she’d remembered it—more so. Dark bronze skin, sensuous lips, and a profile that looked like it belonged on the wall of some ancient temple alongside jackal-headed gods or bare-breasted sphinxes. His black hair, by contrast, was cut in a short, modern style that looked like he had combed it with his fingers. How devious of the man to know that looking like he had just rolled out of bed would prompt a girl to imagine him in bed.

  And how screwed up was she to check out the man who had stripped her naked and tied her to a chair in his basement? The answer to that question was all too obvious. She killed people for a living; she was a very sick girl. She would just have to add this newfound taste for high-stakes bondage to her already long list of kinks.

  Aniketos held up his right hand and unfurled her inky-black stealthsuit from his clenched fist. It ate up the light around it like a black hole spun into cloth.

  “Hard to see and harder to hold. I hope you will forgive me for your current state of undress. Your previous attire made you a little too difficult to handle.”

  She strained her shoulders against the ropes. “You must have something else I can wear.”

  He smiled, a flash of white teeth against smooth bronze skin, and pulled up a chair. “I think not. I rather like the view.”

  Sense memory lit up her synapses—the taste of his blood on his lips when she’d kissed him, the weight of his body when he’d trapped her. She flushed hot, and then hotter still when she met his steady gaze.

  His pale eyes surveyed her, lingering on her pebbled pink nipples.

&nb
sp; “It’s cold in here,” she complained, hoping to explain away her body’s reaction.

  “And yet, you do not have goose bumps.”

  “Don’t you have questions for me?”

  “Of course.” He skimmed her body with another head-to-toe glance. “I spent two months watching you before I set this trap. I must say, you are a woman of fascinating tastes. How do you like captivity? Is your cunt wet?”

  She spat at him. He leaned aside in a smooth motion that would have appeared casual if not for his speed. Quick reflexes, she noted. But she was faster.

  He drew her garrote from his pocket. “Interesting choice of weapon. Why not choose a laserblade, a pulsegun, or some other piece of modern weaponry? They work faster.”

  She tried to shrug. “Garrote is clean, classic, reliable. It won’t be shut down by a target with an electromagnetic-pulse panic button.”

  “You don’t mind being so…close to your victims?”

  She met his eyes. “I like it. I don’t shoot and run. My targets are always dead when I leave because I watch them die.”

  He gave her a rude, toothy grin.

  She returned it. “I haven’t left yet, have I? Did you bring me down here just to pick my brain for pointers on the simple art of murder?”

  He looked up. “Pardon me, that line of inquiry was for my own edification. Curiosity is ever my strength and my weakness.”

  “Then we’ve that in common, because right now I’m curious as hell how you managed to play dead so well. I felt your heart stop.”

  He smiled, but didn’t show his teeth. “Magic.”

  “Do I look like the kind of girl who falls for fairytales?”

  “You look like the kind of woman who has been trained not to ask questions.”

  “I ask for what I want to know.”

  “Really. Do you even know who sent you after me, or why?”

  “I don’t need to know the specifics, but I can guess the general information. You live in a glass penthouse stuffed chock-full of stolen art. It’s easy to make enemies when you take what doesn’t belong to you. Maybe one of the thieves you hired to ill-get those fancy gains sold you out to an angry victim. I’m told we criminals are an untrustworthy lot.”

  He smiled, a strange twinkle in his eyes. “We are, indeed.”

  “We?”

  “I get my own ill-gotten gains.”

  Arden knit her brows and he flashed his teeth in a wolfish grin. “I am a thief, Arden—the best there is. And you are my latest acquisition.”

  “Am I?” Arden kept her voice steady. The man was clearly insane. So why was she still hot for him? Because, her inner voice chided, you’re hardly the poster child for sanity, yourself. And wouldn’t it be delicious to fuck a man who knows exactly what you are?

  A shiver ran through her. When she met his gaze again, he winked, as though he knew exactly what she’d been thinking.

  “Sevastien Aniketos does not exist. I created the persona and took out the hit for the express purpose of capturing you.”

  “Why?”

  He raked her with his gaze, icy blue eyes tracing the length of her body. “Aside from the obvious appeal of having a naked murderess at my complete disposal? I want information about the Darkriver Corporation’s wet works. Who better to get it from than one of their best assassins?”

  Arden could hardly deny she was an assassin; she had sneaked into the man’s penthouse and strangled him in his sleep. But she wouldn’t admit she worked for Darkriver. He would have to do more than ask politely if he wanted that information from her.

  She furrowed her brows to make an exaggerated look of confusion. “Darkriver Corporation is an international private security firm. They have contracts to police several major cities and their peacekeeping forces are active in war zones all over the world. Darkriver doesn’t employ people like me, they catch them.”

  “That was a stupid lie, Arden.” His voice was low, deadly, and threatening by its very lack of emotion.

  She had expected he would get angry with her for playing dumb, that he would hit her and threaten her. Instead, he watched her. She returned his gaze, refused to yield by looking away. Silence stretched between them—charged, intense, and strangely intimate. She had never looked a man in the eye for so long before; not the men she killed nor the men she fucked.

  Her heart beat faster. She hoped he read it as nervousness and not arousal. She had been trained to resist torture, but this was something else entirely. She wanted to fidget, to cover her body, to squeeze her muscles tight around her traitorous twat.

  She wondered why he didn’t hit her for her lack of cooperation. She wanted him to. She wanted an interaction she could understand, and violence was an old acquaintance.

  She licked her lips. His gaze darted down to focus on her tongue, on her mouth. She smiled. Curiosity wasn’t his only weakness.

  “You should be frightened.” His voice was rougher than it had been the last time he’d spoken. “You are naked and bound to a chair in a basement. I could do anything to you.”

  “But all you’ve done is talk,” she taunted. “If you were going to torture me, you’d be showing me your tools. If you planned to rape me you wouldn’t have tied my legs together. If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead by now. Excluding those options, I can only conclude your plan is to keep me here and ask me psychologically probing questions until I die of frustration or boredom.”

  “Frustration?” He took her bait.

  She raised her eyebrows and made an “O” of her mouth to create an exaggerated expression of surprise. “Oops. Was that a Freudian slip? An advanced case of Stockholm syndrome? A closet kink for kinbaku? Stop with the talk, Aniketos. I may like killing people, but I hate to kill time.”

  “You want to provoke me.”

  “Now why would I do that?”

  “You stall for time. You want me to lose my temper.”

  “What I want is for you to let me go.”

  His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Which of those knots have you loosened?”

  He stood and approached her. It was too soon and he was too calm, but she seized her chance anyway. She was not as deft with her left hand—a fraction of a second slower, a millimeter less precise—but she was quick enough to grab a fistful of his shirt and drag his face down to hers.

  She pressed her lips to his, hard and fast, before he could draw away. The kiss only lasted a moment, but it was explosive. The universe had been born in an instant; a mere moment could change everything.

  He tasted of cardamom, brown bread and bergamot when she pressed her tongue between his lips. His tongue met hers, pushed her back, sliding into her mouth with forceful ease. A tremor of pleasure rocked through her, turning her joints to jelly and making her heart hammer hard against her ribs. She wanted him.

  For that one brief instant, she lost herself to desire. She lost herself to the feel of his lips, the smell of his skin, the hot rush of his exhalations against her cheek. And, in that instant, she lost her chance.

  He wrapped his hand around her wrist and wrenched it away from his collar. The haze of lust between them shattered like warm glass plunged into a tub of ice.

  He stepped to the back of her chair, twisting her arm as he went. It only took him a second to tie her hand to the edge of the chair again. He pulled the ropes tighter this time—her fingers immediately started to tingle with the loss of sensation.

  “That hurts!”

  “It is your own fault. Was the kiss worth it?”

  She leaned her head back to meet his eyes. She licked her lips, slowly, before answering. “I liked it better when you were bleeding.”

  He stepped out of her field of view. She heard him take a breath. She waited for his answer, but none came. Cold, damp air tickled the back of her neck. The fluorescent light flickered out, and she heard a door open and shut somewhere behind her. He had left her, but the victory felt like defeat. She was bound and alone in a dark basement.

  “Fe
els just like old times,” she muttered as she methodically tested the ropes for another weak spot. Escape was the first lesson she had learned from Darkriver, survival was the second.

  Arden had been little more than a child when Darkriver took her. She didn’t remember her family or the name they had given her. She didn’t remember her age. She remembered that her body had been almost as tall as a grown woman’s body, but as thin and flat as a boy’s.

  She remembered that first night. She had woken to darkness, to the damp press of stagnant air, to the stench of rotting meat. She had woken to the rasp of rough ropes against her skin and the unyielding angle of a high-backed metal chair beneath her.

  It took her a day to get free. Her tongue was swollen from lack of water. Her body stank of her own effluvia. Her wrists were raw and wet with her own blood.

  She used her hands to search the darkness for a weapon and found the sticky skin of a corpse just a few feet away. The same rough rope bound its rotting wrists. The high-backed metal chair had become this prisoner’s bier.

  Her foot tapped up against a rusting piece of metal pipe. She picked it up and examined it by touch. It was jagged on one end. She wrapped her hands around the blunt end of the pipe and started searching for the door.

  She waited by the side of the door for what seemed like hours. Her heart pounded like a drum, but she kept her body as quiet as the corpse on the metal chair. Footsteps echoed in the hall. She tightened her grip on the pipe. The door opened and the man who had kidnapped her stepped through the door.

  He was young. The scraggly brown beard on his pocked cheeks did little to hide his rounded face. Though her other memories were hazy, she remembered the damp, greasy feel of his groping hands when he’d grabbed her off the street. She remembered how his breath had smelt of sausage and beer when he’d told her all the disgusting things he would do to her. He was a villain, but not a liar—he’d brought a pair of pliers with him, just as he’d said he would.

  Even then, young, alone, and frightened, she’d known she would only get one chance to strike. Instead of swinging the pipe at his head, as she had seen countless prisoners in the holotainments do, she lunged forward, jamming the jagged end of the rusty pipe into the young man’s doughy gut. He tried to scream, but the sound that came from his mouth was a wet, pitiful wail.