Like a Thief in the Night Read online

  She jumped over his bleeding body to get through the door and scrambled down the narrow passage beyond. She turned the corner and ran into a man in a policeman’s uniform. He caught her up in his arms and murmured, “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re here and everything is all right.”

  The policeman stiffened when he noticed the bloody pipe in her hands. His expression changed from one of concern to one of disgust. He set her down and pushed her back. “What have you done?”

  “Captain,” a policewoman shouted from the other end of the hall. “There’s a man dead over here. It looks pretty brutal.”

  The policeman clamped his hand around her bloody, abraded wrist, heedless of her mewling whimper of pain. “I think I have the murderer right here.”

  She tried to shake her head, to tell the officer that the man was a bad man, that she had been tied up and had escaped, but the policeman just dragged her with him down the hall. Back to the scene of her crime.

  “God, that’s disgusting,” the policeman said when he saw the body of her captor sprawled in the prison room. “What kind of little monster are you to do this to someone? Why couldn’t you just wait to be rescued?”

  “We had better cuff her and take her in,” the policewoman said. “Crimes like this must be punished.”

  She shook her head and tried to pull away. The policeman’s grip on her bloody wrists slipped, and she broke free. She turned and ran.

  “Stop, murderer!” the policeman shouted.

  The sound of her heartbeat filled her ears. Shots echoed in the hallway behind her. When she turned the corner, hands grabbed her, clamping over her mouth before she could scream. The hands pulled her into a narrow opening in the wall and released her long enough to slide the panel shut.

  “Sshhh, special girl. Don’t worry. The police are wrong. I know why you did it.”

  Her savior was a woman, small, with golden hair and kind blue eyes. “My name is Eden Black. I work for a company called Darkriver. Come with me and I’ll keep you safe from the people who want to hurt you because of what you did.”

  The blonde woman offered her hand and young Arden took it.

  Years later, Arden was sitting at a hotel bar surveilling a target when she saw a familiar face a few meters away. He had shaved the scruffy beard and acquired a scar across one eyebrow, but she still remembered the rattle of the pliers in his hand.

  She took the empty barstool beside him and whispered, “Didn’t I kill you once?”

  He looked up, winked, and made the same wet, piteous noise he’d made when she stabbed him years before. “A little fake blood goes a long way, but I like to think it’s my acting that really sells the scam.”

  She reached behind the bar for a glass and poured herself a shot from his bottle. “You were very convincing.”

  He took a longer look at her face. “And you were vicious, right from the start. I knew you’d make it through the program, but I didn’t know you’d turn out to be such a looker. How many have you killed?”

  She downed her drink. “Too many to turn back.”

  Chapter Two

  “I have her.” The man Arden thought of as Sevastien Aniketos lit a cigarette and swiveled his chair to face the communication screen on his desk.

  Thousands of kilometers away, a ginger-haired Englishman glared into his own comm screen. “Good work, Nikolai. How is she?”

  “Ruthless. Sexy.” Aniketos took a long draw on his cigarette.

  The Englishman blushed. “I meant, what’s her physical condition? Have you injured her?”

  “She is healthy. I have not hurt her.”

  “Have you interrogated her? Has she told you anything?”

  “I have asked her a few questions—nothing important. She has told me nothing of value. Right now, she thinks she has the advantage.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because she knows I want to fuck her.”

  The Englishman blinked. Sir John Wright was a gentleman in the old sense of the word—mannerly, circumspect, protected from the vulgarities of blunt speech by the sort of wealth and power that made most people afraid to piss him off. In Aniketos’ experience, Wright rarely discussed the baser aspects of the actions individual operatives took under the aegis of the Knighthall Group, and operatives never brought them up. It was all very civilized.

  “So fuck her. Torture her. Do whatever you have to do to make the bitch talk.” Coming out of Wright’s mouth, those crass, cruel words sounded like a blasphemy. “That assassin is as cold a killer as Darkriver ever hatched. I don’t care what you do to her. Just find the location of Darkriver’s Hatcheries. I want my son back.”

  “Patience, Sir John.” Aniketos puffed out a lazy ring of smoke. “These things take time.”

  “Easy to say when you’ve all the time in the world. We mere mortals must operate on a tighter schedule.”

  Aniketos stubbed out the cigarette. “Darkriver has had your son for more than three years. I watched Arden Black for almost two months before I set this trap. I need only three more days to gain her cooperation. Patience.”

  “Three days? How do you plan to convince her to willingly cooperate in only three days time?”

  “I will take away her other options. If she reappears after going missing for three days, with her target still breathing, Darkriver will believe she has betrayed them.”

  The Englishman smiled. “And even if Darkriver let her live long enough to tell the truth of what happened, they’ll hardly believe some Banbury tale about a man who can’t be killed.”

  “The very fear that secured her loyalty to Darkriver will become her reason to betray them—if we offer her protection.”

  “Brilliant! Perhaps I was not mistaken to call in the favor you promised my grandfather. We could use a man of your unique viewpoint. Are you certain you shouldn’t like to join the Knighthall Group?”

  “I am not cut out to wear a white hat.”

  “You’re hardly a villain, Nikolai.”

  “Consider me a self-interested outside party. I will help you get what you want as a way to get what I want.”

  “And what do you want from this undertaking?”

  “The assassin, of course.”

  Sir John’s thin lips stretched into an even thinner smile. “Are you going to add her to your collection? I imagine she’d look quite lovely in a glass case beside all the other weapons you’ve stolen”

  “You jest, but nothing I steal is commonplace. As a weapon—as a woman—the assassin is both beautiful and lethal. You do not understand how rare she is.”

  “I don’t understand why you want her,” the Englishman conceded, his gingery brows drawing low over his eyes as he regarded Aniketos. “And I don’t think you do, either. Not really.”

  Aniketos suppressed a growl of annoyance. Wright spoke as though Aniketos should have a reason for wanting what he stole. Wright didn’t understand that the thrill of wanting, and of getting what he wanted, was reason enough.

  “Fortunately, my motivations are none of your concern, Sir John. All you need to do is come here in three days, and the assassin will tell you what she knows.”

  “Very well.” Wright nodded. “What do you plan to do with her in the meantime?”

  Aniketos raised an eyebrow. The Englishman blushed again.

  “I—er, I didn’t think.”

  “Relax, Wright. I do not plan to rape the girl. I may be a thief, but I do have my standards. I shall untie her and see what happens.”

  “That’s it? You’re going to stay locked in a luxury flat with an assassin for three days?”

  “Why not? What is she going to do—kill me?”

  She was waiting for him when he returned to the basement. He should have guessed the ropes wouldn’t hold her. He could have used metal or glue restraints, but where was the fun in that? Lethal as she was, she couldn’t kill him. He had the advantage of height and strength. Without her stealthsuit, she would be much easier to grab and to hold, much easier to sub
due.

  He supposed he should have found other clothes for her to wear. Stripping her wasn’t part of Knighthall’s standard interrogation procedure, but he wasn’t an interrogator. He was a thief. It was his nature to take things—chances, risks, liberties.

  She looped the rope around his neck the instant he stepped through the door.

  “This again,” he muttered, kicking the door shut behind him.

  She jerked the rope—a quick tug that should have snapped his head back—and followed with a hard twist meant to break his neck. He felt the bones split. A wash of ice water flooded his nerves before they reformed. All of this happened in less than a second. She was fast and lethal, but she hadn’t the strength to beat a man who couldn’t be injured.

  He shoved back and crushed her between his body and the wall. He felt the breath rush out of her, but she didn’t loosen her grip on the rope.

  He reached over his shoulder, grabbed a fistful of her dark hair and used it to pull her around to face him.

  She looked different than she had in the months he’d watched her. The first night he’d seen Arden, she had been on the prowl for a lover, as was her habit when she was not on a job. She’d worn black leather pants, high-heeled boots and a thin black top with no bra. Her short, dark hair framed her face in jagged wisps. She’d worn black eye shadow—too much of it—on her wide-set chocolate-brown eyes. She had painted her Cupid’s bow lips with the sort of glossy, blood-red lipstick that would make a trail of her kisses look like a line of little wounds.

  Tonight, her face was bare. Her dark eyes were wide. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were an almost rosy shade of pink. She had a gamine quality that belied everything he knew of her lethal nature. And she looked young, too young.

  He almost laughed at the thought—a man who had been born in an age where most people were married by thirteen and parents by fourteen worried over a woman who looked like she was well into her twenties. Besides, even if she were a crone with the memory of hundred summers behind her, she would still be young by comparison.

  He had watched civilizations rise and fall. He had stolen the treasures of a hundred ages. Time was a river that broke its path around him, carrying briefer, brighter lives away in the blink of an eye while he remained.

  But this small woman—this cold, old soul cast in hot, young flesh—pulled him into the current of time. He had endured eons, but she made him impatient.

  He wanted her with an urgency he had no right to. An immortal had no need to rush. Yet he craved her with an immediacy that had compelled him to take her when he should have tempted her, to seize what he might have seduced.

  Now, Arden was his captive. Angered and aroused, there was murder in her eyes. But Aniketos didn’t doubt he would prevail. He had seduced a thousand women in his long life. Though the assassin was unlike those others in almost every respect, she had one thing in common with her predecessors. She would yield.

  He smiled at the prospect.

  Arden couldn’t stand the way her captor looked at her—cool, assessing, amused. She lashed out and raked her nails along the inside of his arm, digging in to break his skin. He didn’t so much as flinch. With a grimace of sick fascination, she watched as the marks she had scored faded before her eyes.

  His raspy whisper broke on a rumble of laughter. “You cannot harm me.”

  But she could hurt him. She whipped her head to the side and sank her teeth into his forearm. She bit down hard, tearing at his skin like a wolf tearing into a fresh haunch of meat. His blood ran over her cheeks and chin. Her mouth filled with the hot, coppery taste of him.

  He wrapped his free hand around her throat and squeezed. She coughed as she struggled to breathe, spattering his hand and face with a fine red mist of his blood. He didn’t ease his grip. She unclenched her teeth. She felt dizzy, high on adrenaline and low on oxygen.

  He leaned toward her until his face was centimeters from hers. She struck at him with her hands and kicked with her legs, but each blow was weaker than the last as she struggled for air. He watched her, calmly observing the signs of her suffocation. She wondered if he meant to watch her die. Turnabout was fair play, but she wouldn’t be back for an encore after her curtain fell.

  His lips parted. She thought he would speak. He pressed his mouth against her jaw and licked his blood from her skin. His tongue was warm and wet, gentle as his hand was cruel. He licked her lips and she parted them.

  They kissed. It was hot and bloody, just like the first time. Arden felt like she was floating. It was probably lack of oxygen, but oh, what a way to go.

  He released his grip on her neck and used his hands to brace her arms beside her body while she was still dizzy from the sudden inrush of air. Lips still locked to hers, he pushed her back against the cold plaster wall and used his body to pin her there.

  Arden couldn’t help herself and didn’t want to. She rocked her hips against his body and met his tongue with hers. She moaned as he lifted her up to cup her hips against the hard length of his arousal.

  When he let go of her left arm so he could unfasten his pants, she didn’t fight him. She snaked her arm around his back, tugging at his shirt, desperate to touch his bare skin. He released her other arm so that he could lift her hips and she wrapped her legs around his waist.

  She savored the feel of his cock pressed between their writhing bodies, rubbing up against her shaved pussy, tantalizingly close to her clit. She canted her hips against the smooth, hard length of his erection, teasing her clit with the feel of him even as he tried to lift her to thrust his cock into her wet, ready pussy. They wanted the same thing but they were still fighting each other, each trying to touch and taste and take without giving too much in return.

  Brute strength won out in a matter of seconds. Arden felt no shame in the loss. He wasn’t gentle, but Arden had no use for gentle men. He impaled her in one hard thrust. She gasped, lightheaded from her struggles, stretched by his sheer size, aroused by his fierce strength. He was overwhelming, unrelenting, delivering each thrust like a blow. The old plaster wall cracked and crumbled against her back, and still he kept on.

  She opened her eyes and found him watching her, his gaze calm and clear.

  She raised her chin. “Do it again.”

  “What do you want?”

  She raised her chin higher, baring her neck like a sacrifice.

  His calm demeanor shattered and his body stilled as he held her gaze. His eyes narrowed. He wrapped his hand around her neck.

  There was nothing calm about his gaze now. He watched her with a madman’s intensity, weighing and judging her every physical response.

  She was choking, dying as he fucked her. His body moved. His keen eyes watched. His hand tightened on her throat.

  She came like a lightning strike, her body electric with pleasure even as her lungs screamed for air. Orgasm rocked her again, eating up the oxygen in her blood, echoing across her nerve-endings until her vision started to go black.

  He released his hand. She sucked in a breath and came all over again. Life and Death and everything in between! Her nerves snapped with sensation, each breath brought a new wave of pleasure. Her hips rocked weakly against him as a rasping moan of satisfaction trickled from her bruised throat.

  He groaned as he slammed into her three more times. The muscles in his back tightened beneath her hands and he came with a shuddering curse that sounded like it had been forced out of him.

  She blacked out, but only for a moment. When she came to, he was carrying her across an expanse of soft gray carpet. She considered fighting him, but her muscles were weak and shaky—she was in no shape to win.

  He laid her down on black silk sheets. Was this the same bed in which she had murdered him just hours before? The windows were sealed tight with steel shutters, and she guessed that the doors outside were similarly secured.

  He stood to leave her. She grabbed his hand. Her grasp was weak, but he stayed to listen anyway.

  “Why didn’t you
die?” Her voice was rough and her throat hurt.

  He flashed a toothy grin and leaned close to her ear as though he was about to reveal something of great import. “Magic.”

  She groaned. “I didn’t ask for a bedtime story.”

  “Perhaps you should get one. Do not ask me questions if you do not want my answers.”

  She struggled to get up but he pressed her arms into the bed on either side of her body.

  “There once was a very clever Thief…”

  There was once a very clever Thief whom no lock could stop and no trap could catch. When there was nothing left in the world of men to challenge him, he decided to steal from the gods. He scaled the ziggurat that led to their glass heaven and climbed over the golden gates to paradise.

  The gods were petulant and petty. They were so caught up in their intrigues and squabbles they didn’t notice the Thief sneak past them. The Thief stole the key to Life and Death and hung it on a chain around his neck.

  With the key in his possession, Pain could not touch the Thief, Time could not age him, and Death could not hold him. Every time Death dragged the Thief across its threshold, he simply unlocked the door between Life and Death and walked right back out.

  The Thief was bathing in a river one day when the gods looked down from their heaven and saw the key to Life and Death hanging from a tarnished chain around his neck. They dragged him up the chipped, untended steps of their ziggurat to the wind-pitted halls of their glass heaven. Men had found other gods to worship in the last thousand years and these gods were as fragile as old papyrus, brittle and slowly crumbling to dust.

  True to form, they immediately started bickering about the best way to punish the thief. Finally, the youngest god, who was something of a trickster, said, “Our power on this plane is fading, and when Death returns to take back the key, we shall be no more. Who better to keep it safe for us than the only man to ever steal it?”