Samhain Publishing Ltd, Ebooks and Books in Print

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.

“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?”

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.”