Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last

was enough to make him studiously consider the locations of the bathrooms. Just in case an evac order was issued by the back of his throat.
    In the end, he found himself upstairs in the second-floor sitting room pacing around. From that vantage point, it was no problem to hear the vestibule door, and yet it wasn’t like he was waiting out in the open—
    The double doors of Wrath’s study were pushed wide, and John Matthew emerged—from the king’s sanctum.
    Immediately, Blay strode across the sitting room, ready to see if maybe the guy had heard anything—but he stopped as he got a gander at John’s expression.
    Deep in thought. Like he’d received personal news of the disturbing variety.
    Blay hung back as his buddy went off in the opposite direction, going down the hall of statues, no doubt to disappear into his room.
    Looked like things were afoot in other people’s lives, too.
    Great.
    With a soft curse, Blay left his friend be and resumed his own useless walking…and waiting.

    Far to the south, in the town of West Point, Sola was prepared to enter Ricardo Benloise’s house on the second floor, through the window at the end of the main hallway. It had been months since she had been inside, but she was banking on the fact that the security contact she had carefully manipulated was still her friend.
    There were two keys to successfully breaking into any house, building, hotel or facility: planning and speed.
    She had both.
    Hanging from the wire she’d thrown onto the roof, she reached into the inside pocket of her parka, pulled out a device, and held it to the right corner of the double-hung window. Initiating the signal, she waited, staring at the tiny red light that glowed on the screen facing her. If for some reason it didn’t change, she was going to have to enter through one of the dormers that faced the side yard—which was going to be a pain in the ass—
    The light went green without a sound, and she smiled as she got out more tools.
    Taking a suction cup, she pushed it into the center of the pane immediately below the latch, and then made a little do-si-do around the thing with her glass cutter. A quick push inward, and the space to fit her arm was created.
    After letting the glass circle fall gently to the Oriental runner inside, she snaked her hand up and around, freed the brass-on-brass contraption that kept the window locked, and slid the sash up.
    Warm air rushed to greet her, as if the house were happy to have her back.
    Before going in, she looked down. Glanced toward the drive. Leaned outward to see what she could of the back gardens.
    It felt like somebody was watching her…not so much when she’d been driving into town, but as soon as she’d parked her car and gotten on her skis. There was no one around, however—not that she’d been able to see, at any rate—and whereas awareness was mission critical in this line of work, paranoia was a dangerous waste of time.
    So she needed to cut this shit.
    Getting back in the game, she reached up with her gloved hands and pulled her ass and legs over and through the window. At the same time, she loosened the tension on the wire so there was slack to let her body transition into the house. She landed without a sound, thanksnot only to the rug that ran down the long corridor, but to her soft-soled shoes.
    Silence was another important criterion when it came to doing a job successfully.
    She stopped where she was for a brief moment. No sounds in the house—but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. She was fairly certain that Benloise’s alarm was silent, and very clear that the signal didn’t go to the local or even state police: He liked to handle things privately. And God knew, with the kind of muscle he employed, there was plenty of force to go around.
    Fortunately, however, she was good at her job, and Benloise and his goons wouldn’t be home until just before the sun came up—he lived the life of a vampire, after all.
    For some reason, the v-word made her think of that man who’d shown up by her car and then disappeared like magic.
    Craziness. And the only time in recent memory that someone had given her pause. In fact, after getting confronted like that, she was actually considering not going back to that glass house on the river—although there was a fucked-up rationale for that. It wasn’t that she was worried that she’d get physically hurt. God knew she was perfectly competent at defending herself.
    It was the