Lover at Last (Black Dagger Brotherhood #11)(28)
Author: J.R. Ward

Qhuinn was a f**king curse to him, the guy really was.

About fifteen miles south of the Brotherhood’s mountaintop compound, Assail woke up on his circular bed in the grand master suite of his mansion on the Hudson. Above him, in the mirrored panels mounted on the ceiling, his naked body was gleaming in the soft glow of the lights installed around the base of the mattress. The octagonal room beyond was dark, the interior shutters still down, the fallen night hidden.

As he considered all the glass in the house, he knew so many vampires would have found these accommodations unacceptable. Most would have avoided the manse altogether.

Too much risk during daylight hours.

Assail, however, had never been bound by convention, and the dangers inherent in living in a building with so much access to light were something to be managed, not bound by.

Getting up, he went over to the desk, signed into his computer, and accessed the security system that monitored not just the house, but the grounds. Alerts had sounded several times during the earlier hours of the day, notifications not of an impending attack, but of some kind of activity that had been flagged by the security system’s filtering program.

In truth, he lacked the energy to be overly concerned, an unwelcome sign that he needed to feed –

Assail frowned as he reviewed the report.

Well, wasn’t this instructive.

And indeed, this was why he’d installed all his checks and balances.

On the images feed from the rear cameras, he watched as a figure dressed in snowfield camouflage traveled on cross-country skis through the forest, closing in on his house from the north. Whoever it was stayed hidden in and among the pines for the most part, and surveyed the property from various vantage points for approximately nineteen minutes…before traversing the westerly border of trees, crossing into the neighbor’s property, and going down onto the ice. Two hundred yards later the man stopped, got out the binoculars again, and stared at Assail’s home. Then he circled around the peninsula that jutted out into the river, reentered the forest, and disappeared.

Bending in closer to the screen, Assail replayed the approach, zooming in to identify facial features, if possible – and it was not. The head was covered with a knit mask, with cutouts only for the eyes, nose, and mouth. With the parka and ski pants on as well, the man was covered in his entirety.

Sitting back, Assail smiled to himself, his fangs tingling in territorial response.

There were but two parties who might be interested in his business, and going by the daylight that had reigned during this recon, it was clear the curiosity was not generated by the Brotherhood: Wrath would never use humans as anything other than a last-resort food source, and no vampire could withstand that amount of sunshine without turning into a torch.

Which left someone in the human world – and there was only a single man with the interest and the resources to try to track him and his whereabouts.

"Enter," he said, just before a knock sounded on his door.

As the pair of males came in, he didn’t bother to look away from the computer screen. "How did you sleep?"

A familiar, deep voice answered, "Like the dead."

"How fortunate for you. Jet lag can be a bore, or so I’ve heard. We had a visitor this morning, by the way."

Assail leaned to one side so his two associates could review the footage.

It was odd to have housemates, but he was going to have to get used to their presence. When he had come to the New World, it had been a solo trip, and he had intended to keep things that way for numerous reasons. Success in his chosen field, however, had mandated that he pull in some backup – and the only people you could even partially trust were your family.

And the pair of them offered a unique benefit.

His two cousins were a rarity in the vampire species: a set of identical twins. When fully clothed, the only way anyone could tell them apart was by a single mole behind the earlobe; other than that, from their voices and their dark, suspicious eyes to their heavily muscled bodies, they were a mirror reflection of each other.

"I’m going out," Assail announced to them. "If our visitor comes again, be hospitable, will you?"

Ehric, the older one by a matter of minutes, glanced over, his face highlighted by the glow around the bed base. Such evil in that handsome combination of features – to the point that one nearly felt pity for the interloper. "’Twill be a pleasure, I assure you."

"Keep him alive."

"But of course."

"That is a finer line than you two have at times appreciated."

"Trust me."

"It’s not you whom I am worried about." Assail looked at the other one. "Do you understand me?"

Ehric’s twin remained silent, although the male did nod once.

That grudging reaction was precisely why Assail would have preferred to keep his new life simple. But it was impossible to be in more than one place at a time – and this violation of privacy was proof that he couldn’t do everything by himself.

"You know how to locate me," he said, before dismissing them from his room.

Twenty minutes later, he left the house showered, dressed, and behind the wheel of his bulletproof Range Rover.

Downtown Caldwell at night was beautiful at a distance, especially as he came over the inbound bridge. It was not until he penetrated the grid system of streets that the city’s sludge became evident: the alleyways with their filthy snowdrifts and their oozing Dumpsters and their discarded, half-frozen homeless humans told the true story of the municipality’s underbelly.

His worksite, as it were.

When he got to the Benloise Art Gallery, he parked in the back, in one of two spaces that were parallel to the building behind the facility. As he stepped free of the SUV, the cold wind swept into his camel-hair coat and he had to hold the two halves together as he crossed the pavement, approaching an industrial-size door.

He didn’t have to knock. Ricardo Benloise had plenty of people working for him, and not all of them were of the art-dealer-associate type: A human male the size of an amusement park opened the way and stood to the side.

"He expecting you?"

"No, he is not."

Disneyland nodded. "You wanna wait in the gallery?"

"That would be fine."

"You need a drink?"

"No, thank you."

As they walked through the office area and into the exhibition space, the deference Assail was now accorded was a new thing – earned through both the huge product orders he’d been putting in as well as the spilled blood of countless humans: Thanks to him, suicides among disenfranchised males age eighteen to twenty-nine with criminal drug records had struck an all-time high in the city, making even the national news.