Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Lydia stopped dead two strides into the black-and-white foyer.
The scent of blood was precisely the kind of crappy news flash that the night seemed determined to keep providing, and the air was so saturated with copper that she expected to see a decapitated body down on the marble-tiled floor. Glancing back at the guard, the man was shutting the door, and then he returned to his sentry spot by the archway into the library that looked out over the back acreage. It was on her tongue to ask him if he smelled it, too, but then he probably didn’t. She sometimes forgot how much better her nose was.
The guard swiveled his head toward her, like he was remote-controlled. “You forget something outside?”
“Ah, no. Thanks.”
He nodded and resumed his forward-facing stance, his eyes staring into the middle distance. Standing there in that little alcove—which must have been built specifically for a statue—he was like part of a chessboard, the knight come to life.
Tracking the scent, she went down the hall toward her and Daniel’s bedroom, but thank God the blood wasn’t his—
The study was wide open, which wasn’t normal, and as Lydia closed in on the floor-to-ceiling aperture, the scent exploded in her nose.
Oh, God. C.P.
She spoke up. “Hello, is everything all right—”
Across the austere space, a door into a private half bath was thrown wide, and the red pool on the white marble floor gleamed in an evil way.
“No!”
She bolted across and swung around the doorjamb without entering because she didn’t want to step in the puddle. The toilet hadn’t been flushed, and the white bowl was bright—
“She’s okay.”
Lydia spun back. Daniel had entered the study, and the sight of him in his sweatshirt, with his jeans hanging off his hips, his feet bare, and his cane angled to support his weight, made her want to cry. As she ran to him, she was babbling all kinds of things, but then she was up against him and just trying not to faint.
“Is it the baby?” she mumbled into his shoulder.
“You knew?”
Lydia pulled back and nodded. “But it wasn’t my story to tell. I caught the change in her scent, and then I—I didn’t keep anything from you, I swear—”
“Shh. It’s okay.” He stroked her arms. “She’s medically stable. There was nothing anybody could—whoa, take a deep breath.”
Such good advice. That she tried to take. “She wanted that pregnancy. I am so sorry—where is she—”
“Upstairs.”
“Can I see her?”
“Yeah. No doubt she’d like that. It’s been… a helluva day.”
As his eyes searched her face, she knew what he was looking for, and shook her head. “He’s not going to help us. I saw him up there, and that asshole is not going to help us.”
Daniel’s jaw locked for a moment. “We’ll find another way. Somehow—”
“How can he be so cruel?” Releasing his shoulders, she tangled her fingers in her hair. “I don’t understand how anybody can be like that. He’s a monster, an absolute—”
Daniel urged her arms down. “Hey, hey, let’s move on from him. Just breathe with me, okay?”
Lydia nodded. Nodded some more. Then she replayed the exchange up on the mountain—and got stuck in a memory loop with the symphath’s sadistic detachment.
“You’re right,” she muttered. “We don’t ever need to see that man—male, whatever he is—again. But, God, I can’t get over how ruthless he is.”
Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing that bears repeating,” she shot back with strength. “I just hope he rots in hell—and you’re right, we’re going to have to help Gus on our own. We can find that Kurtis Joel guy ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, that might be a problem.” Daniel ran his hand over his skull a couple of times, like he was trying to rub his brain so it worked better. “I have no idea who the guy is, where he is—why he’s in the file system. The name appeared twice in the old FBG database, and it stood out to me because it was the only entry in the whole goddamn thing with no larger context. No detailed biography. No company ties. No notes. There were just two words, each time—‘apparatus occisio.’ ”
Lydia frowned. “Is that Latin?”
“Yup. ‘Killing machine.’ ”
She thought back to when she had first met Blade—and that enemy soldier had come out of nowhere. The thing hadn’t been human at all. And then she went back further, to the spring… when she and Daniel had been tracked through the woods by what she thought was a man, but hadn’t been. At all.
“The scene at Gus’s was totally clean,” Daniel said. “No hair, no fibers—and the blood was Gus’s only. That’s what made me think of the entries. A killing machine. It has to be what broke into the condo, and that database was maintained by Blade. He made the notations and he knows something—I can feel it.”