Chapter Two

Klaus

The rain in the city always tasted like soot and copper.

I stood on the roof of the gallery building three blocks down from the Mandell gala, watching the swarm of red and blue police lights cut through the fog below. From this height, the chaos looked small. Pathetic. Like ants scattering after their hill had been kicked.

I pulled off my leather gloves, bone by bone, and tucked them into my coat. The encrypted comms unit on my tactical vest chimed twice. A private line.

I didn't answer right away. I pulled a cigarette from my pocket, struck a match against the damp brick wall, and cupped the flame against the wind. The tip flared amber, illuminating the scars across my knuckles before fading back into the dark.

I pressed the receiver behind my ear.

"Dominic," I said. My voice was a flat, low hum, stripped of the electronic rasp I used during work.

"Klaus," my handler’s voice cracked through the scrambled frequency. "We just got a high-priority ping from the Mandell network. Clifford himself called the emergency relay."

I took a slow drag of the cigarette, watching a convoy of black SUVs speed away from the gallery’s side entrance. "Did he?"

"Someone broke his perimeter tonight," she said. "Infiltrated the VIP wing, bypassed six armed guards, and cornered his daughter. Left a knife in a table and walked out. Clifford is terrified out of his mind. He's offering open ended capital for full spectrum protection."

My jaw tightened around the filter of the cigarette. The smoke sat heavy in my lungs.

"Is she injured?" I asked.

A beat of silence on the line. "The daughter? No. The report says the intruder didn't touch her skin. Just took off her mask and left a warning."

I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second. In my mind’s eye, I could still feel the fragile, frantic pulse beating beneath her warm skin when I held her wrist. I could still see the stubborn flame in her dark eyes right before she tried to split my skull open with a bronze perfume burner.

She hadn't screamed. She had swung.

She was as fierce as she had been the first time I saw her three years ago, standardizing her routine through my long range scope before I ever stepped foot into this godforsaken city. She didn't know I knew the pattern of her breath. She didn't know I knew she favored her left foot when she was tired, or that she hated the sound of thunder. She thought tonight was the first time our paths had crossed.

She didn't know I had been keeping her alive from the shadows long before her father realized he was drowning.

"He wants you specifically, Klaus," my handler continued, oblivious to the quiet war going on inside my chest. "He said he needs someone without a soul. Someone to act as her shadow 24/7 until he roots out the ghost from his past."

"Clifford Mandell is a coward," I said quietly, flicking the ash off my cigarette into the abyss of the alleyway below. "He built a palace on top of corpses, and now he's shocked that the ground is giving way."

"So you're declining?"

I looked down at my hand the same gloved hand that had pinned Anna Mandell against that marble table twenty minutes ago. The phantom imprint of her skin lingered against my palm like a brand.

Accepting this contract meant stepping directly into her world. It meant standing outside her bedroom door. It meant watching her up close, smelling the soft jasmine scent of her hair, hearing her voice and never, under any circumstances, letting her know the monster guarding her was the same monster who held the knife.

If I stayed in the dark, she remained safe from me. But if I didn't take the contract, Clifford would hire someone else. Someone who might miss a angle. Someone who might let her die.

That was a variable I could not permit.

"Tell Mandell I accept," I said, my tone dropping an octave, turning cold as iron. "On my terms. Total authority over her security detail. No interference from his men. No exceptions."

"He'll agree to anything right now, Klaus. When do you start?"

I dropped the cigarette onto the wet concrete and crushed it beneath the heavy sole of my boot.

"I'm already there," I whispered, and cut the line.