Chapter 2

The Devil Who Smiles

Nolan left the terrace twenty minutes later with his pulse still refusing to behave and his cover, he suspected, dangerously close to compromised in ways that had nothing to do with security cameras.

Alistair Blackwood had not asked a single question that felt like an interrogation, and that was precisely what frightened Nolan most. A crude interrogation he could have handled in his sleep. Cassius had trained him against every known method of extracting truth from an unwilling subject, drugs, threats, seduction, exhaustion, all of it. Nobody had trained him for a man who simply looked at him with quiet, patient attention, as though Nolan were a painting worth studying rather than a mystery to solve, and let the silence do the work that questions usually did.

He needed to leave the building. Priya’s cover was blown, which meant security sweeps would only intensify, and every minute Nolan spent inside these walls increased the odds that someone would notice Etienne Marchetti’s credentials did not hold up to scrutiny. He took the private elevator down, thanked whatever god watched over careless spies that it deposited him near a stairwell rather than the lobby, and descended two flights before slipping through an unmarked door into the underground parking structure.

It was quiet down there, the fluorescent lights humming faintly, rows of cars gleaming under sterile white light, and Nolan’s footsteps echoed just loudly enough to make him wish he had worn softer shoes.

He heard the voices before he saw the men.

Three of them, positioned near a black sedan with tinted windows, and a fourth man on his knees between them, hands zip tied behind his back, blood already dripping from a split lip onto the concrete. Nolan’s instincts screamed at him to retreat, to find another exit, to become invisible the way he had been trained to become invisible since before he could tie his own shoes. But some traitorous, curious part of him, the part that had never quite learned to stop cataloguing danger even when danger had nothing to do with his mission, kept him rooted at the edge of the structural pillar he had ducked behind.

“You thought you could skim off my shipments,” said a voice, light, almost cheerful, utterly at odds with the scene it presided over, “and that I wouldn’t notice. That’s the part that actually offends me, you know. Not the stealing. Men steal. It’s practically a hobby down here. It’s that you thought I was stupid enough to miss it.”

The man crouching in front of the kneeling figure had messy black hair that fell across his forehead in a way that should have looked boyish and instead looked like a warning, emerald eyes bright with something that might have been amusement if it were not so clearly closer to hunger, and tattoos climbing up one forearm from wrist to shoulder, visible where he had rolled his sleeves with unhurried precision, as though preparing for something he intended to enjoy.

Lucein Blackwood.

Nolan had seen photographs. The photographs, again, had failed to capture something essential, the way violence seemed to live just beneath his skin, coiled and patient, ready to be let loose with the same casual ease other men used to loosen a tie.

“Please,” the kneeling man gasped, “please, I have a family, I have kids, I’ll pay it back, I’ll pay double, I swear to God!”

“God isn’t down here tonight,” Lucein said, and smiled, and it was the smile that undid Nolan more than anything else, because it was genuinely, terrifyingly warm, the smile of a man greeting an old friend rather than a man about to end a life. “Just me.”

Nolan should have left. Every rule he had ever been taught insisted that a witness to an execution had exactly two options, become invisible or become a body, and standing frozen behind a concrete pillar counted as neither. But his foot shifted against a stray piece of gravel, the smallest sound, barely audible even to his own trained ears, and Lucein’s head turned toward the sound with the swift, total focus of a predator that had just heard something interesting move in the grass.

“Who’s there?” Lucein’s voice had lost none of its lightness, which somehow made it worse. “Come on out. I don’t bite unless you ask nicely.”

Nolan had two seconds to decide, and he used every fraction of them. Running would confirm guilt and invite pursuit. Bluffing badly would end in a body bag. He stepped out from behind the pillar instead, hands loose and visible at his sides, and let his expression arrange itself into something between embarrassed and frightened, an expression that was not, this time, entirely manufactured.

“I’m so sorry,” Nolan said, voice pitched soft and unsteady, “I got lost looking for the valet stand, I didn’t mean to, I’ll just, I can go…”

Lucein’s eyes swept over him once, head to foot, and something in his expression sharpened, interest replacing suspicion with unsettling speed. “You’re from the gala.”

“Yes. I mean. I was.” Nolan let his gaze flick, deliberately, toward the kneeling, bleeding man, and back to Lucein, let a tremor into his voice that most men would read as pure fear and that was, in fact, mostly calculation. “I really didn’t see anything. I wasn’t, I don’t want any trouble, please.”

One of the other men, broader, scarred across one eyebrow, took a step forward, hand drifting toward his jacket. “Boss, we should stop.”

“Nobody asked you,” Lucein said, without heat, without even fully looking at the man, and something in his tone made the broader man freeze mid step. Lucein’s attention had already returned entirely to Nolan, studying him with the unhurried thoroughness of a man appraising something he had not expected to find in a parking garage on a Tuesday night. “What’s your name, pretty thing?”

“Etienne,” Nolan said. “Etienne Marchetti.”

“Etienne.” Lucein tasted the syllables like he was deciding whether he liked the flavor. “You’re a terrible liar, Etienne. Your pulse is visible in your throat and it’s not moving like a man who’s actually scared for his life. It’s moving like a man who’s thinking very fast.”

Nolan’s stomach dropped, a cold, precise plummet, because that observation was too accurate to have come from luck. But he kept his face steady, kept the tremor in his hands, because panic, real panic, was the only convincing response to being caught, and the moment he stopped performing fear was the moment he confirmed there had never been any fear to begin with.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”

Lucein studied him for a long, unbearable moment, long enough that the kneeling man’s ragged breathing became the loudest sound in the garage. Then, without warning, he laughed, a bright, delighted sound that echoed off the concrete and somehow made the scene more disturbing rather than less.

“You know what,” Lucein said, rising to his full height, brushing invisible dust from his knees with theatrical care, “I like you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the lying. I respect a good liar. Most people just aren’t very good at it.” He crossed the distance between them with unhurried, prowling steps, until he was close enough that Nolan could see flecks of gold scattered through the green of his eyes, close enough that Nolan’s pulse, already unsteady from an entirely different Blackwood twin twenty minutes earlier, kicked into something close to genuine alarm. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Etienne. You’re going to walk out of this garage, and you’re going to forget everything you saw here, because forgetting is the only thing that’s going to let you keep breathing. And I’m going to remember your face, because I don’t forget pretty things that lie to me well.”

“I understand,” Nolan said, and this time the tremor in his voice was almost entirely real.

Lucein reached out, and Nolan braced for violence, for a hand closing around his throat the way it had likely closed around a dozen others in this same garage. Instead Lucein’s fingers brushed, feather light, along his jaw, tilting his face slightly, studying him the way an artist studies a subject before the first stroke of paint touches canvas.

“Run along,” Lucein murmured, releasing him, stepping back with the casual ease of a man who knew exactly how much power he held and felt no need to prove it further. “I’ll find you again. I always find the things I decide I want.”

Nolan did not run, because running would have looked like exactly what it was, but he walked away faster than dignity strictly allowed, and it was not until he was three blocks from the building, safely folded into the back of an anonymous cab, that his hands finally began, faintly, to shake.

He had survived two encounters with the Blackwood twins in the span of thirty minutes. He had been marked, in different ways, by both of them.

And as his phone buzzed with an incoming message from Cassius, three words that made his blood freeze colder than anything Lucein Blackwood had said in that garage, Nolan understood, with sudden, sickening clarity, that surviving them was going to be the easiest part of what came next.

The message read: You were seen. Both of them. Explain.