by Eva Chase
The Temptation of Four
Book 2 in the Moriarty’s Men series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2019
Copyright © 2019 Eva Chase
Cover design: Deranged Doctor Design
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-36-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-37-6
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Next in the Moriarty’s Men series
Claimed by Gods excerpt
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Chapter One
Jemma
Hidden by the velvety folds of the brocade curtain, I peered out my hotel room window. Shoppers and tourists strolled through the mid-morning sunlight along the road below. One of Zagreb’s bright blue trams whirred past. The glossy signs at street level, nearly as many of them in English as in Croatian, stood out against the aged stone that rose two or three stories above them.
The hotel rose taller still, but even from my sixth floor vantage point, I should have been able to recognize the men I was searching for if they’d been in view. I’d gotten to know Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Garrett Lestrade rather intimately during the time I’d spent with them in London weeks ago.
“Do you have eyes on them?” Bash asked. My right-hand man had gotten up from the table where we’d been enjoying a room service breakfast, his newspaper discarded. His fingers veered instinctively toward the pistol I knew he was wearing in a concealed holster at his hip.
“Not from here.” I drew back from the window. Honestly, I’d have been a little disappointed if the trio of London’s top criminal investigators had tracked me all this way only to carelessly reveal themselves that quickly.
They might not even realize I was in this hotel. The porter who’d called to warn me that an “old man” had come in asking about me had said the staff at the front desk had denied any knowledge. But that man had almost certainly been Sherlock in one of his elaborate disguises, and if anyone in the lobby had given a hint that they knew more than they were letting on, he’d have picked up on it.
I hadn’t exactly left the three of them in the lurch when I’d vanished from London, but I had lured them into committing a heist that would have cost them all their careers if they’d fumbled. And I’d told them plenty of lies along the way. After realizing that, they might not be in the friendliest mood toward me.
I turned to Bash. “There’s no way they could charge me with any crime they know of without revealing their own. They don’t even know you exist. So they don’t pose any real threat, as long as they keep out of my other business. I’m thinking we head off potential interruptions by finding out what exactly they want.”
Bash raised an eyebrow. Otherwise his tan face was as deadpan as usual. “It looks like giving them their evidence didn’t stop them from wanting revenge after all.”
I’d gone a little out of my way to ensure the trio didn’t end up embarrassed after the heist was over. At the time, I’d told Bash it was to protect myself. They’d gotten their man, even if he hadn’t actually committed the one crime I’d planted evidence of. Stefan Richter had been guilty of plenty of other indiscretions. If Sherlock and company had figured out his innocence in that one murder, they’d decided to let him hang for it anyway.
“Maybe they’d have caught up with us three weeks sooner if they’d been angrier,” I said. “And we might have had Richter’s people harassing us on top of that. Let’s go. You take the front, and I’ll take the back—we’ll meet up at Franjo’s. Watch from the back room?”
“Of course. I’ll be there before you walk in, Majesty.” Bash gave me a mock salute, swiped his hand over the black stubble of his hair, and headed out the door. With well-honed self-control, I avoided spending more than a second admiring the sculpted muscle of his backside.
I took more time than he had with my own preparations, pulling my thick red waves into a braid and covering my head with a gauzy scarf as if I wanted to hide it. The casual cotton dress I’d put on would work well enough.
When I’d given Bash a couple minutes’ head start, I slipped out into the hall and made for the staircase at the back of the building. If the trio suspected I was staying there, they’d be watching that exit.
In the alley, I let the warm spring breeze tug a strand of my hair from beneath the scarf and paused to put on a pair of sunglasses before I emerged. I hadn’t heard any definite signs of pursuit, but these three were better than that. My heart thumped at a pace that might have been slightly giddy as I wove through the streets to the pub Bash and I had been frequenting.
Franjo’s held an eclectic mix of styles and offerings. I stepped inside to exposed brick walls and a buoyant Europop song. The tables scattered throughout the middle of the room were old wood carved with a checkerboard pattern, but the bar on one side and the booths on the other shone with slick indigo laminate. The smell of pickles, barbeque wings, and fine wine mingled in the air.
I slid onto one of the padded booth benches in view of both the entrance and the black curtain that hung over the doorway to the back room. Franjo Junior, the grizzled son of the original Franjo who’d established the pub decades ago, nodded to me from behind the counter, where he acted as primary bartender as well as owner. Bash and I had gotten ourselves into his very good graces by handling an extortion racket that’d been breathing down his neck.
It always paid to make friends with the locals.
The waitress brought over my usual, a sidecar. It might have been early in the day for alcohol, but there was a little orange in it, and anyway, I deserved a drink. As invigorating as the prospect of tangling with the London trio again was, especially after the dull drudgery of the last six weeks, it was also a hassle.
Where had I slipped up to allow them to track me here? What the hell were they hoping to get out of following me?
I didn’t have to wait long for the opportunity to ask those questions directly. I’d just taken my first sip of the sidecar’s tangy sweetness when a stooped figure with shaggy gray hair came in. The man took a seat at the bar—not directly across from my booth but close enough that he could easily keep an eye on it—and ordered a local beer.
Sherlock truly was a master of disguise. I wasn’t completely sure it was him and not a regular getting started on his daily boozing until he dropped his napkin and reached down to pick it up, giving him the perfect excuse to steal a surreptitious glance my way. His long lithe fingers confirmed my suspicions. I restrained a smile, pretending to be
absorbed in my drink. When he’d gotten back on his stool, I ambled over with my glass.
“Hello, Sherlock,” I said, sliding onto the stool one over from him. “What a coincidence, bumping into you here.”
Sherlock’s hand tightened around his beer mug, just slightly. He rubbed his narrow face, his posture straightening to reach his full remarkable height, and suddenly it wasn’t so hard to see the man I knew within the disguise. His cool blue eyes studied me with their usual penetrating sharpness. He gave me a crooked smile.
“Hello, Jemma,” he said evenly. “I’m guessing it isn’t such a coincidence on either of our sides after all.”
“I’ll give credit where it’s due,” I said. “I don’t think I’d have seen through the disguise if I hadn’t been waiting for you.”
He made a dismissive sound that seemed to say he wasn’t going to be mollified in his failure and took a sip of his beer. His lips twisted with a grimace. Sherlock was more the brandy type.
I leaned back against the bar. “Should we invite John and Garrett in too? Make it a full reunion?”
“I think it’s probably best to keep the conversation simple. One-to-one.”
“All right. Let’s converse then. How did you track me to Zagreb?”
A hint of his earlier smile came back. “If I tell you that, you’ll know how to cover your tracks better next time.”
He did enjoy being able to hold his superior strategizing over a person. I set aside that question. I’d find out eventually if I needed to. “Fine. I assume you’ll at least tell me why you tracked me here. This is an awfully long way to come just to have a drink together.”
Sherlock turned toward me on his stool as if he could read my reactions better that way, which maybe he could. A whole lot went on in that admittedly brilliant mind of his that I couldn’t entirely follow. His thoughts and deductions moved in patterns different from my own. Which was part of what had made him so fascinating from the start.
“I’m surprised you’d even ask that,” he said. “Did you really think I wouldn’t realize how thoroughly you deceived us? It took less than a day for me to put the pieces together, in case you wondered.”
The corner of my lips quirked up. “Less than a day after I’d already left. Not less than a day after the scheme began.”
“Fair.” He nudged his beer mug but appeared to decide against trying to drink any more of it. “You pulled off a crime under our noses and escaped with the spoils. You couldn’t expect me to ignore that.”
I shrugged. “There isn’t much else you can do about it. You can’t even prove I did it in any way a court of law will accept.”
“I don’t understand why you did it at all.” His gaze searched mine even more intently than before. “That piece you took was valued at a few thousand dollars. Hardly worth the lengths you went to in order to obtain it. Unless you have some personal stake in it.”
The piece I’d taken was now part of a gold cuff, etched with mathematical patterns that were punctuated by perfectly symmetrical gemstones, currently wrapped around the middle of my right thigh as it had been since I’d snapped it into place right after the heist. Thinking about it, I had the urge to rub the spot on the back of my neck where the ghostly fiend I’d bartered my soul to years ago had marked me.
The gold cuff was the only thing keeping me out of that fiend’s maw. I’d made the deal with it for reasons Sherlock could never have understood. He’d never have believed the shrouded folk with their haunting visages and unsettling powers even existed.
“I can’t see that there’s any benefit in discussing that,” I said.
“How about something even more basic: who exactly are you?”
I brushed off the question with a wave of my hand. “The same answer applies.”
Sherlock didn’t look perturbed. “The benefit is that if I’m satisfied with your answers, I’ll go home. Whatever schemes you’re attempting to enact here, I assure you I can be very disruptive.”
I didn’t doubt it. “Hasn’t the greatest consulting detective in the world got better things to do with his time than dog one woman over a single theft you admit wasn’t that shocking in value?”
“No,” Sherlock said. “Because everything I know about you tells me it’s impossible you aren’t carrying out other schemes of one sort or another. The one I do know about involved at least one man’s death. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the greatest danger the world currently faces.”
Ha. Let me introduce him to the shrouded folk and see what he thought then. They ate his version of dangerous for breakfast. There was one still hoping to eat me.
“So, you’re going to follow me around until the end of time?” I said. “That sounds rather tedious.”
He gave me his first real smile of the conversation. “I’m counting on it being considerably more tedious for you than for me.”
He was very pleased with himself to have found me at all, wasn’t he? That would have been amusing to see if it hadn’t been equally annoying that he was here at all. I wet my lips, and Sherlock shifted an inch toward me. His voice dropped.
“Jemma, you’ll notice I didn’t say I’m sure you’re the greatest danger the world faces. The pieces of the puzzle I do have make me wonder if you weren’t in some kind of trouble back in London. Have you escaped it yet?”
A chill tickled over my skin, seeping deep enough to make my fingers itch for one of the sugar cubes I kept in my purse. He did notice more than any man had a right to. Did he think I’d turn to him for help if I needed it?
I pulled back and took a swallow of my drink. When I answered, I kept my voice as bland as possible.
“I can assure you that I’m perfectly fine.”
Right now, it wasn’t even a lie. Sherlock looked skeptical, though. “And how long can that last? One trinket won’t hold off a debt collector in perpetuity.”
It could if it was more than a simple trinket. But at that moment, the chill that had washed over me a moment ago condensed around my thigh—around the gold cuff. An icy tingling shot through my nerves from around the metal surface.
The cuff had set off that sensation a few times in the last couple weeks. I’d tried not to make much of it. This time the tingling quivered right up into my chest. I inhaled, and the scents of the pub turned frigid in my lungs. Cold fingers squeezed around my gut.
For an instant, everything inside me felt frozen, like the instant when I’d peeked out from my hiding place on that high plateau near the cult commune where I’d grown up and discovered what happened to kids like me. Kids who impressed the shrouded folk with their drive and their wildness year after year, spurred on by our parents to prove their loyalty to the creatures they worshipped. The “lucky” ones like that boy just a couple years older than me were chosen—chosen to be swallowed screaming into the fathomless mists of the creatures’ mouths.
His screams had gone on for the longest time after he’d disappeared down the shrouded one’s gullet, growing fainter as if spiraling into the distance, with hitches and tremors that suggested something inside the fiend was ripping him apart piece by tiny piece. It was the most horrible sound I’d ever heard then or since.
“Jemma?” Sherlock said.
I wrenched myself back to the present. The icy tingling had faded, and the world’s most brilliant detective was watching me with eyes that saw too much. I shook off the last of the chill and gathered my ample composure.
“I’m fine,” I said, “and I expect to remain fine for the foreseeable future. I don’t owe any debts.” That deserved to be paid, at least.
Maybe it was time to turn this scenario more in my favor. My trio was here and insistent on staying. Why shouldn’t I make use of them?
Chapter Two
Garrett
Normally I found John’s easy-going demeanor much more enjoyable to be around than Sherlock’s arrogant intensity. But as we waited, watching the pub the consulting detective had headed into after Jemma, the doctor’s apparen
t lack of concern was becoming incredibly irritating.
“I wonder why Croatia?” he said in an offhand way, swiveling the handle of his walking stick where we were standing a little back from the front window of an electronics shop.
Of the questions I’d like answers to, that was pretty far down the list.
I shoved my hands in my pockets to stop them from fidgeting. I’d have taken out my notepad and jotted down observations of the road if that wouldn’t have made it even more obvious to the store’s staff that we weren’t actually browsing their merchandise. It was a good thing they were mostly occupied with the soccer game showing on one of their display TVs. Cheers echoed through the speakers as someone must have scored a goal.
“Why London?” I said. “Why Richter? Why string us along?”
John shrugged. “She wanted to get that relic for whatever reason. Maybe we should be flattered that she decided we were her best chance at getting to it.”
“That’s assuming she picked us because of our skills and not our gullibility,” I muttered, although to be fair, no one I was aware of had ever accused Sherlock of being gullible.
She’d pulled the wool over my eyes easily enough. I’d been starting to care about her, to think about how I might arrange to see her again.
And now she was sitting less than a hundred feet away, doing God knew what. The restless tremor that ran through me carried a jumble of emotions with it. I wanted to see her. I wanted to touch her again. I wanted to demand an explanation for why she’d done it and have her make some kind of amends. I wanted to never have met her in the first place.
