The Muscle

by Amy Lane

  But ever since that moment in the parking garage, when Josh had looked at Hunter with that pixieish face and that sober adult attention, he had, well….

  Roped him in, pretty much like the con man Josh had been raised to be.

  Hunter, still raw from the loss of Paulie and still bewildered as to what Ron Pinter had been involved in that could have resulted in such a disastrous consequence, had needed that calm, that leadership.

  Josh Salinger’s easy company and easy acceptance of a personal code of ethics—as opposed to one that was a little easier on the bureaucracy—had been the balm for Hunter’s soul. But he hadn’t sparked Hunter’s interest. Hunter might not have been in love with Paulie, but he’d been attached to him, and he didn’t trust easily. He’d been pretty sure that part of his life would take years to heal.

  And then Josh had introduced Hunter to his friends, including his best friend since grade school, Dylan Li.

  Grace.

  Grace, who was, even as Tabitha spoke, swaying slightly on the couch, his sinuous, ribbon-thin body always graceful, never still.

  Grace had driven Hunter absolutely batshit from that first meeting months ago. Every predator knew to keep still.

  Everything that moved as much as Grace was preparing to run.

  Grace was, in fact, prey.

  But wily prey. If Hunter had been on the job, he doubted he would have carried out a contract on Grace yet, because the man never quit moving.

  And the longer Hunter spent watching him ripple, stretch, pirouette, and vibrate his way from one side of the world to the other, the less Hunter thought he could have carried out a contract on Dylan Li period.

  That wasn’t the kind of predator Hunter felt like when he was around Grace.

  And now, as Hunter studied everybody in the room, he found his attention returning again and again to that lithe, dancing body. Grace’s shoulders were turned toward Tabitha, and his attention—always hard to pin down—only strayed every so often. Now and then his rippling hands made an abortive pass at her shoulder, her arm, or her hair.

  He wanted to pet her.

  He really cared for this girl. Not as a lover, obviously, but as a sister. As a friend. However, his attention was starting to spook her, particularly as she spoke about Sergei Kadjic and the increasingly impossible position the mobster was putting her grandfather in.

  “I think,” Danny said into the ruminative quiet, “that we’re going to need more information.”

  “You can’t help me?” Tabitha asked, her voice pitching on a wail that told Hunter she’d been at the breaking point, and if Grace’s offer of help didn’t pan out, she might well and truly snap.

  “Of course we can!” Danny told her, glancing around the room to make sure everybody was on board.

  Everybody was definitely on board. Hunter knew he, for one, was growing bored. Their last caper—or rather their first caper, the one that had reunited Felix and Danny after a ten-year separation—had been nearly two months earlier, and Chicago was not quite out of the volatile spring season that tended to put everybody’s teeth on edge.

  Hunter could swear the occasional hits of bright sunshine brought out the extra-rank BO in every man he passed. That must have been it, because he hadn’t gotten laid since… well, since Paulie.

  Either way, Hunter was pretty sure it was all Grace’s fault that nobody in the damned city smelled good enough to fuck except the dreamy, otherworldly man sitting on the couch, making his long-boned hands swim like otters through the air.

  Danny smiled at them all beatifically, as though thinking they were all the sweetest children, wanting to help their sister find a lost toy.

  Given Hunter had no idea how many laws they were about to break, he still couldn’t resist that tug of praise, of gentle approval, that Danny, Felix, and Julia seemed to emanate. It didn’t matter that he’d been raised by good heartland people who still liked hearing from him at Christmas but would never know much else about him. What mattered was that these people seemed to think he’d done a good job raising himself, and he was a valuable member of their team.

  He didn’t get it, and he wasn’t sure he ever would.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take one more hit of that gentle approval-flavored Kool-Aid and love it.

  “What do you have in mind, Uncle Danny?” Josh asked, his head cocked as though he were taking notes.

  “Well, some reconnaissance first,” Danny said thoughtfully, looking over his shoulder for Felix’s nod. Tall, blond, as noble as a lion, Felix Salinger ran a highly successful cable news network. But Hunter had seen him manipulate people like chess pieces and had to admit the guy, like Danny, had the heart and soul of a true con man. Danny turned his attention back to Tabitha, but not without first giving Felix a secret little smile that made Hunter’s chest ache.

  They were a little older than the rest of the crew—old enough for Felix to have claimed to have fathered Josh at an appallingly young age—but their love was apparently eternal.

  “So, darling,” Danny said, his voice dripping reassurance. “When is your grandfather’s next trip?”

  “Next week,” Tabitha whispered. “I know it’s got to be for Sergei because our show is so close to performance date. He’s not taking any dancers this time—there haven’t been traveling performances since his uncle died. But Grandfather is leaving us in the charge of an assistant director and the assistant choreographer right before showtime. It’s… he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t have to.”

  “Hm. Bad form to leave the cast and crew to themselves before opening night, isn’t it?” Danny frowned when Josh nodded the affirmative. “What kinds of threats is Sergei making to Artur to keep him toeing the line?”

  Tabitha swallowed and gave Grace a sideways look. “He’s threatening to set Grandfather up to take the fall. He’d be imprisoned, and the Conservatory would be shut down. I think… the way Sergei touched me that night….” She shuddered. “I think there’s been some innuendo about hurting me, and maybe some of the other dancers.” Her glance at Grace turned apologetic. “I was dancing so badly last night because Grandfather told me to tell you to watch your step. He was trying to laugh about it—don’t walk under ladders, stay away from black… cats….”

  She trailed off as the two house mascots came chasing into the downstairs den in a tumble of playful black fur.

  Abruptly she giggled.

  “Oops,” she said, her cheeks dimpling into a smile that Hunter could appreciate. He scooped up the dervish nearest himself and scratched it behind its ears. Cary Grant—the older cat who’d been Chuck’s originally but had been adopted by the house—drooped automatically into an ecstatic purr.

  Without a word, Hunter walked to the couch and dropped the creature into Tabitha’s lap. She cooed and started to rub the cat’s ears, and the cat—shameless attention whore that he was—went in for the whisker rub against her palm.

  Tabitha’s desperation, her tremulous voice, her fear, melted to manageable levels.

  “Thank you,” she said, her smile charming and poised. Probably her usual state.

  Hunter nodded, and she smiled up at Uncle Danny and continued.

  “So as I was saying, I think Grandfather wanted me to warn Dylan to be careful, but he didn’t want me to….” She bit her lip, then carried on. “He didn’t want me to say anything about Kadjic, because that could get him hurt—or arrested—and he didn’t see any way out.”

  Danny nodded. “Hm. Tabitha, does your grandfather ever take people on his trips, now that they’re no longer done under the cover of the dance troupe?”

  Tabitha thought about it. “Sometimes,” she said. “Last year he took me to Paris with him. He told me it was a last-minute trip, since we were on vacation and all, but he had to drop off a package at a hotel again. So I think he was making the best of a bad situation.”

  “Mm.” Danny chewed on his lower lip. “How’s young Dylan for this next show, my dear? I mean, really, how much
practice does he actually need?”

  Tabitha gave Grace a disgusted eye roll, and the snotty little shit actually preened. “He’s fine,” she muttered. “He could learn the show cold in a day and perform it flawlessly in a week. We’re eight weeks in. The hard part is keeping him interested enough to listen for his cues.”

  Grace gave a benign smile. “I’m a prodigy,” he said with no repentance.

  Hunter scowled at him, and Grace scowled back.

  “I am too!” Grace argued, as though that look had come with words attached.

  Hunter raised an eyebrow.

  “Fine! I’m being a brat. I’m just saying, I could probably miss a week to go do—” Grace looked at Danny. “—whatever it is you want me to do.”

  Danny’s smile held more than a tiny bit of Peter Pan mischief in it. “Oh, my dear boy. The things I could name.” Danny turned back to Tabitha. “Do you think if you asked, your grandfather could take Grace with him? It’s not entirely necessary, but we’re going to need Grace to… run some errands with our friends in the city, and it would help if he wasn’t constantly trying to hide the fact that he was there from Artur.”

  “But you don’t even know where he’s going!” Tabitha said, baffled.

  Very quietly, Molly started chanting, “Please let it be Paris. Please let it be Paris. Please let it be Paris!”

  Tabitha gave her an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry. It’s Vancouver. His cover story is that he wanted to check out the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and see if we could perform there.” She nodded as though this were of utmost importance. “It’s supposed to be very grand!”

  Alas, Molly was obviously disappointed. “Really? Our first chance to travel, and it’s to Vancouver?”

  “I love Vancouver!” Julia exclaimed. “Shopping, culture, theater—it’s all very urbane.”

  Molly gave her a suspicious look. “Vancouver?”

  “Oh yes. The food is to die for. You can eat out in downtown Vancouver every day of the year and still not visit the same place twice. And the stores! Granville Island, Gastown. There are some wonderful tiny souvenir shops and high-end fashion boutiques—”

  “Fashion boutiques,” Molly said quickly. She was currently wearing a gauzy forest-green skirt topped with a sleeveless jacquard vest in palest cream. With her riot of sunset hair—replete with a few ringlets dyed in mermaid blue—she looked like a bohemian fairy princess, and she’d designed all those clothes herself.

  “Vancouver is the cutting edge of the West Coast,” Julia told her, eyes twinkling, and while it may very well have been true, Hunter had to appreciate the way Julia helped smooth over Molly’s disappointment.

  “Vancouver,” Molly said, nodding as though she’d had ultimate confirmation. “We can go.”

  “So glad you approve,” Danny said blandly. He looked back to Tabitha. “So, do you think you could convince Artur to take Grace with him?”

  “Well, yes,” Tabitha said, looking around the room. It was almost as though she were trying to figure out what everybody was doing there. “I just don’t know why everybody else would want to—”

  Danny patted her hand. “Don’t worry, darling. There will only be a few of us—we need to see who is collecting these packages, right? And what’s in them.”

  “You can’t steal them!” she said, her voice panicked. “If the person on the receiving end doesn’t get their… their”—she waved her hands excitedly—“their whatever it is, Sergei’s going to be upset. There’s no telling what he’ll do!”

  “No, no, no, no,” Danny told her, his voice like butter. “Don’t worry, honey. Nobody will ever know we were there.”

  THERE WERE more questions after that—travel plans, Artur’s habits, places he liked to go when visiting another city. Danny tried to press Tabby on Sergei a bit more, but she hadn’t known anything, and Danny had moved on so quickly, she’d hardly noticed he’d tried. After another half hour, Tabitha drooped visibly, and Julia escorted her upstairs to rest in a guest room.

  Julia gave them all an arch look over her shoulder as they were leaving, and Hunter, who could speak fluent nonverbal, had no problem interpreting that to mean “Don’t you idiots make any permanent plans while I’m gone.”

  They disappeared, and the entire group—Hunter included—visibly relaxed. Grace and Danny both stood up and stretched, Grace doing something elaborate and showy that involved kissing his kneecaps because he could and Danny simply raising his hands above his head and reaching for the sky.

  Hunter’s eyes were on Grace, mostly, and the long, sinewy lines of his legs to his hips, from his hips to his shoulders. He moved like air, or like smoke, but Hunter had seen him in tight clothes—he knew the muscles that supported all that flexibility, and he wanted to touch them.

  But he didn’t want them to be gone the next morning.

  “Okay, children,” Danny said, moving toward the wet bar. “I will take suggestions and observations at this moment. What do you have for me?”

  “He’s been a mob mule for how long?” Chuck asked, voicing everybody’s question with his usual succinctness, and Hunter blinked hard, trying to snap his mind to the job.

  “We’ll have to ask Grace,” Felix said. “Grace, how old is the Conservatory?”

  “Mm… thirty years, I think.” Grace closed his eyes, stood straight, and then arched over backward and did a complicated ripple thing with his hands coming out from his chest. He straightened and reached for the sky, and Hunter found himself staring again.

  Dammit.

  Grace looked over his shoulder, toward Danny and away from Hunter, and Hunter found he could breathe—and concentrate on the job too, which was a definite plus.

  “So thirty years.” Danny blew out a breath. “Vlad Kadjic was… well, he was nothing like his nephews, that’s for certain. Andre may be an animal, but he’s got rules. I don’t know much about Sergei—but I’m expecting he’ll be worse than Andre. The ones on the bottom of those dung heaps often are.”

  “Will they expect Artur to be loyal?” Felix asked, hands casually in his pockets as he leaned against the bar. “And yes, I want orange juice too.”

  Danny got behind the wet bar and started scooping ice from a freezer underneath. “No, yes, and it doesn’t matter,” he answered, and Hunter could hear the rustle of rolled eyeballs go around the room. “Don’t look at me that way. What I’m saying is that no, Sergei won’t expect Artur to work for him out of loyalty, hence the veiled threat to Tabitha. Yes, he’ll expect the threat to Tabitha to work, and the threat to the Conservatory too, because these are things that Artur Mikkelnokov loves, and they are both particularly vulnerable. And it doesn’t matter, because he’ll either (a) work Artur to death because he doesn’t give two shits about him, or (b) have him killed because working people to death creates enemies but killing them outright creates silence and fear. No, Grace,” Danny added, dumping straight orange juice into two tall glasses, “it’s just as well your friend asked for help now. We’ve got some time before Sergei decides to start killing people and burning things down.”

  There was a collective shudder, and Hunter—who had always respected Danny—grew to respect him a little bit more for not sugarcoating things.

  Danny saw his regard and smiled, downing a swallow of orange juice. “Hunter, you have something to say?”

  Hunter nodded slowly, uncoiling from his position against the wall, remembering he was among friends—a thing he’d never really had before he met Josh Salinger, but one he was beginning to enjoy.

  “We need to know what they’re trafficking,” he said slowly. “Tabitha is right. It’s got to be more than precious gems or gold.” He narrowed his eyes at Danny. “How high up was Vlad Kadjic? Was he, I dunno, a big enough mobster to fund a coup?”

  Danny sucked air in through his teeth. “If you’re asking if he was into industrial espionage or spy work, I have no idea.” He bit his lip. “I expect Felix and I can do some digging.” He aimed a look at Stirling. “You woul
dn’t want to help when we need it, would you?”

  Stirling nodded, making eye contact with Danny and only Danny. “Sure. Anything else?”

  Felix turned to Stirling, keeping his voice low so the kid wouldn’t startle. “Talk to Tabitha and see if you can get a list of some of the places and dates Artur made deliveries. I know when I make a business trip, something happens in that vicinity within a day or two. It’s only in my field—broadcasting or communications—but there’s a ripple to my visit. Take a look at the timelines and figure out what ripples these little packages are leaving. And if you’re not done by the time they leave for Vancouver, be prepared to bring your little show on the road, because I have the feeling we’ll need you in Vancouver too.”

  Josh went to speak up. “But—”

  Hunter could see it, but only because he was standing across from Felix. Felix raised an eyebrow at his son, and Josh nodded. Ah, Felix would be addressing the obvious hole in the plan later.

  “So, what do Molly and I do?” Julia asked, coming down the stairs at a pretty good clip. She flashed a brilliant smile at Molly. “Besides shop.”

  Molly grinned back, but Hunter saw the yearning in her eyes. Molly and Stirling had been foster children together until their foster parents were killed in a yachting accident. Molly missed having parents, and lo and behold, Josh brought her and her brother home to a whole new set.

  Inside, Hunter wanted to sigh. He was too old and too prickly for new parents, but that didn’t mean he wanted to let his team down either.

  Chuck spoke next, his Texas drawl apparent in a few words. “So, Stirling and Josh on coms, Julia and Molly on surveillance, Grace is there to steal shit, and Hunter and me on for security?”

  Danny grimaced. “Could you flip for it?” he asked delicately. “I really don’t like leaving Tabitha here unprotected. If we could make you her driver, let you sleep in her grandfather’s house with her…. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would really love it if we had something in place in case Sergei decides to do more than threaten.”