Den of Mercenaries [Volume Two]

by London Miller

  Synek had only just closed his eyes, willing his body to stop shaking long enough to doze off, when he heard the rustle of feet crunching on the icy sidewalk.

  He couldn’t be sure, now or later, why he’d opened his eyes and leaned far enough out of his hiding spot to see who lurked at the mouth of the alley. It wasn’t as if he liked people very much, or the recoil they often got once they caught sight of him.

  But he was alone, in the dead of winter, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to just disappear into the shadows.

  Synek wanted to be seen.

  He couldn’t see much at first, just the vague impression of a man as wide as he was tall and someone else walking alongside him. A girl, he realized, when he saw dark hair fluttering in the wind behind her.

  Until she stepped underneath the streetlight, he couldn’t make out any of her features, but once she was there, he could better see her face. Her eyes were wide and heavily lashed, her lips a shade under plump.

  But pretty, Synek thought as he looked at her. She was pretty.

  In his desire to get a better look at her, he knocked over a glass bottle, the ensuing sound making him cringe as he rushed to pick it up and taper off the noise. But it was too late, he already had her attention.

  Instead of shying away, she peered through the darkness, searching for the source until she laid eyes on him. Surprisingly, her eyes widened in delight.

  The man she was with—her father, he presumed—didn’t bat a lash as she started down the alley toward him, too engrossed in the conversation he was having on his mobile.

  “Don’t be scared,” the girl said as she neared, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He found it odd that she would assume she would be the one to hurt him rather than the other way around. He was the one living in the grubby alley, after all. He was a boy, and she was a girl, and he knew, far too well how to hurt someone if he needed to.

  His time on the streets might have been short, but he’d learned to act quickly.

  And one thing he’d learned in all his time here was that sometimes, it didn’t matter if he posed a threat or not—most reacted as if he did.

  “Daddy, look!” the girl exclaimed, pointing a finger at him even as she looked back at her father.

  “We don’t take home strays,” the man said, barely sparing Synek a glance.

  Not that he minded.

  “But it’s cold!” the girl said with a stomp of her foot, clearly not used to being denied something she wanted.

  Synek didn’t understand why it mattered to her so much. He was nothing, no one, yet there she stood, going back and forth with her father about the dirty throwaway boy sleeping in the trash.

  “I’ll make sure he’s not any trouble,” the girl said, trying again. “He’ll be good, I promise.”

  The man let out a long-suffering sigh, one that spoke of past arguments won by the girl across from him. “First sign of trouble and his ass is out.”

  The girl smiled brightly at him before crossing the short distance where Synek was still sitting. “Come on,” she said in a soft voice as if she were talking to a wounded animal. “I’ll make sure you get food and water.”

  A part of him screamed that he should stay where he was and decline her offer, but instead, the allure of a warm bed and hot food had him stumbling to his feet.

  The girl smiled wider as she patted the top of his head. “We’re going to have so much fun.”

  Synek couldn’t muster a smile.

  Chapter 6

  Under the shade of a giant oak tree, Iris could pretend she wasn’t thinking about Synek while she stared through a pair of opaque sunglasses at the man sitting on the balcony of the nearby cafe.

  The man didn’t realize he was the subject of her attention. He merely sat happy and oblivious as he waited.

  It would be easy, too easy, to take the gun she kept in her glove compartment and end this once and for all, but a quick death would be too good for him, and justice, the most important aspect of the revenge she sought, wouldn’t be meted out if he died.

  Her father’s legacy would still be tarnished because of him.

  There was also the chance that other victims were out there—that he had done this to other families—families too afraid to speak out against a man in power.

  Because it was hard enough to present accusations against a normal man. It was something else altogether when you were accusing the sitting governor.

  She couldn’t deny them their chance at the truth, even if it only made what she needed to do that much harder.

  But nothing good ever came without hard work, so despite wanting to see him rot in the ground, Iris left her gun where it was and waited.

  Instead, she sat alone in her car, staring up at the balcony until she needed to grab her binoculars. The man sat at one of the outdoor tables. One of his security buffoons looked terribly out of place in the clean-cut suit with the spiral wire behind his ear.

  It was going on seven in the morning, but a glass of something auburn was set down on the table beside the man by a passing waiter, minutes before his companion appeared in a flurry of blue silk.

  She couldn’t have been much older than Iris herself, though it could be argued that she looked even younger with the way her clear glowing skin was done up with the barest traces of makeup, and her hair shone in the early morning sunlight.

  Iris watched for a moment, seeing the delicate but intimate kiss they laid on each other’s cheeks, the almost subtle way his hand rested too low on her hip to suggest anything innocent before she pulled out her camera. Before they had a chance to pull apart, Iris snapped a photo.

  Unfortunately, Iris didn’t have the equipment to hear what they were saying from her vantage point, so pictures would have to do. While she had been tailing him for over a year now, Iris hadn’t been able to get close enough yet to get any audio recordings, and the equipment she needed to do it long range was a bit out of her price range.

  They didn’t seem to mind that they weren’t alone. A couple on the right side of them was too engrossed in their meal to notice them—and undoubtedly probably didn’t recognize the governor at all—and another man sat alone at another table, his strawberry-blond hair impeccably styled.

  An hour passed before the breakfast date ended with the man sliding a powder blue box from the breast pocket of his jacket, complete with a white ribbon wrapped around it.

  Through the lens of the camera, Iris watched the woman smile and gush, a hand resting delicately above the swell of her breasts as she accepted the gift and carefully unpackaged it to reveal the single solitaire resting on a silver chain.

  The man wasted no time in getting out of his chair and circling around to drape the necklace around her neck as she lifted her hair. It winked at the hollow of her throat, as beautiful and delicate as the woman wearing it.

  Did she know she was in the company of a monster?

  Did she know she could very well be an unfortunate casualty when Iris brought him down?

  Would it really matter in the end if she did or didn’t?

  Waiting until they’d left the cafe—the man in his chauffeured car with government plates, and the girl in a sporty red Mustang—Iris tucked her camera away and headed home.

  She grabbed a bite to eat on her way back home—her stomach protesting the lack of food since she’d been up for six hours already.

  Located on the third floor of a six-floor walkup, her apartment was nothing to write home about. Situated behind a late-hour Chinese restaurant, it wasn’t prime real estate by any stretch of the imagination, but it was good enough as a temporary place, and it was far enough outside of Wraith territory that it wouldn’t be easy to find if they came looking for her.

  Inside her apartment, she made a plate of food before carrying it with her into her makeshift office on the right side of the apartment before toeing off her boots and leaving them where they sat in the middle of the floor.

  By t
he time she sat at her desk, the first hundred or so photographs were waiting for her to go through.

  The first dozen was all familiar, set aside into a folder for later perusal, but as she flipped through them, she noticed someone at the edge of the camera’s frame—a man she’d only briefly noticed while she was there.

  He was impeccably dressed—in a dark suit and maroon-colored tie with a pair of Ray-bans shielding his eyes—and though he was dining alone, something about the way he sat gave the illusion that he was comfortable while also alert.

  His table was adjacent to the governor’s, and even the way his chair was placed gave the impression that he wasn’t just at any table—he’d picked this one for a reason.

  Nothing in particular stood out about him. He was attractive, sure, but so were dozens of others who called New York home. His suit was expertly tailored, but again, in one of the fashion capitals of the world, that wasn’t too surprising. But something about him Iris couldn’t quite put her finger on made her zoom in to get a better look at his face.

  Now, as she scrolled, she paid less attention to the governor and his companion and more to the man who had been covertly watching them.

  Who was he?

  She snapped a screenshot of his face, setting it aside to run through the facial recognition software she frequently used when she went after a target, but as she finished going through the last of the images, the last one made her hesitate.

  Instead of looking at the governor, the mysterious man seemed to be looking at her.

  * * *

  There were three things in the world Winter Banes loved above all else—hacking, Răzvan Petri, and Synek.

  The latter probably should have claimed the top two spots on that list—though, to be fair, Răzvan did bounce between number one and number two—but hacking was easier to love. It was a learned skill. An effortless task that didn’t stress her out and make her wonder why she’d ever thought to take it up as a profession.

  Nothing was effortless about loving men—they were too much damn work and could be more moody than any female she knew.

  Case in point, Winter was on day two of trying to reach Synek since she’d come back to New York, and so far, nothing. He hadn’t responded to a single text or even bothered to return one of more than a dozen phone calls she’d made in the past forty-eight hours.

  Worse, she hadn’t even been able to leave a voicemail because his “mailbox has not been set up yet.”

  Had it been any of the other mercenaries of the Den, she might leave them be, but because it was Synek—and she knew him better than he probably knew himself—she couldn’t just leave him to his own devices.

  Bad shit happened when he was left on his own too long—especially when he wasn’t in his best frame of mind.

  “It’s like he’s trying to give me an ulcer,” she mumbled to herself. Rubbing her forehead, she wished there was just one less thing she had to worry about, considering all the pressure she was under.

  Besides her work with the Kingmaker—which was exhausting even without his need to start a war with his ex-girlfriend, or whatever the hell Belladonna was—she was also trying to navigate a new relationship with a man she loved who suffered from night terrors brought on by a hellish life spent in an orphanage.

  His brothers—the other three members of the Wild Bunch—pretended it wasn’t happening. That they didn’t see the horror inside him when he slept. They all had their own demons to work through, so it was hard to try to help another get past theirs, but she was sure if she could get to the root of Răzvan’s night terrors, she might be able to bring him some peace.

  And maybe she’d even figure out a way to help the others.

  Which equaled spending her every waking moment when she wasn’t working for the Kingmaker looking for an unsanctioned orphanage in buttfuck nowhere Romania with hardly any information at all to go on.

  Now was not the time for Synek to disappear without a word.

  Times were supposed to be simple now. Synek was supposed to be out in the world without having to worry about her, but things between them had never been simple by any means.

  Their relationship had always been, for lack of a better word, complicated.

  For years, they’d been yin and yang.

  He’d been her protector and confidante—the one person she could turn to if she ever needed someone. If she was sick, he would move heaven and earth to make her better. If she was in pain, God help the person who hurt her in any way because he would make them hurt in ways she didn’t even want to think about.

  That was how it had always been—until Răzvan.

  Until she had fallen in love with someone else, even if that love hadn’t been the same.

  Sometimes, she didn’t think Synek understood the difference—or that it was possible to love more than one person. It had always been just them, after all, and though she had never voiced the thought to him, she had always wondered whether she was the only person in the world who had loved him.

  Even now, she thought about the last time she’d seen him before they met up in California and his parting words.

  I’ll never love anyone the way I love you.

  Winter had never wanted that for them.

  She’d hoped with a little time, he would get used to the idea of her and Răzvan being together, but she hadn’t realized how badly she wanted that to happen now rather than later.

  While it had only been a week or so since she’d last seen him, that was still too long without having heard anything from him. She tried not to let it bother her, but she was losing sleep over it.

  Which was why, for the past hour, she had sat with her feet propped up on the table, her laptop resting on her thighs as she brought up the tracking app she had installed on not just Synek’s phone, but on majority of the tech the mercenaries owned—a little secret she’d never told them.

  They were finicky when it came to their privacy.

  None of them—especially Synek—liked their whereabouts monitored, but she wasn’t going to let any one of them disappear again without her being able to find them. But no matter which number of his she typed in, nothing came back.

  There wasn’t even a blinking cursor that showed the phone was one, and when she tried to turn it on remotely, nothing happened.

  Thinking it might have been her software malfunctioning, she typed in Red’s phone number, just to check, and within seconds, his icon popped up in Brooklyn, so the tracker had to be working fine.

  Was Synek ignoring her?

  Even if he didn’t know exactly what she was doing, he still knew that she could locate people through the GPS on their phones. There was a chance he had turned it off in an attempt to prevent her from finding him.

  But what if he hadn’t …

  Dragging her fingers through her silver hair, Winter set the laptop aside and got to her feet, heading to the kitchen to give herself a chance to think. Her mind was spinning with possibilities, and the last thing she wanted was to panic when there was no reason to.

  Grabbing one of Răzvan’s bottles of Gatorade—then another when she heard him coming down the stairs—she turned to face him as he rounded the corner, a hand towel tossed over his bare shoulder.

  His hair glistened with sweat, the dark strands thick and shoved back out of his face.

  Even now, after months of getting used to the sight of it, she tried not to smile and barely resisted the temptation to run her fingers through it, though she was always careful not to accidentally pull on it.

  For years, he’d worn his hair tapered close, having spent years with kids and adults alike who liked to tug on it and make him cry, but now, he was gradually letting it grow back.

  All because she’d been curious what he looked like with hair.

  He might have towered over her and had the muscle mass of a heavyweight MMA fighter, but Răzvan was a sweetheart.

  “Good workout?” she asked, shamelessly looking him over, taking ridiculous satis
faction in the knowledge that she got to keep him all to herself.

  He gave her an amused smile, still not used to compliments she showered him with.

  —You should come up with me next time.—

  “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I give up tacos, Răz. The only workout I need is with a keyboard.”

  Besides, the last time she’d ventured into his gym upstairs, he’d tried to kill her with the number of crunches he’d wanted her to do.

  No thanks.

  His shoulders shook with laughter as he pressed a kiss to her forehead, reminding her why she loved him endlessly. — What’s bothering you?—

  “What makes you think something’s bothering me?” she asked, even as she turned away to head back to her laptop.

  It didn’t make much of a difference. He could read her without trying.

  Whether it was something as trivial as a broken nail or a stud missing from her favorite Jeffrey Campbell Lolita boots, he wanted to know why she was so upset so he could fix it.

  Even as she sat back on the couch, there was no escaping Răzvan and his inquiry, but while Synek had been on her mind constantly over the past week, she had never mentioned it to him.

  To say the pair of them didn’t get along was putting it mildly. There was the little fact that Synek hadn’t just tried to kill him once—courtesy of three bullets in his bulletproof vest—not twice—this time with a knife pressed against his jugular—but three times, the last of which she hadn’t been privy to since it had all gone down in the Hall.

  Considering she and Synek had both worked for the Kingmaker, and Răzvan worked for the Kingmaker’s brother, Nix, the two were bound to cross paths eventually, but she didn’t want to fan the flames.

  Răzvan came around, sitting across from her on the table, and shut her laptop before she could get her hands on it. —Tell me, or I’ll make you tell me.—

  “Sexually?” she asked, a little hopeful.

  That managed to get half a smile out of him, which meant she wasn’t entirely wrong.

  —You know what I mean.—