by Bec McMaster
Gemma trailed Malloryn up the stairs toward the training room, where the sounds of grunts and blows echoed.
Inside the room, Byrnes, Kincaid, and Charlie looked like they'd been busy beating the stuffing out of each other.
Byrnes appeared to have been doing most of the beating. Since his transformation into a dhampir two months ago, the color had begun to drain out of his skin and hair, thanks to the Fade, and while he'd been dangerously fast and lethal as a blue blood, now he was incomparable.
Kincaid, a newly infected blue blood with a mechanical arm, was still getting used to the changes to his body and his increased bloodlust. He and Charlie circled Byrnes, fists held up defensively, as Byrnes lashed out with a sudden high kick that almost took Charlie's head off his shoulders. Charlie ducked, slapping the blow aside, as Kincaid slammed his fists down on Byrnes's back.
Or where Byrnes had just been.
Byrnes spun low, sweeping Kincaid's feet out from under him, and then straightened abruptly, slamming the flat of his palm into Charlie's chest.
The pair of them hit the training mats, and Kincaid stayed there, cursing under his breath. Charlie flipped to his feet, his blue eyes twinkling as he noticed the pair of them in the door.
"Gemma. Malloryn." He winced. "Just in time to see Byrnes hand us a thrashing."
Byrnes scrubbed his mouth, showing no hint of surprise. No doubt he'd heard them coming up the stairs with his exquisite hearing. "You almost had me that one time."
"Once." Kincaid groaned, and found his feet with a flexibility he hadn't owned last month. There was no sign of the mechanical leg braces he'd once worn. "You were being generous."
"Where are the others?" Malloryn asked.
"Ava and Jack are in the laboratory downstairs, tinkering with Jack's next project," Charlie said promptly. "Ingrid's reading a book, and I'm not certain where the baroness is."
"Probably avoiding Malloryn," Byrnes muttered sotto voce.
"I beg your pardon?" Malloryn shot him a sharp look.
"Nothing." Innocent did not become Byrnes.
"Tsk, tsk," Gemma chided, filling the sudden tense silence in a rush. The duke was getting married within a week, and betting odds had reached fever pitch as to whether he was going to get the bride to the altar or not. But not all the Rogues were enjoying the lead-up to Malloryn's wedding. "If I were the ladies, I know where I'd be."
She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Everybody suddenly reached for their shirts.
"Herbert, can you fetch the baroness?" Malloryn threw over his shoulder. "Tell her to be in my study in five minutes, then send for tea."
"At once, sir." Herbert vanished.
"Perhaps you can solve a problem for us, Your Grace," Charlie called.
"Yes?"
"Let's say the three of us were discussing who the most dangerous rogue in the Company of Rogues is," Charlie said, with an impish smile as he hauled his shirt over his head. "Now Kincaid is a blue blood and Byrnes is dhampir, it's upset the ranking a little. We're trying to sort out who fits where."
Malloryn blinked. "Who fits where on what? A scale of which one of us is the Most Dangerous Rogue in the Company of Rogues?"
Men. Gemma rolled her eyes, though she couldn't help looking to Malloryn to see what his answer would be.
He abhorred wasting time, but she'd seen him start to warm to the rest of the Rogues in the past couple of months. Sometimes he needed a bit of lighthearted banter in his life.
"I already know the answer to that question," he replied, slapping the file he'd been carrying on the table. "I don't need to guess."
"My vote's for Byrnes," Charlie explained. "Presuming all goes wrong and Byrnes loses control of his inner dhampir, I think he's the most dangerous. He's faster than us now, and stronger. Impervious to most wounds."
"My vote"—Kincaid crossed his arms over his chest—"is you. You destroyed Charlie and me in the ring last month. Barely even broke a bloody sweat. I think you could handle Byrnes."
"The question isn't, can I handle him." Malloryn snorted. "If Byrnes ever slipped his leash, then I wouldn't go after him myself. It's a ridiculous assumption."
A Malloryn answer to a T.
"And you're all looking at this all wrong," Gemma added, unscrewing the lid on the flask of blood at her hip. "All three of you look at strength literally. You should be thinking of strengths and weaknesses. Vulnerabilities. You're asking who the most dangerous Rogue is; not who the strongest one is. So sorry, Kincaid, you're out of the running."
The man could probably lift a carriage by himself, and with his mech arm a single blow from him could smash ribs, but he was nowhere near the top of her list.
"Byrnes isn't, either. He has a ruthless edge Kincaid lacks, but we have a major trump card against him. If Byrnes gives in to his dark side, then Malloryn would send Ingrid in to bring him down," Gemma replied, sipping her blood. "Byrnes has three major weaknesses; his wife, sunlight, and the Black Vein serum. If you want to take him down without damage, you send in Ingrid to bring him to his knees. He's physically incapable of hurting his wife, and she'll have motivation enough to bring him down any way she can—except dead. If you want him dead, then you take a sniper dartgun and sit in wait where he'll least expect it, and use the serum against him. If you want to escape him, you'd better hope the sun is shining brightly, thanks to his newly acquired dhampir weaknesses."
Or you created an ultraviolet incandescent illuminator to use against him, but nobody technically needed to know about that—and Jack hadn't quite gotten the prototype she'd requested right yet.
Because Byrnes wasn't the only dhampir out there.
Just the only one who was working on their side.
"But where does everyone else fit?" Kincaid demanded.
Because the size of ones balls is important.
"Easy. From least dangerous to most dangerous; Ava, Jack, Kincaid, Charlie, Isabella, Byrnes, Ingrid, Herbert—for you're all forgetting dear Herbert—and then Malloryn at the top," she replied.
"Herbert?" Kincaid blurted. "The butler?"
"You think he's a butler?" Incredible. "That's why you're down at the bottom of the list. You'd be dead before you even noticed where the threat was coming from."
"Charlie's above me!" he protested.
"Charlie's had the benefit of learning how to fight under the Devil of Whitechapel," she said with a shrug. "I've seen him with a cutthroat razor. And he's faster than you. Besides, when you fight, you fight to put a man down. You're a pugilist at heart. Not a killer."
"Hence," Malloryn said with no small amount of amusement as she decimated them, "why Gemma is at the top of my list. If, for some godforsaken reason, the Company of Rogues start fighting among themselves, my money's on Gemma taking you all down."
The three of them turned to look at her.
She smiled sweetly and merely sipped her flask.
"So who wins between you and Malloryn?" Byrnes’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Hypothetically?"
"Malloryn."
"Gemma."
They spoke at the same time, and then looked at each other.
"You're right," Malloryn said to Kincaid. "I wiped the floor with both you and Charlie last month. Who do you think taught me to fight?" He gestured toward her in an extravagant hand wave. "Gemma has skills none of you can ever dream of owning. Myself included."
Which was a polite way of saying she'd spent most of her formative years training to be an assassin.
A small knot formed deep inside her. "And yet, you're my equal now in the ring."
"Tell me you haven't thought about how to take me down, if such a thing was required," he said dryly.
Have a plan to kill everyone in the room. It was the first thing Lord Balfour's Falcons had taught her as a little girl. She shrugged uneasily. Hard to break small habits. "You don't think I'm actually going to tell you how I'd go about it?"
Malloryn shared a small smile with her. "Worth a shot."
> "And you don't think I presume you haven't worked out how to take me down in return? If the pair of us went to war, you win. When it comes to pulling the trigger on you, I hesitate. You don't."
Trained as an assassin or not.
She'd never truly had the gift for killing.
Especially not friends.
"I seem to recall a different story."
"Five years ago," she said pointedly, knowing he was stirring up the past to put her on edge. Malloryn simply couldn't help playing games; but she could play them too. "You're a far more ruthless man than you ever were, Auvry. Now? I think you'd pull that trigger now."
Malloryn looked vaguely uncomfortable.
"What happened five years ago?" Charlie asked.
Gemma screwed the lid back on her flask and sucked in a small breath as she steadied her sudden nerves. Russia happened. "Malloryn didn't pull the trigger. He let me live."
And then he saved my life.
"You two were on opposing sides?"
Every face in the room suddenly sharpened at Charlie's question.
"No." Her voice didn't so much as quaver as she looked up and met the duke's eyes. "I was working for Malloryn, I just wasn't following orders. I decided to protect a target he wanted dead."
"An enemy agent who was about to fracture my plans to tear down an entire alliance."
Her lips pressed together.
Dmitri was more than that to me.
But it was all a lie.
And so, she didn't argue.
"Malloryn had one shot at him, but he couldn't pull the trigger because I was between them. You say I let love ruin me, but you used to have a heart too, Auvry. It was the only weakness you potentially had. Now? I think you'd take that shot." She'd seen the darkness stirring in him throughout the revolution, and the lengths he'd gone to in order to defeat Lord Balfour and ruin the prince consort. The man that came out on the other side wasn't the same one who'd gone into that fight. "So if it comes down to Malloryn and me? King takes queen," she conceded.
"You might be surprised," Malloryn replied tautly, the pinched expression about his nose showing how closely her arrow had struck.
"It's a good thing we'll never have to find out," she replied, gracing the room with a false smile. "Problem solved?"
"Well, I'm convinced," Byrnes replied, scratching his jaw. "As cold as my blood runs at times, it's a little unnerving to watch the pair of you debate murder over a flask of blood as if you're discussing the weather."
Kincaid scowled. "Agreed."
Charlie shrugged.
"It's the important questions in life," she replied, and finally gave in to the urge to roll her eyes.
"Now... do you think we can discuss actual business?" Malloryn demanded. "As enlightening as this little discussion was, the Company of Rogues has a new problem. Someone has just murdered the most dangerous assassin that's ever graced the Echelon in the exact same way he used to murder others. We know how he was killed. We don't know how his killer got in. Or who it is."
He slapped the file against his thigh.
"And... I have a credible report stating his next target is the queen."
Gemma looked at him sharply. Playing his cards close to his chest, indeed. "It is?"
No wonder he'd been out of sorts.
Chapter 4
"They called him the Chameleon," Malloryn explained, once all the Rogues—besides Ava and Jack—had assembled in his study. "A master of disguise who could kill any target, no matter how high profile or guarded. He was an assassin who plagued the Echelon in the years before the revolution, and he was caught the day the prince consort was overthrown. Or so we thought."
"Intriguing statement," Byrnes mused, his glacial eyes lighting up with glee. "Or so we thought."
Gemma settled into her usual armchair between Baroness Schröder and Charlie. "Of course you'd be interested."
Byrnes smiled a devious smile. He never could resist a challenging case. "It's been a boring month. Malloryn's had me confined to the house while we waited to see how my transformation would affect me."
For years blue bloods had feared the Fade—the end stage of the craving virus, when all the color drained out of their skin and hair and they began to transform into a bloodthirsty vampire that would slaughter anything and everything that moved. However, the Company of Rogues had recently discovered there was one other course of transmutation for a blue blood. Using the elixir vitae, a closely guarded secret serum, blue bloods could become dhampir instead. As fast as a vampire, with the same weakness to sunlight, but retaining their mental faculties.
"Tell me more about this Chameleon," Byrnes purred.
"Fifteen assassinations over the course of five years," Malloryn replied, tossing a file across the polished mahogany table toward Byrnes. "Gemma? You know the facts best."
"His most high-profile kill was Lady Harrenhall," Gemma said, pushing to her feet and standing next to Malloryn, "and several of his previous assassinations happened to be the prince consort's enemies. His last kill, Lord Randall, was the one anomaly to the pattern. Randall was a trusted cousin of the prince consort who was working on his behalf to forge an alliance with the blue bloods of the Russian court. They played golf together. He was murdered the same day of the revolution and his killer apprehended on the spot, though he refused to confess and claimed he had no recollection of killing Randall."
"You believe this Chameleon worked for the prince consort?" Ingrid asked.
"We suspect he had to be connected to the prince consort in some way, as there are too many coincidental deaths among the prince consort's enemies."
"He?" Byrnes asked, pouring a brandy for Ingrid. "If you don't know who it is, then how can you presume?"
"Because we have several witnesses and every single one of them describes a different man. Old, young, bearded, clean-shaven, brown hair, blond, tall, short.... He was a master of disguise. There is no distinguishing characteristic beyond his calling cards; the King of Diamonds card is usually planted on the victim's body; a diamond is engraved on the casing of the bullet used to kill; and there's nowhere he can't get into, no one he can't kill."
"He wants to be known," Charlie mused.
"He's proud of his work," Byrnes added.
"And the man you thought was the Chameleon?" Ingrid mused, sipping her brandy. "I presume there's a reason we're discussing this case now."
The baroness rounded the table toward the opaque projector at the far end and removed one of the caps so the screen on the wall at the opposite end of the table suddenly lit up.
"As Malloryn said, we thought we'd captured him three years ago," the baroness said. The projector flashed as she slid a small slide into place, and a photograph of a man with a neatly trimmed mustache flashed up on the wall.
Malloryn stared at the image. "Jonathan Carlyle. The man we thought to be the Chameleon. Carlyle was serving as Lord Randall's footman—a new posting for him—when he put a pistol to Carlyle's head and pulled the trigger. Gemma brought him in. Since then, he's been locked away in Thorne Tower and the queen's best questioners have been working on him to discover whom he worked for. For three years he's pled his innocence, and he seemingly couldn't remember being in the room at the time of Carlyle's murder. He stuck with this story regardless of what was done to him, and I've seen dangerous men break under less. He simply couldn't remember anything beyond his lordship sending him to fetch brandy. He didn't know why he did it. He claimed to like Lord Randall, who'd given him a position that gave him the ability to send money home to his elderly mother. He felt like he owed Randall a debt, and he used to sob when Randall was mentioned. It's always bothered me because we could never understand how such a limp handkerchief of a man like Carlyle ever managed to carve a swathe through half the Echelon."
"Interesting," Byrnes said, leaning forward. "A man with no reason to murder a blue blood pulls the trigger, but can't remember why. I'd say I wanted the Randall case, but I'm fairly certain there's more
to it. You said the Chameleon was murdered."
"This morning, Carlyle's cell door was discovered unlocked. Someone put a bullet through his forehead in a move seemingly reminiscent of the Chameleon. He had a playing card in his hand—a King of Diamonds."
"You think the real Chameleon is still out there, and you misjudged."
"I don't know what I believe," Malloryn countered, glancing her way.
Gemma ground her teeth together. She'd been the witness who saw Carlyle standing over the body of Lord Randall. Yet it wasn't the first time she'd failed a mission spectacularly.
You didn't fail. You saw him.
Behind closed lids, she called to mind the image of Jonathan Carlyle slipping into Lord Randall's parlor and pouring him a glass of bloodied brandy, which his lordship took. The second Randall lifted it to his lips, Carlyle removed the linen cloth on the tray in his hand, revealing a pistol.
He'd put the muzzle to Randall's forehead and pulled the trigger before she could even cry a warning.
"I saw it happen," she burst out, unable to tolerate Malloryn's pointed silence. "I was undercover as Randall's secretary at the time, trying to stop the Chameleon before he completed his mission."
Byrnes tapped his fingers on the edge of his chair. "If Gemma saw Carlyle pull the trigger, and yet someone else killed Carlyle, then we have two Chameleons."
"Possibly. Or perhaps Carlyle was a scapegoat. Perhaps the real Chameleon knew we were closing in and wanted to throw us off the trail?"
"Could it have been blackmail?" Charlie asked. "Perhaps the real Chameleon forced Carlyle to kill Randall?"
"Why did he not remember killing him then?" Ingrid asked.
Gemma seethed. If it was true, then the Chameleon had known she was on his trail and had deliberately fooled her. "You said there was a credible threat against the queen?"
Malloryn withdrew a playing card from within his waistcoat and held it out to her.
A single bullet hole was drilled through the center of the card.
He turned the card around, revealing the suit.
