“I didn’t mean to distress you, Jane.” Millie had forgotten how dramatic her friend could be, prone to hysterics and fainting couches. No one had had such a thing where Millie had grown up. She’d never fainted in her life. “I just wanted to warn you to be extra vigilant. Take extra care with your security.”
“Why?” Jane sniffed, though she wasn’t truly crying. “I don’t have a child.”
“I know, but … even so.”
Jane looked into Millie’s eyes, her mind working over a ponderous thought. “Millie, if this man who broke into your apartments was this assassin, why didn’t he take Jakub? Why kiss you and then … let you go?”
Millie put her head back against the edge of the bath and closed her eyes. “I don’t know, Jane.” She’d been asking herself that very thing since he’d vanished from her rooms. “I really don’t know.”
* * *
It was too late, Argent realized. Too late to go back now.
He’d taken too long to prepare. Too long to cleanse her fire from his blood and become like water again. Three days of nothing but training, fasting, meditating, and sleeping had cleared his mind and cleansed his body. He was cold again. Ruthless. Focused.
Ready for death to flow from his hands.
Or not, depending.
How apropos, then, that he should meet her at a bathhouse. That they should finish this in the water.
He climbed the stairs to the House of the Julii and nodded to Ellis McGivney.
“Weel, sweet baby Christ, if it isn’t Christopher Argent,” the Irishman sang in a voice surprisingly lyrical for such a grim-looking man. “Is it the stage dove ya’re after?”
“She’s mine.” Argent paused, wondering if the Irishman was daft enough to try and stop him.
“Ta kiss or ta kill?” Ellis asked, biting down on a well-worn cigar.
“That remains to be seen.”
A worry crossed the man’s craggy face. “I’ll only try and stop ya if ya’ve already been after Ely.” Though the look in the bodyguard’s bloodshot eyes said that he knew doing so would be the death of him, as well. But a man like Ellis McGivney didn’t leave the death of his twin unavenged.
“I have no quarrel with you or your brother,” Argent said. “I imagine he’s still at his post.”
Ellis’s shoulders relaxed a notch. “Then I’ll abandon my own post to ya. Though if ya don’t mind me sayin’, this isn’t good for business. How can one make a living as a garda if your clients end up dead?”
“Then best not to guard anyone I’m after.”
The Irishman’s jaw tightened with temper, his meaty hand curling into a hammer-sized fist.
Argent stared at him. Waiting.
“We backed Blackwell in the Underground War,” Ellis said quietly. “We’re still loyal ta him. Ta ya both. Remember that if ya have any jobs ta throw our way.”
“Blackwell never forgets.” Argent nodded. And I couldn’t care less.
Ellis glanced toward the colorful stained glass of the exotic bathhouse door wedged between two Roman columns. “She was kind ta us both. Fair. Good ta her boy. Paid us in advance. Don’t much like the thought of her screaming, with fear or with pain.”
“She won’t,” Argent promised.
“Very well then, I’ll be on me merry way.”
With that, Ellis McGivney jogged down the bathhouse stairs, light-footed for such a square-shaped man. He tipped his hat and flashed blackened teeth to a passing lady, chuckling at her gasp as he made his way into the afternoon.
The humid steam filled Argent’s lungs as he crept down the long hallway from the ladies’ dressing room to their baths.
Feminine voices echoed off the thick, unencumbered walls and bounced down the hall toward him. One high and sweet, the other soft and low.
Millie.
He cursed the increasing speed of his heart, the intensity of his breath.
There it was again, anticipation. There had to be something he could do to get rid of it.
Listening to the ladies’ conversation, Argent kept to the mist, unable to see them, his back against the far wall until he positioned himself in a dark corner, using the shadows and steam as a cloak.
The fact that she’d gone to Morley would frustrate Blackwell, but it didn’t surprise Argent in the least. He’d wondered how long it would take for the chief inspector to bring this serial killer business and lay it at the Blackheart of Ben More’s doorstep. As the reigning king of the underworld, Dorian Blackwell had taken his fair share of blame for crimes he’d not committed.
And had gotten away with plenty. They all had.
As far as Argent knew, Blackwell didn’t employ many assassins. Neither did he deal in the risky business of kidnapping. So who was murdering these women? And what had happened to the missing boys? In Argent’s experience, killers generally had a similar modus operandi for how they did their jobs. A pattern or habit they stuck to, whether on purpose or not. They raped, or they didn’t. They killed slowly, or quickly. Some favored guns. Others, such as himself, used closer, more personal means. Something the budding science of ballistics and forensics could not trace back to him. His garrote, his hands, sometimes a knife. All three his most deadly weapons.
So the fact that Chief Inspector Morley had informed Millie that these unrelated deaths were likely perpetrated by the same killer seemed extraordinary.
Fascinating, even.